Stripping the Engine

Remember that model railway engine I was restoring?  Well, today I finally got back to it, while I was waiting for the heating engineer to arrive and look at my non-working gas boiler.  Progress wasn't spectacular, but I've stripped the worst of the paint off of the driving wheels, front bogie and trailing truck.  So, here's the 'before' picture:

All that garish red had to go as it is completely unprototypical.  (It was rare for British steam locomotives to sport any colour other than black (mixed with soot and oil) below the footplate, although their German equivalents usually did have red painted wheels).  Here's the 'after' picture:

As you will note, despite two treatments of stripper, the red hasn't gone entirely.  The wheels, bogie and pony truck are, however, now in a better state to take new (black) paint.  It wasn't just an issue of the brightness of red colour (which would have made painting over it difficult) but the fact that it had a gloss finish, which would have made it difficult for new paint to 'take' on it.

I'm not sure whether the next stage will be to repaint the chassis (and the tender chassis, which I stripped a while ago), or to proceed with stripping the blue paintwork off of the loco and tender bodies.  The latter could be a lengthy job - the surface area to be stripped means that it will have to be done in stages.

Oh, if you are wondering about the boiler, whilst the engineer got it working again, it failed its safety tests and has now been condemned.  So I'm now looking at replacing the boiler.  Which, whilst not cheap, isn't really unexpected: it wasn't new when I bought the house and I've just finished paying off the mortgage, so really it's a miracle that it lasted this long.  Of course, while I'm grateful for it lasting so long, the truth is that I could undoubtedly have saved money on my gas bills if I had replaced it with more efficient new boiler years ago.