Onto the painting!  An exciting moment.  I have put the metal primer on already.

Here are a couple of pictures of the loco. and tender together.

The chassis and wheels have been partially painted already.

There are some modellers who assemble the entire kit before even starting to paint it, but this means that you are forced to take apart some of the construction in order to paint awkward places like behind the wheels, and so I have chosen to do a limited amount of painting as I go through.

For undercoat I use some stuff found in Australia made by a car-paint firm call Hi-Tech, who make some really good primer called (surprise) “All-Surface Primer”. I’m sure there would be equivalents made elsewhere.  Advantages are that it will stick to anything (I have to use a Stanley knife blade as a scraper to get it off the polished granite samples that we have from when we chose our benchtop in the kitchen) and that it is really thin and so easily applied by an airbrush.

I am going to have to slacken off the coupling between the tender and the locomotive, because at present there is too little movement side-to-side to allow the loco. to go around the somewhat tighter-than-realistic curves on my layout.