ÖBB 1116 250-0 'Mozart' 

Inspired by the recent plethora of Hobbytrain Taurus liveries both real and imagined I decided it was time to make one of the many special ÖBB Taurus liveries, none of which Lemke seem strangely not to have noticed:

	1016 023-2 'Kyoto Express'	awaiting picture
	1116 100-0 'Licht ins Dunkel'
	1116 141-1 'City Airport Train' (CAT)
	1116 142-9 'City Airport Train' (CAT)
	1116 200-5 'Semmering'
	1116 246-8 '50 Jahre Österreichisches Bundesheer'
	1116 250-0 'Mozart'
	1116 264-1 '125 Jahre Rotes Kreuz' (Red Cross)
	1216 226-1 'European Union Austrian Presidency'
Pictures by Martin Baier, Sven Eger, Nils Jasper & Zoltán Iván

Specifically I will be making the Mozart-lok 250-0, not only because it has the most complex and challenging livery to reproduce (although the Bundesheer-lok comes close) but because I saw it for real quite by chance when on holiday in Austria.  It really is the most beautiful livery I've seen on a locomotive and annoyingly my camera had a flat battery at the time!  The design was specially commissioned as part of an Austria-wide celebration of 250 years since the birth of Mozart.

The Plan

It is going to be such a simple procedure:

The HUPAC model above from Conrad arrived with red plastic pantographs that looked terrible, they were swiftly removed and Sommerfeldt replacements are on order.  Some pictures of the new arrival can be seen here.  

The schematic below shows my original plan which has since changed slightly - the decal will include the metallic gold colour too but I will still spray the body gold anyway just in case there are gaps in the decals.

May 2007 update

The first step was to produce an exact 1:1 size computer template of the Hobbytrain model. This was done at first by working from this side plan of the Hobbytrain BLS version which I found on the web:

but the plan didn't quite match the model exactly so to finalise the template it had to be printed out and placed over the body for comparison and small ~pixel sized adjustments made.  At this stage the template looked like this (top):

The next stage was to increase the resolution of the template to the maximum possible to allow as much detail in the decal as possible.  This is why the single pixel lines look so faint on the template above (bottom).

The practise run of the designs was made on transparent plastic / OHP (over head projector) paper so that they could be compared very closely with the model and final adjustments made (they are not at the final high resolution).  The red lines are from my template and the gold and black are from the actual design used on the real locomotive but scaled and so they are an excellent fit - testament to the accuracy of the Hobbytrain model and my design work! (But mostly the model...):

The final adjustments were made and the decals are duly produced by a specialist printer in Austria and delivered in May. The signal changes from red to amber!

August/September 2007 update

After a delay caused by being busy elsewhere I return to the project with anticipation! Enamel metallic gold hobby paint used as a first attempt - with 'metallic' airbrushing/spray painting being difficult and expensive, ordinary painting with a brush was resorted to. The glazing and pantographs were removed from the bodyshell, those parts to remain grey, namely the roof, buffer region etc. were masked up carefully with low-stickiness masking tape. I had attempted using acrylic paint but it would not stick to the model - perhaps I should have sanded the body first or coated it with a preparatory coat of varnish? - a lesson learnt for in future! Once painted:

The gold looks too dark in the picture - and it is - I failed to check the paint matched closely enough to the decals, which the picture below shows are a poor match. Mixing the metallic gold with some yellow paint resulted in the right colour but the metallic effect was lost! The only solution was to find a more 'yellow' gold than standard modelling gold paint and for this I resorted to a specialist in gold leaf and painting as the model paint ranges don't offer a selection of golds. When this new decal-matched paint arrives then I may progress with the plan - until then I am examining how to install red tail lights (SMD LEDs probably) onto the chassis while the model remains dismantled, now that the issue of having warm white lights has been solved...

Warm white LEDs

Many models that now come with LEDs instead of bulbs do so with the cheap white ones. I can't really understand this - even a top of the range, super-detailed (super-expensive) Fleischmann model (such as my DB BR185 or SBB Cargo Re482) have them! It is true that LEDs are essentially maintenance free and very cheap to produce but they are limited by the range and depth of colours they can emit - this is all to do with physics - a bulb has a filament which gets hot and emits a range of wavelengths of light from the black body radiation curve. (See Wikipedia for more information, or alternatively lie down in a darkened room and forget it all!) An LED, by the very nature of its design, can only emit over a very short range of wavelengths. The standard cold-white LED therefore looks completely wrong for most models, as the warmth of this Taurus' lights demonstrates:

Fortunately this is very easy to fix - it is just a case of unsoldering the cold-white 3mm LED and replacing it with a more expensive warm-white one (in my case purchased from Bromsgrove Models). The Hobbytrain Taurus circuit board (see picture in the Gallery) is quite easy to remove and can be slid out without too many screws being undone...then with a soldering iron, solder (with lead of course! Do not suck...) and some long-nose pliers it is just a question of making the substitution as neatly as possible and without frying any SMD (surface mount device) components nearby. The result is thus:

That is it so far! Until the next update here is a comic of a Taurus working out in the roundhouse to entertain you: