Restoration job on a Reihe U

Start date: october 2005

When I worked on the restoration of the E41 of my friend I came to realize that I had a loco myself that fell victim to my youthly urge to "improve" a poor looking model. I remember having bought it in Austria, probably Feldkirch, somewhere around 1975.

The Reihe U in its orginal state (I found a spare body on a rail show for a few euros)

During the the next years when I started fiddling with models and scratch building I added details and repainted this loco. The result was horrible to say the least but at the time I was very proud of it.
Now thirty years later I wanted to restore it to its original state.

I removed the "improvements", sanded the body as much as possible and airbrushed it with a base coat. That's when I learned one valuable lesson: never, ever airbrush your precious model with an unknown paint or coat without extensive trials on scrap pieces. The base coat proved to dry during flight and stuck to my model with a very grainy effect

The roof. Even now you can see the grain.		And in more detail the result is simply awful
The water tanks were especially effected		In more detail. Need I say more

At first I completely gave up, bought a new body as shown above and forgot about it all.
But gradually all other projects I had at hand were drawing to a close and the thought that I hadn't restored the original body kept itching.

Working my way around with the glass fiber pencil		Every corner, every detail

On April 29 I went to to paint several objects and along with it the superstructure of the U

Well this is how far I got to date (April 29, 2006). I only work on it in the time left when other projects need time to dry etc.