A Few More Boxcars

In between working on signals and installing resistors on wheelsets, I managed to finish a couple of boxcars recently. 

The first car is V&O 33786 which began life as an NMRA Division 7 project car. John Miller had a number of these kits and gave me one that had the original number scraped off. He intended to re-number the car but realized at some point that he had enough V&O cars on the K&LE. Rather than try to match the original paint, I simply added a piece of Micro Scale trim film to make it appear that the original number had been painted over when the car was re-numbered. I added a few additional decals to bring the car up to my era and then weathered it using artist's acrylics and powders.

For the roof, I found a number of shots of Great Northern boxcars on the web and used them for references.

Next up is an Atlas 60' auto parts boxcar decorated for the DT&I. I added an ACI label and then weathered it using the same mediums as the V&O car.

For the roof, I found a number of photos that captured the look I wanted to achieve to use as references. I then tried the techniques described by Gary Christensen in his article in the August 2104 issue of Model Railroad Hobbyist. Here's a link to the article: http://mrhpub.com/2014-08-aug/land/#76. Gary does some absolutely beautiful work and I've followed him on the Rustbucket forum for some time now. Here's a link to the Rustbucket: http://tws-rustbucket.com/. You have to register to get into the site, but it's free and well worth the time and effort. The work being done by a group of people on this site is some of the most fantastic weathering ever done.

As described by Gary in his article, the base rust color is a 50/50 mix of charcoal grey and burnt sienna craft paints. I applied this coat with a cosmetic sponge in order to get random, "pitted" look. Once that was dry, I applied Transparent Orange Oxide oil paint with a cosmetic sponge in order to add some depth and additional color to the roof. That was it- what you see in the photo above was achieved with just these two simple steps. A special thanks to Gary Christensen for sharing some of his beautiful work along with his techniques.

At some point in near future, we'll take a look at recent progress on the signal system.