Saturday, December 20, 2014

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. 


4 comments:

  1. Tom,
    Both cars look great - especially like the V&O car!

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  2. I love the color fade on that DTI car!

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  3. Marty and Chris- thanks for the kind comments.

    Tom

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  4. Looks great Tom. Good to see that the methods described in that MRH article are easy enough to do, and your results shows you really nailed it. Inspires me to give those methods a try - thanks for sharing!

    Mike McNamara
    Delran, NJ

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