FPS 82756

Over the last year or so, I've been building a bunch of freight cars. While some of them are now on the railroad, a significant number remain in the paint shop in various stages of completion. And some of these have been in the works for some time, such as FPS 82756.

Those of you who read the blog on a regular basis will be familiar with the Forest Park Southern. It's the proto-freelanced railroad of Bill "Smokey" Doll and it has appeared in both Model Railroader and a segment of TrainmastersTV. It's a beautiful railroad set in the late 1950's in Virgina and West Virginia. And as you might expect, the FPS interchanges with a number of the other railroads in the Cincinnati area, including the CWE.

The story of FPS 82756 begins with another good friend, John Miller. He has painted and lettered almost as many FPS freight cars as Bill, with one exception: all of John's cars are set in the mid-1970's era which is the time frame of his Kanawha & Lake Erie Railroad. It was John who came up with the mid-1960's auto parts boxcar scheme that you see on FPS 82756. John was kind enough to give me some of the decals for the car, and what you see below is the result.

The car is one of the old Robins Rails 60' Greenville cars that was produced back in the mid-1980's. The kit was subsequently produced by A-Line for a period of time. While it lacks the detail and fidelity to scale of more modern cars, it's a fairly good representation of the Greenville car and a neat kit. I changed the truck spacing, added some additional details, and then painted and weathered the car with artist's acrylics and powders. The big FPS letters in the logo are white decals that were colored with a highlighter to get the yellow tint. However, the yellow washed out during the weathering process so I went back and hit the letters with a watercolor pencil. It was one of those ideas that came out of nowhere as I was finishing the car. I'm glad it did, because the yellow letters are one of the key features of John's neat scheme.