Grime & Dirt V

It has been an unusually cold winter for North Carolina. We usually get a a few weekends with temps in the upper 50's and even the low 60's but those days have been coming on week days and it cools off by the time I get home. The last two weeks have been so cold I can't even do any spray painting of sealing outside, which slow down even the weathering of rolling stock. As a result, any projects requiring the use of solvents are stopped cold (pun intended) and the weathering of freight cars has slowed greatly. I think if I change my weathering process a little and do some parts in larger batches (like Dullcoating and priming) then I'll have an inventory of cars waiting for drybrushing and or powders, both of  which I can do indoors.

The latest addition to the re-weathered fleet is this Western Maryland (Chessie System) covered hopper. This one was modestly weathered previously. I was able to remove most of the old weathering because I had used acrylic paint. I switched to acrylics for weathering about 15 years ago and I wish I had switched 20 years earlier. I can strip off acrylic based weathering with a Q-tip dipped in Isopropyl alcohol. The model is a stock Atlas RTR.

This Lehigh & New England is also a re-weather project. I removed most of the old weathering but not all of it would come off. In the end I think the remaining old weathering worked in my favor by adding some texture that I wouldn't and probably couldn't have added intentionally.

I have not added wire grab or stirrups and it's obvious in these images. The car also has a list which you can see in the above image. This is an old Roundhouse kit I built at least 25 years ago and I didn't mount the body to the frame properly. I can't correct the list without the risk of major damage to the body so I'll just leave it as is. If you were to see this car go by in a train you would likely notice it because of the weathering but not see the list and probably not the chunky details.

I picked up this car for $5 and it came with a 40' trailer too. What I really wanted was a flat car to use for drilling my carfloat and  got a trailer for free. I added plenty of weight to the underside before weathering. 

As nice as the wood deck is I would say this car has been re-decked within about 3 years or so. The Pennsy shops didn't bother with repainting though. 

Grime & Dirt IV

This post is really more of an addition to the previous one. I ran out of time on Sunday, so here is some more freight cars I have been working on.

This Milwaukee Road box car was previously weathered with Floquil and an airbrush many years ago. There is really no way to remove the Floquil paint and leave the original paint so I have tried to improve the weathering with some acrylic paint (which I can remove if necessary).

I added some dirt and rust streaking to the side. In hind site I might have had some success toning down the Floquil by adding acrylic washes with a color very close to the factory paint. Maybe next time.

The original roof was light gray. I used paint and some powders to age the roof.

The Milwaukee Road Airslide is a stock Walthers kit. I only added weathering.

This Continental covered hopper is the first of a Proto 4 pack of kits.

I added some cargo spillage to the roof of this car using the same technique as with the N&W covered hopper in the previous post.

The last in this set is PC-890093. I went light on the dirt because it's not supposed to be all that old. I did add a replacement cargo hatch though. I haven't figured out why the background of this image is pink. It was photographed when all the others on this page were.

This Walthers car has wire stirrups added. I also used some powder on the side. 

Grime & Dirt III

It has been to cold to do much structure building and I haven't been in the mood for starting any new structures anyway. I would like to finish up a bunch of the little  unfinished projects I have stashed away but most of them require using solvents I can't use in an non-ventilated room. In the mean time I keep myself busy weathering freight cars, so I'll post some images of those.

I had finished the weathering of this N&W covered hopper a while back but had not taken any images. I decided a couple of weeks ago to come back to this car and add some cargo spillage on the roof and the resulting dark grime down the sides of the car. I didn't want to over do the spillage on this car because I like what I have and I'm not trying to cover up any mistakes.

To represent the spilled cargo I brushed on some Matte Medium then sprinkled some very fine sand. After about 10 minutes I brushed more Matte Medium onto the sand to ensure adhesion to the car. Later I painted the sand with a dark gray and then a little green on top of the gray to give a "rotting grain" kind of look. Lastly I brushed on some thinned gray starting at the top where the grain piles are then down the sides.