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Weathering freight cars - 2
find you’ve over-weathered a car. My favorite source is the
many period freight car photos in railroad historical society
magazines, websites
,
or books such as “Railway Prototype Cyclopedia,” “Refrigerator
Car Color Guide’”by Gene Green, or “The Postwar Freight Car
Fleet” by Larry Kline and Ted Culotta.
ExactRail’s B&O wagon top boxcar
2. This began with an Exact Rail B&O M53 boxcar. This
model has its original factory paint scheme. To age
the car, I sprayed it lightly with Dullcote mixed with a
few drops of boxcar red and black. This does a couple
of things to the model: 1) it blends the starkness of
the white lettering in with the car, and 2) the flat finish
gives the surface some “tooth” for using dry pigments
and pencils. After the Dullcote dried, I used brown and
black MIG pigments along the car’s vertical ribs where
industrial dust and coal smoke naturally collect. MIG
pigments have an adhesive ground-in with the colored
pigments, and they won’t come off during normal han-
dling. I then used an old paint brush to apply some
black pigment underneath the running board, where
coal dust would collect. Finally, I used a white pencil
to add the switch foreman’s or conductor’s switching
instructions.
MRH-Jun 2014
