I've been waiting for some flower clumps to arrive - not for my wife's Valentines Day gift, but for houses around the town of White Haven. My office mate likes to look at pictures from this website after a long weekend and is expecting a lot out of me since I have a 4-day weekend, so I had to publish something. I could have worked on a bunch of things, but since the weather has turned a bit nasty I guess I started to think about nasty looking trains.
You see, the rainbow years of Conrail, especially 1976 and 1977 must have been like trying to keep things together with masking tape and a prayer. The people in charge of running the system had to kluge together locomotives from many manufacturers and railroads, all of which had just gone through bankruptcy. No fresh coats of paint on anything, delayed maintenance, fluid orders for train movements, rails that were decrepit and needed a lot of attention. There were a lot of decisions - what to get rid of, what to maintain, and what needed to be bought or leased. The summer of 1976 would have seen a lot of nasty looking locomotives and freight cars making their way through the Lehigh Valley gorge.
I haven't weathered any of my rolling stock and only a few of my locomotives - until this weekend. I took a look at some videos, got my paints and pastel powders and picked out what I thought would have been one of the oldest and most decrepit coal cars - a New Haven Railroad 4-bay hopper that was built in 1953. It's still in New Haven livery (the New Haven was incorporated into the Penn Central Railroad in 1969. The Penn Central itself had only started in 1966, formed from the Pennsylvania and New York Central systems. I figured at least one New Haven coal car made it through the Penn Central and into Conrail without being repainted, and now that it's part of Conrail, the car's in sad shape.
However, that's not how the model came out of the box.. As you can see in the picture below, nice crisp lettering, and everything's a uniform level of black. That's not the picture of a bankrupt railroad.
As I said, I got out my acrylics and my powders and pulled off the wheel sets. The next picture is a rough application of acrylic paint (browns, reds, grays).
I then dulled everything up with an application of gray Pan Pastel powder.
Then I hit her with my other Pan Pastel powders (rust, black, etc.), painted the trucks a dull gray and added some rust, painted the wheel sets similarly, painted the coal load a flat black and put Humpty Dumpty back together. The final result after about 30 minutes of work is below - ready to go and be like a sore thumb amongst all of my other un-weathered hopper cars. Sore thumbs are not my thing, so the remainder of my weekend is going to be spent making some nasty looking hopper cars. After I get some Dullcote, I'm going to hit each one of them with that to hold the powders in place. Can't wait to run the train on Monday! Pictures forthcoming.
This is probably the other extreme of my coal hopper fleet. The Chessie System was formed in 1973 out of the B&O, C&O and Western Maryland railroads. This car already has the "Chessie Cat" paint scheme but also has B&O markings, so it had to have been repainted between 1973 and 1976, so the weathering on this car has to be much more sedate. I hit it with some gray to get rid of the "black plastic" look you get right out of the box and touched some rust to some small areas on the lower section of the car and hit the top with some black powder. Done in about 2-3 minutes! I have two others just like it, so those will quickly get a similar treatment. The photo shows the disparity in the weathering applied.
Here's the Chessie fleet of 3 cars together.
Spent some more time the next day doing some extreme weathering to my Jersey Central coal hoppers. The CNJ ceased operations in PA (and hence anthracite coal movements in 1970), so the remaining coal hoppers that made it into Conrail would have been badly in need of care and feeding. I hit them hard - maybe too hard. They were a bit extreme until I toned them down with a lot of black Pan Pastel. Now I sort of dig them. Here's a shot of the coal train running today. Three CNJ hoppers in the center flanked by 2 of the B&O hoppers I weathered the previous day. As you can see, all three CNJ cars are rusted to different degrees, and have different degrees of paint fade, and all three are much worse than the B&O hoppers.
I was running my Conrail coal train quite a bit this weekend. The power for the coal drag are 3 ex-Penn Central units and then my lone Lehigh Valley C628. I've spent some time weathering the PC locomotives, but the LV in Cornell Red was still pretty much what you get right out of the box. I think I've talked a few times about how I love this paint scheme. Those locomotives never looked as good on any other railroad. Anyway, it was time to weather the girl - she may have looked snazzy in 1968 when she was bought, but time and a bankrupt Lehigh Valley would have made it look a lot like the picture below (which I'm going to use for a guide for weathering):
A couple of points regarding the photo above. 635 was bought from the Monongahela Railroad after they discovered the ICC wasn't going to allow them to move coal from West Virginia to Michigan. Alco took them back and sold them at a discount to the LV who already had 8 others from a previous buy. 625 (which is the unit I have) was an earlier unit and doesn't have the cover over the middle air intake. All the other exterior components are similar. You'll note a considerable accumulation of soot on the top of the locomotive, some whitening of the red paint near the air intakes, black soot washing down the deck between the handrails, and just some general dinginess. This photo was taken in 1975, so I think it's pretty close to what I want to present for my own unit in 1976. Some other photos show a general collection of gray/brown dust on the lower sections of each unit, but I'm not going to go hog wild - I still want to keep this unit pretty handsome.
I removed the shell and trucks in preparation for the weathering, and also removed the side handrails (the front and rear rails had never been installed on my unit and I mean to do that when all the weathering's finished). A couple of notes on handrails - if at all possible, don't glue your handrails on your locomotive. They should fit snuggly in their holes without glue which allows you to get to the other areas of the locomotive shell if you have to do some maintenance. However, in the case of a couple small rails in the front section of the C628, you may have no choice - you get like 3 anchor points for them and often you can't get the rail to stay in place without a touch of glue. Another point on LV locomotives, the end sections of the rails are orange rather than the red for the rest of the sections.
After a careful cleaning with a soft-bristled brush, it was time to attack. You want to weather locomotives a lot less often than rolling stock, so I decided that for most of the detail work, I'd d use paints, and then hit it with powders and a final spray to fix things in place. Locomotives also get handled a lot more often than the other cars, so you want something on there you won't have to maintain often. I mixed up some grimy brown/rust color (actually espresso brown, black, and orange) for the wheels and applied it with a microbrush, being carful not to paint the areas of the wheels that will be in contact with the track. I also hit the truck sideframes with the same color - they were already gray, but I wanted to give them a hint of age and a bit of corrosion.
Next I hit all of the grills with a grimy black/gray. Right from the factory those grills would have been red, but after 8 years of use, they'd either have sucked up soot or had it blowing out through them. I used a brush and unloaded almost all the acrylic paint on it and lightly stipled the grills. The nice thing about acrylics is that if you overdo it, you can lightly rub with a damp finger and fix it.
Keeping the brush with very, very little paint on it, I brushed the top surfaces and blended the sides of the body and worked my way to the front and the back. Just went into zen mode - didn't think much, just kept the photo of 635 in mind. Here's the result after putting Humpty Dumpty together again (minus railings).
Then it was time to reinstall railings.
and brush with powder.... done!
.... and then it was back to weathering more coal hoppers. I did a little research and it turns out that many of the varieties of hopper I've purchased were built in the 1970's, so there are going to be quite a few that don't look too miserable. A good case in point are the HTG hopper cars that the Reading Railroad purchased in 1975. They're easy to spot due to the large "RDG" lettering on the body, and I had 4 to weather. I hit the wheels, trucks and couplers with some rust and dust and certainly took the black down a few notches. some slight rust and then some gray road dust and they were quickly back on the layout.
Took a visit to Forest Hill Station today and picked up some Testor's Dullcote - it's a matte varnish in a spray can and it's useful for a lot of things - one of those is for sealing coats of weathering products. I guess there's probably nothing worse than pulling a car free from a train and scarring all of your weathering with a thumbprint. Hit one of my CNJ hoppers with it and it definitely seals in the coats of powder, but also hides some of the brightness. Ergo, I had to hit the car with a bit more gray Pan Pastel powder. Yeah, that powder isn't sealed, but I can always go back and do some touchups.
It's about 9 months later and I haven't weathered an more of my fleet. However, I was up visiting my Mom in Bath, PA on Friday and had a chance to wander through Northhampton, Bath and Nazareth on my way to "Trains and Lanes" - one of the few hobby shops still alive and ticking that hasn't resorted to the M.B. Klein merchandising model - Internet sales only. The towns in that area are dominated by the huge infrastructure devoted to the mining of Portland cement. Railroads were huge players in moving cement from that area to where it was needed - and that's still the case. I decided that I wanted a short local train on my layout to deliver commodities like cement. The problem was, I didn't have any covered hoppers - until Friday. Trains and Lanes had some nice short covered hoppers ideal for hauling concrete, and they also had an Erie Lackawanna kit from Accurail that would have fit right in with the mines in the Lehigh Valley. In fact, there was a spur of the EL that came down from Delaware Water Gap to Portland, PA and then down through Bangor to Nazareth and Bath with concrete being a major commodity shuttled on that line. I think that's still the case, and competing concrete plants were also serviced by lines controlled by the Lehigh Valley railroad running through the same area. It was probably also the case for the Lehigh and Hudson River Railroad. All three became part of Conrail in 1976.
So, as I said, I'd bought a kit. Rather than put it all together, there came a point in the assembly when I said to myself - this would be a good place to stop so I can weather this covered hopper. Covered hoppers can take a lot of abuse, from rust to chemical spills and grafitti, you can see a little of everything. However, grafitti in 1976 was not the grafitti of today, and for these cars, I though rust and concrete spills would probably be the major players for at least this car.
So, here's the virgin model without wheel sets or top covers - I left them off to aid in the weathering.
There are some pictures on the internet of real concrete hoppers and I'll use some of those for inspiration:
The photo above is a former Lehigh and New England covered hopper that appears to have seen quite a few concrete spills. The powdered concrete got on everything as it was loaded and tended to wash down the sides and stick. It was also caustic and tended to eat through paint and rust steel, so these cars could have a wide variety of looks based on the amount of spills.
Here's nearly an exact match with some modern grafitti. Note th rust spots and streaks lining up with just about every support for the roof walk. There are also streaks at the three major side welds, and the ladders and stuff are covered in rust.
Here's another, this time taken in 1992. Less surface rust ont he hopper, but you'll note that there are whiter streaks down the side of the hopper under each walkway support. The deterioration of the "Erie Lackawann" and the emblem are significant, and I could model that with some solvent applied with a toothpick if I wanted to get that effect. I can also see in this photo that the trucks might also have been painted grey and there is still a touch of gray paint on them.
This study is the (I think), the right way to approach weathering. Although nature is random, if you want something to look "right", draw inspiration from what's out there. You don't have to duplicate each picture, but you can use them all to weather an individual car.
I got started on the model. the first thing I thought I'd do is coat the entire model with a gray (almost white) wash. I thought about using some oil paints and thinner (saw that on youtube yesterday) but I didn't have paint thinner. Used acrylics diluted with water. A little black, a lot more white and then added water until is was drippy. After hitting the top, the two ends and one side, I set it aside to dry completely. I've heard you can use a hair dryer to make this step faster, but plastics and hot air have not been my friend in the past.
I did treat the sides to an extra dose of gray below the four loading ports and that seemed to be a really effective way to simulate concrete spills. I'll supplement with some chalks in a bit to make it even more realistic.
I hit the trucks with undiluted gray acrylic paint and set them aside to dry.
Then I mixed up a wash of "road pizza". I got this idea from a teacher I used to paint theatrical sets with. We were doing Fiddler on the Roof and he wanted us to first paint everything on each set with a color he called "Road Pizza" - it's a pukey brown and can simulate a place that is dirt poor or a place that is just old, used and dirty. Everything under a railroad car gets dirty, so I hit the underside with two coats of Road Pizza wash and then hit portions of the top deck. I kept going and hit some of the areas on the sides but may have overdone it.
But here's the nice thing about using acrylic paints. Before you seal it, you always have the option of getting a tissue, dipping it in water and altering what you have. I took a little of the road pizza off of the sidewalls.
Next I sanded some artists chalks in dull red and orange to simulate some rust spots. I placed a couple of drops of matte varnish in a plastic dish and then added my rust-colored chalks and dabbed the semi-wet chalk onto areas of the car that might have rusted. I also painted the trucks and wheels. The wheels got the road pizza wash first and then I later added some Poly Scale rust paint to them and the couplers. The trucks first got a coat of gray and then I added a good deal of rust.
Finally, when everything was dry I assembled the wheels and coupler pockets and made sure the wheels were spinning and the couplers moving appropriately. I then added some touches of Pan Pastels (gray reinforcing the concrete spills, rust emphasizing some areas, and some grimy black on the ends and underside and then up top on the walkways.
Last was a coat of Dullcote to lock things in. Here's the final look - probably too much weathering when you look at it up close, but from 10 feet away it looks right. That's the funny thing about weathering cars - when they're on a long train the effect is greatly minimized because your eye has so much to take in a process.
Procured another short covered hopper kit on ebay last week (this one's a Delaware and Hudson) and decided to put it together. Of course, as with the one above, with everything taken apart and laid out, it was a perfect opportunity to weather it. Used pretty much the same techniques as the Erie Lackawanna hopper, but this one was built in 1952, and a lot of these never got a paint job after leaving the factory, so made it especially washed out with concrete spills and rust. Here it is below as a finished project.
In another one of my blog entries "Fighting Freight Cars" I talked about buying three more Erie Lackawanna Accurail kits just like No. 21387 above. Accurail offers a decal kit where you can change the road number for these cars, so I bought that, 3 other cars, 12 wheelsets, put the three cars together and weathered the cars a little differently. Photos below.
I was towing the concrete hoppers with my Bachman SD45s (one Erie Lackawanna, one Reading). I decided that if I was running beat up concrete hoppers, I'd need to do something about the locomotives, and decided to start with the EL (you can see it below in it's factory-fresh state).
Just like the C628, I pulled the thing apart and distressed the running gear, bottom portions of the frame, the fuel tank, and then started on the body. I was going for grungy.
I took Pelle Soeborg's advice (Model Railroader contributor and author of "Detailing Projects for Freight Cars and Locomotives" - great book with plenty of pictures) and tried hitting that loco body with a good dusting of gray paint (after doing some masking) through my airbrush. Problem was, I didn't get the right mixture of paint to thinner and it came out splotchy. Let it dry and the next day I hit the whole thing with rubbing alcohol and a paper towel and tried to even it all out. Guess it was alright, but I don't think I was real happy with it. Went at the body with acrylic paint (brown and orange mixture for rust, black for exhaust (made sure to hit all of the louvers and grates), gray for oil spills and went to town.
I then got my Pan Pastels out and added dustings of rust and exhaust, especially around all of the seams on the body. After I was happy with it, hit it with a good coat of Dullcoat!
Now Humpty Dumpty is back on the rails and looking a bit more like 1976 on Conrail.
I'm hoping to get to the Reading unit this weekend, but I caught a good paint fading technique on YouTube that uses Tamiya Flat Base paint (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAY3DBxHF1w). The Reading unit is really, really yellow and green and factory fresh, and I don't want to just try hitting it with gray paint again. More pictures soon!
Here's my inspiration for the Reading SD45, a shot from August of 1976... Note that it's lashed to and EL SD45 just like mine!
My impression here is that rust and sun have really done their job on the upper sections of the locomotive. That's especially true for the roof and the top of the blister behind the cab. So, here's what I started with:
...much too clean. As I said a few paragraphs ago, I wanted to use a fade technique I'd seen on YouTube. Pulled the superstructure off and applied some Tamiya Flat Base...
The flat base has been applied in the photo, but most of it on the body of the loco has not dried yet. I turns white (like the areas on the walkway), and once dry, you brush it off until you get a nice fade to the paint. My camera was in the wrong mode, so I didn't get a better picture of the hazing.
...after it hazed over, I brushed the painted surfaces and removed most of the haze. Some of it remained wedged in crevices, but that was dealt with by the application of a wash. I thought about doing another coat, but decided against that. I also hit the exhaust, fans and air intakes with a healthy dose of flat black.
Some of the wash wasn't exactly uniform, so I applied some rubbing alcohol in those places and reapplied wash until I was happy. Got the trucks, wheels and fuel tank with a good bit of gray and brown, hit the couplers with rust (brown and orange paint mixed), and put Humpty Dumpty back together. Hit the whole thing with some PanPastels and did some final touch-up and when I was happy, hit the whole thing with DullCote.
I had purchased a couple of additional 2-bay covered hoppers for the concrete local, normally pulled by my two SD45s, and they stuck out like sore thumbs being pristine - actually the Penn Central had been lightly weathered on the bottom of the car with some grimy brown by the previous owner. Had to do something about both. I don't think I have a "before" photo, but here are both after application of fade and Pan Pastels. I also added Kartrak Scanner decals.
Found one more of these covered hoppers (D&H) in my storage area, and the thing was bright silver. It stood out like a sore thumb until I gave it a good weathering treatment.
I decided to retire my Delaware and Hudson C628's (I had 2 on the roster). By 1976 the D&H was a fast-mover 4-axle loco system, and the Alco 6-axles were sold to Mexico. I'd never weathered them, and in fact I'd never finished either of them - they didn't have railings or dynamic brake cylinders installed. My plan is to sell them on ebay eventually, and I thought someone might pay more for one of these if they're weathered. They're both Stewart Hobbies models and usually they fetch between 60 and 90 dollars these days, maybe a bit more if they are DCC.
I found a picture of D&H 602 in 1977. It's a tired looking locomotive, dirty, the paint blistered and the yellow primer showing.
And here's the other side:
Inspired by these two, I weathered 602....
While I'm waiting on some scenery supplies I decided to weather more rolling stock. One product I've discovered (with help from youtube) is Tamiya's Flat Base. Goes on clear, dries white and then can get rubbed off to reveal a "faded" finish on plastics. This base is also great for adding some tooth for things like washes. Hit this coal hopper with the base and rubbed it off and then just added a rust wash. This particular hopper was built in the 40's, and the only addition would have been the Erie Lackawanna decals in the 60's. Hit it hard with the rust wash and then pulled some away from the decal areas. Then PanPastels, rust highlights, a dash of black on the upper sections of each panel, gray around the trucks, brown on the bottom. And here's the finished product:
I also have a number of Penn Central hoppers. I guess I'm going to have some with minimal weathering, others with varying degrees. Here's the first:
