Weather me final....

My Delaware and Hudson consist pulling the Apollo Trailer-over-flat-car train contains the remaining rolling stock and locomotives that haven't yet been weathered. I did detail and weather the GP39 and the GP38-2 that the D&H got from the Reading and the Lehigh Valley, but the rest of the train is stock. It's time to do something about that...

First the locomotives that need to get weathered - a C628 (one that I painted and decaled from a undecorated Stewart unit), and two right-out-of-the-box RS36's. I was going to start weathering the C628 first, but then got to thinking. There are some details I'd like to add - grab irons, horns, horn brackets, coupler release bars, antennae, M/U hoses, fuel fillers, windshield wipers, rain shields... the list is fairly long. Fortunately, Bowser has all of that stuff, so I put an order together - haven't pulled the trigger on it yet, but sometime next week I'll get that done.

First thing that I can accomplish is adding the standard ladder-type grab irons. From the pictures I found, these were in pretty standard locations, and while the D&H was still operating, they were either blue or gray depending on the paint behind them. However, I did see a cool shot of a retro paint job with all yellow grab irons and it looked rather nice. I won't paint until I get the other detail parts, so I will have some time to debate which color scheme would be best. The shot below represents some of the grab irons installed - had to drill quite a few holes in each shell to accomodate the grabs. I've found that sticking a pin vise into my portable drill works really well - even for very small holes like these #80's.

While I was ordering parts for the D&H locos, I also took a look at the other Alco's in the fleet to see what needed fixing there. A surprising number of things cropped up on the list, and I spent a few rainy days working to get the details installled. The easiest effort were a couple of fuel fillers (orange arrow points to one of them in the photo below) on the fuel tank of my M630...

My C630 (the Reading unit) needed a couple of those as well, but it also needed a new horn bracket and horn assembly:

My C628 LV unit needed the most improvement - fuel fillers, brake cylinders, window louvers:

I'll be doing a little more weathering on the new parts, but everything's good for now with those. Back to the D&H:

Many of the early (if not all...) of the D&H C628's had rain covers D&H604.jpg (838×641) for the air intake grills on the sides of the long hoods - some of the Penn Central units had similar covers. First order of business was to drill some holes over the air intakes to accept the new parts which are etched brass that can be folded on the corners:

Prepainted the guard and Installed with some glue and I'll touch up the paint later: