Weathering Week

I'd like to start off by apologizing for the size of the font on this blog for the past couple of weeks.  I don't know why it's been doing that, and what's worse is I have not been able to fix it. And believe me, I've been trying.  I've followed the instructions I found when I googled the problem, but so far, no results.  The text looks just fine as I type it, but when it's published something goes wrong. So the band-aid solution for now is for you to use your Ctrl-Plus keys to increase the type size to help you with reading the text.


Aside from that, I've been on a bit of a weathering kick lately, so there hasn't been very much going on with the actual layout.  I think it's a bit of a carry-over from kitbashing and weathering the bulkhead flat car into a gondola, which I featured here last week.

Here are a few photos of what's been going on at my weathering / work bench.  Brian asked me to weather three cement cars for him,  requesting that the 2 Penn Central cars have their reporting marks changed to NOKL, so I did a bit of paint patching first, then the re-lettering and finally the heavy weathering style that he likes.  Besides the cement powder having run down the sides of the first 2 cars, there's just a little bit of rust in a few spots. I weathered a couple of other cement cars for Brian last year, so I'm hopeful that these will fit in nicely with those cars.

The newer CNW car is showing significantly less weathering.

And Luc brought over a piece of custom Maintenance of Way equipment for his BRAR, and asked me if I'd be able to weather it for him. I worked on the the black areas first, brushing on light coats of flat black. Some light grey on the tire treads was followed by dry-brushing a soft earth colour over top of the grey. Light washes of thinned black are applied over the body colour. I painted the bucket with dark rust colours, and then dark steel grey powders to finish it off. Here's before and after photos from the workbench.  This little project was a lot of fun for me to work on.

Luc's backhoe has climbed up from the ramp to the top of the RailGon.  The claw at the rear of the machine will begin cleaning out the scrap metal from the gondola.