Berlin Mills Boxcar

Last week's post I referred to weathering and patching a GONX gondola to an HPJX gondola.  I didn't get to that project yet, but did get a start on a Berlin Mills PC&F 5241 cu.ft. boxcar I bought from Rapido a couple of months ago. It's certainly not finished yet, but weathering on one side is complete so I thought I'd show that progress.This is the boxcar as new and just out of the box

Boxcar after fading with thinned acrylic Concrete Gray sprayed through the airbrush. With the paint cup on the airbrush filled about halfway with water, I added and mixed in 2 drops of the paint.  I sprayed each side of the boxcar with about 6 layers of the mixture.

I then sprayed the whole car with Testors Dullcote to seal in fade layers before spending the next hour or two adding the rusty and grimy weathering.

So now that nice shiny boxcar looks like this.

And here's a look at it and the stuff I used to get it this way.

Left to right we have: Pan Pastel Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber  powders, Winsor & Newton acrylic Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber paints, Tamiya Panel Line Black, Folk Art Barn Wood acrylic, and 2 fine tip brushes and one flat brush.

I expect to be able to get more accomplished on this freight car in the coming week.

I had a birthday on Wednesday, and my late sister's birthday would have been today (Friday).  Here's the two engines together that I've numbered with our birthdates.

Side by side in front of the maintenance building at the JSSX.

And the two on a different day working along the shortline.

That's it for now.  Have a good week.

JSSX This Week

Trains are back in action this week here, after cleaning the track (again) last week and having everything cleared off of the rails to do that.  I spent a good couple of hours cleaning, using one of those grey Peco eraser thingies and running the track CMX track cleaner all over the place.

Nothing like a photograph though to help us see things that just don't look "right" on the layout.  So here we are, along the GTW tracks that run behind the scrap metal yard.  This angle of view is captured by reaching across the layout and laying the camera down on the track.

So the problems here, as I see them anyway, are the switch in the foreground isn't ballasted, and the back side of the fence on the right is just plain white styrene sheet. So there's that. But the tracks themselves look kind of cool with some dips and dives.  That diamond there on the left is Code 100, everything else is Code 83.

A closer view at the spur at Tri-State Paper and GTW 6212

I came across this gondola photo.  I like the weathering and aged graffiti on this one, and I've got a pretty similar, but clean gondola that maybe I could try to make look like this one.  It would fit in nicely on the layout here.

Photo credit goes to Dustin Faust.  Not sure, but it looks like Altoona, Pa.

And here's the car, maybe manufactured by Roundhouse, I could try to use.

This gondola is pretty close to the prototype one.  At least close enough for me.

That'll be it for the trains on the blog this time, but I've got this one other picture to show.

I know that's not much from the layout, but I want to show this picture that I took last summer of the lake freighter Cuyahoga as it passed beneath the Bluewater Bridges here at Sarnia.  This freighter was built in 1943, making it the oldest vessel on the Great Lakes.  It was here through the several winters for maintenance.

Anyway, my reason for posting it is that while sailing in Lake Erie in May, Cuyahoga suffered an engine room fire.  As a result, it was towed last week across Lake Erie from Ohio to Port Colborne, Ontario where it is slated to be cut up, likely for scrap.

Not a Train to be Seen

Things have been pretty quiet around the railroad here.  This weeks post will serve as a case in point...

Nothing happening at the grey warehouse.

And no freight cars at the transload either.  I've got to come up with a name for that place.  I've been thinking of calling it Affiliated Transfer, or something like that, and making just a small sign to place here.

Over on the GTW, the spur at Midwest Plastics on the left is also vacant.

All the gondolas are "gon" from Ferrous Processing

And Tri-State Paper as well as the GTW main and run around siding have no trains either.

Truth is, I've just got all the freight cars cleared off so that I can give the track a decent cleaning.  Again.

Have a great August 1st long weekend.