A Couple of Weathered Freight Cars

A few years back, I started to notice the weathering patterns on different freight cars, and became more interested in that than I was in the train or the car itself, if that makes sense. I bought a couple of weathered cars at train shows, but they had only had rust and grime airbrushed onto them and didn't really look right. I decided to try weathering my own freight cars, with the goal being to have all of the cars on my layout weathered, at least to some degree.

Some of those early attempts turned out pretty good, and others...well, maybe not so much.  Here are a couple of my earlier efforts that I'd call successes.  I weathered the covered hoppers for my friend Sean. I believe I actually did 5 of them for him. I remember I really liked the way the one in the 2nd picture here turned out. The fading of the CN grey was done with acrylic craft paint.

As for the boxcar, I eventually ended up selling that one. That was one of the first cars I did where I had tried to follow a picture I'd found online. I had posted pictures of it to www.Trainorders.com and, from that posting, Scott Sanders recommended I go to  www.tws-rustbucket.com, where I continue to learn from him and the other remarkable weathering artists there. That site is an incredible source of inspiration to me.

Sorry for the poor location of the pictures, but there weren't many photo-worthy locations on the JSSX back then.