Entrance Gate, and a High Cube Waffle Boxcar

I made up this chain-link gate for the street entrance to the scrap yard. It doesn't look perfect, as the two halves don't line up perfectly. But it fits in very nicely with the general beaten-up look I'm going for with this industry...well the whole layout for that matter.

I had wanted to make this a sliding gate, but that idea didn't quite work out for me. When open, a sliding gate wouldn't take up as much space in the scrap yard as a swinging gate like this. I just think that would make more sense for the business...if the business was real of course. 

The street entrance gate, taken as the GT switches out the scrap yard.  I'm thinking a couple of signs here would add a little more interest.

In last week's post, one of my photos of the scrap yard rail entrance gate also showed an NW waffle boxcar lurking on the mainline behind the scrap metal yard.  I thought I'd show a little more of that car.

I had often looked at these black Norfolk-Western boxcars on the ExactRail website, but had never purchased one.  That changed when I received their email back in December pointing out that they only had 3 of them remaining in stock.  I figured that if I was ever going to get one, I had to do it then, so I opened up my wallet and ordered myself one.

At the same time I ordered Exactrail's bulkhead flatcar, which I added the gondola sides to and featured here back on February 9th.

Continuing on now with the waffle box, I ran masking tape around the right-hand door, and sprayed it with ModelFlex Dark Tuscan Oxide, which to me looks close to ordinary primer red. So now, this boxcar has one door that looks to have been replaced or re-painted. While I had that colour loaded in the airbrush bottle, I also sprayed a piece of blank decal paper with it.  I sealed that with DullCote. Now I've got a Tuscan Oxide decal that I can cut to size and use to make paint patches.

For the road grime that the car has picked up over the years, I sprayed Craftsmart (acrylic) Espresso colour, mostly along the bottom of the sides.  I hand painted the lower door tracks with the Tuscan Oxide so they look like they've received some maintenance, and added in one small paint patch from my newly created decal as well. There are also 3 or 4 waffles at the right-hand end that I did the same thing with a flat black decal I'd sprayed previously.

Notice here too that some ground cover has been added at the rail entrance and along the fence.  Looks much better than last week. 

I think this NW waffle box came out looking pretty good.  However, see this next photo for a problem that has cropped up on the car's other side.

Here's the waffle car over at South Industrial Blvd., where the lighting is better.

One of the vertical door opening post thingys has inexplicably gone missing from this side of the car. It's frustrating. And notice that you can see the shadow that was created when I had sprayed the grimy brown colour.

I've spent considerable time looking for this piece around the layout, on the floor, on the workbench, in the trash basket, but haven't managed to find it yet.  I didn't have any masking tape on that side of the car at all, so I don' know how or why or where it came off.  If I have to, I can make a stand-in from some steel wire that looks to be just about the right diameter.  First, I'll look around a little bit more for the missing piece.  Maybe I could offer a reward to anyone that finds it. Any reward offered wouldn't be much though...