Louisville and Wadley Boxcars

My freight car roster increased by a pair of 60 foot high-cube Louisville and Wadley Railway boxcars that have found their way out of the storage cabinet. Following a couple of days on  the workbench for a light weathering, they've made it onto the layout.  These two cars were manufactured by Hubert's, which is now owned by Intermountain.

I purposefully kept the weathering to a near minimum on these two, which is kind of a challenge of it's own, as there always seems to be a temptation to add more rust or dirt or grime.

Just one of the LW boxcars, fresh out of the box.

I masked off parts of the lower areas of both boxcars.  With the masks in place, I airbrushed the exposed areas with light layers of ModelFlex Concrete Grey to fade the blue-green colour.  This Concrete Grey is the same paint that I used previously on a blue GT boxcar that I featured three weeks ago.  These cars are more of a turquoise colour, but I figured it worked well once, so why not try it again?

Here are the two boxcars after the paint fade is finished.  You can clearly see the difference in the shades of colour where I had done the masking before spraying the concrete grey.

I added just a light rusting at the door hardware and a couple of faint streaks of grime on a couple of the panels.  The roofs of both boxcars were left largely untouched, as that's the way they appeared in most of the photos I saw online.

My two 60 foot Louisville & Wadley boxcars spotted together.

And, just for the heck of it, here's the 76 year old tug Manitou passing northbound under the Blue Water Bridges this past Tuesday. It doesn't really look like it to me, but Manitou is listed as being 110 feet in length.  Not sure, but my guess is that the tug was headed back to it's home port of Bay City, Michigan.

The flags look nice flying in Tuesday's strong breeze from the south.