Two More Weathered Gondolas

I was asked to weather a group of freight cars for another modeler, so here are the results I came up with on a couple of 50 foot gondolas. I sprayed them with chipping fluid and then a couple of different shades of brown, which I promptly "chipped off" with a small damp brush, leaving a well-worn appearance to their side panels. I masked around the reporting marks and then patched and re-stenciled them.

I was asked to put some graffiti on some of the models, so these photos will show how that turned out on these gondolas. The larger graffiti on these is from an assortment of decals given to me by Luc Sabourin some years ago. To make the decals look less decal-like, after they've dried, I brushed on a couple of light layers of acrylic craft paint. I used soft yellow, blue and green shades, which help tone down the brighter original colours of the decals just a little bit. 

The smaller, whitish scribbles toward the ends is my own chicken-scratch, done with a white paint pen. As a final step, the cars were given very light overall sprays of browns and greys which serve to tone down the colours even more.

And the photos below show the other side of the same two gondolas.

This is an interesting scene outside of the LDS shop (former CN Roundhouse) at Sarnia on Friday.  Ex-CP, this GP9 looks to be marked for Cando Contracting as CCGX 4024. The long hood looks to be on a flatcar just beyond the geep, but that's another long hood in grey primer sitting on the ground. I think that it may belong to another geep being worked on inside the shop, but I'm not entirely sure of that.

 The faded paint, spray painted reporting marks, covers on the exhaust stacks, and notice the brake wheel still standing in front of the engine would all make for an interesting modeling project.

Don't get to see too many of these around here any more, but on Tuesday I was able to snap this nice picture of SW 1200 #7304.

Going by information on rrpicturearchives.net, 7304 was originally built in 1960, and rebuilt in 1987. Looks pretty good for a machine that has spent nearly 60 years outside.