High Cube CN Boxcar

Back on the 15th of January, as one of his Wordless Wednesday posts, George Dutka posted a photo of a CN/DWC 60 foot high-cube Gunderson boxcar over at his excellent White River Division blog. I commented on the reporting marks patching at the time, and following that, George was generous enough to send me an email with a better resolution photo of the car.

Have a look at George's photo...

As I looked around the internet for other reference photos of similar boxcars, I happened across this one that was taken by my friend Luc Sabourin. 

I have an Athearn Genesis model of a boxcar that's in the same 793 number series and is supposed to be a reasonably close approximation of this type of boxcar.  I suppose Athearn's thought was that it's close enough to the prototype and guys (like me) will buy it.  Hey, I didn't even notice the quite obvious differences until Luc told me. The easy to see difference between model and prototype is that the Athearn model has too many exterior posts and panels on the sides, and the ends aren't quite right either.

Regardless, it's a nice looking model, and I decided that I would patch the reporting marks and paint over the lower portion of the car in roughly the same pattern as George's photo.  I'm not going to try to replicate the graffiti though.  Maybe sometime in the future, but right now I don't feel that I'm talented enough to do the graffiti justice in HO scale.

So here goes with my patching effort:  First up is the plain model, to which I had previously sprayed a light overspray of grime to flatten down the shine.

All taped up and ready to patch:

I sprayed ModelFlex Light Tuscan Oxide through the airbrush. The paint seems to go on heavy, so I'm doing my best to better train myself to spray multiple lighter coats.  Here it is after painting and the masking removed:

And now the boxcar finished up and in service on the JSSX:

The small patches on the doors would be quite difficult to use masking tape, so I sprayed some decal paper with the light oxide and applied those patches as a decal.  The grey reporting mark patches were done the same way using primer gray.  The black numbers are MicroScale decals.