Man, Is The Boss Gonna Be...

First up this week, Brian Smith sent me this recent detail photo from his layout. Brian captioned the photo with the following quip:

"Man, is the boss gonna be pissed".

George Dutka built the bike shop for Brian, and featured it over on his blog on March 10th http://whiteriverdivision.blogspot.com/2020/03/motorcycle-repair-shop.html and again at http://whiteriverdivision.blogspot.com/2020/03/brian-smith-layout-and-gtw-boxcar.html on March 17th.  George posted some really nice pictures of Brian's bike shop, so I urge you to check them out.


As part of a municipal upgrade project, The City of Sarnia has awarded a contract to build a sewer tunnel that will run some 40+ feet beneath the local CN rail yard.  In an article on that subject this week, the Sarnia Journal included this excellent Glenn Ogilvie aerial photo of the Sarnia rail yard(s).

The view is looking east.  "A" yard is at the top, "C" yard is at the bottom of the picture. The two yards and main line funnel under the Indian Road overpass. The Via station is the brown-roofed building on the left of the tracks. At the bottom of the picture is what's remaining of the Canadian National roundhouse, now leased by Lambton Diesel Specialties.


I was a little bit surprised to find this 86 foot GTW boxcar in the storage cabinet recently, as I'd forgotten that I even had it in there.  The large GT logo that was on the right-hand end seemed a bit thick, so I thought I'd remove it and replace it with a decal.  Removal was pretty easy, as it was a dry-transfer.  I simply put some masking tape over top of it, and when I tore that off the logo lifted right off.  That's how I removed some of the reporting mark on the other end as well.

The boxcar was unweathered, which would help to explain why it had never made it onto the layout.  The doors were silver (aluminum maybe), but I decided I'd paint over them and follow that up with weathering. 

Once completed and dry the boxcar arrived on the layout, fitting right in with some DT&I auto parts cars.

I painted the doors ModelFlex GT blue that I have on hand, and then faded the whole car by spraying it with Concrete Gray. I painted in the flat black patch for the new numbers decals, added another random black patch or two, and the old ACI bar-codes, as well as the lube plate stencil decals.