More 8 Door Boxcar Progress

The JSSX Railway blog has hit 3 years old this week.  My thanks go to everyone that looks in here.

Last week, I wrote that I'd have more done on my 86 foot SSW boxcar. And I do have, although it's still not finished up it is edging closer. A week ago, this is the way It looked... 

The grey stripes obviously not finished up.

So as of last night, the boxcar is looking like this...

The big white circle for the Cotton Belt herald was made by tracing a similar spare SP herald onto white decal paper and cutting it out with a sharp Xacto knife.  And when I say sharp, I know what I'm talking about...I'll spare everyone from having to look at my index finger as evidence (no stitches required, but it wasn't pretty).

Anyway, with the homemade circle decal applied and dried, I've added the vertical ribs overtop, using Evergreen'e .030 x .030 styrene strips cut to length. I used ordinary white glue to attach them.  I'll hand paint the portion of the ribs outside of the circle with red.

I had to cobble together the word "Hydra" from other parts of the decal sheet I'm using, and there is no "D" on the decal sheet at all, so I made one using a "C" and a "B".

And speaking of decals, the words COTTON BELT that are to go on the centre section of the boxcar are unavailable (so far as I know) in red letters, so I'm hand painting the red over the white letters on this old Cotton Belt decal set that I've had for years.

The letters on this old decal sheet are the correct size, but I need to paint them in red to match the colour of the boxcar.  Not easy, but not quite impossible either. I've unintentionally painted "outside the lines" a little bit, but been able to clean them up pretty well using a damp toothpick. I can do more touch up later, plus I still have the second set to paint as well. It's been so many years that I don't remember what I had used the missing decals on the sheet for.

On the layout itself, I added in this detail Fibre-Optic cable box, made by GLX.

Looks pretty good situated in between the JSSX tracks and the front edge of the layout