Ferry in the Fog

A car ferry in the fog... that's what this graphic represents for the AnnArbor Railroad

The Ann Arbor RR had car ferries that crossed Lake Michigan from Frankfort, Michigan to the Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin, with the idea being to bypass the congestion in Chicago.

I don't remember ever seeing a prototype freight car with this logo myself.  But many years ago I was at a train show somewhere in the Detroit area, and someone had a model of an 86 foot Ann Arbor Railroad auto parts car for sale.  I didn't buy it, but I've often wished I had.

A few months ago, I was looking through the CMR Products website, and happened across their decal set for 86 foot Ann Arbor auto parts cars. I thought about it for about 5 seconds...and then ordered myself two sets.

Good pictures of the prototype AnnArbor RR cars seem hard to come by, but I did find a real nice image of the Lionel model in this paint scheme. I pretty much followed that to try to match up the paint colour.

I'm pretty sure this is the wrong boxcar model to use for this. I think that the proper car to use would be the Walthers Greenville 86 footer, but I don't have one of those to spare right now. Hey, I figure that if the major model manufacturers can produce foobies on a seemingly regular basis, then I should be able to get away with this one.

I used acrylic craft paint Canyon Orange with a drop each of Holiday Red and Espresso brown. Once I had sprayed that on the model, I thought it looked a bit too dark, so I sprayed a couple of light coats of just the Canyon Orange by itself.  I thought the colour match was a lot better after that.

Most of the decals went on real well, but one of the big "Ferry in the Fog" decals first curled up, and then a number of air bubbles formed underneath it that I couldn't get rid of. I pulled that decal right off and used one from the 2nd set that I had been just smart enough to order.

I'll probably weather this car sometime, but for the time being, it's going to stay looking the way it is:

I'm pretty happy with the way this little project turned out. So that's it for this week.  Thanks for looking in here.