Gondola Re-Paints

 As I wrote last time, I've been spending quite a bit of time weathering gondola cars recently, so here's a look at a few of those:

ZVBX is one that I wrote about 3 weeks ago when I got the idea from a gondola that Lance Mindheim had featured on his blog.  I re-painted in grey an old gondola I had, re-lettered it, and then weathered it. This scrap load was made by Chooch Industries (I think).

EDIT: Friend Chuck has advised me via email Saturday afternoon that the gondola load above, is now a Walthers Scene Master piece, part number 910-6051.

ZVBX 97324 is freelanced as a sister to 97337.  I broke 3 drill bits on this one as I was drilling the holes to add the metal grab irons, so that was "challenging".  The graffiti on the side is Microscale decals.  They've been weathered to flatten down the colours with oversprays of Roof Brown from the airbrush.

JSSX 1410 is an old Roundhouse gondola that I've had forever. I thought that my shortline should also have a gondola that could make an appearance on the layout. I did much the same things to it that I had done to the other two above.

And I thought I'd also show this work-in-process as well, an older Walthers gondola. It was originally green, and lettered for the MKT. I was going to patch-letter it to UP, but then had a better idea, realizing that my GTW line should probably have a GTW gondola available to run into the scrap metals recycler site.

Hard to see in the photo, but I've bulged out the side panels with overlays of .005 styrene that has been cut to fit between the cars' ribs. I pre-mixed some C&O blue I had on hand with concrete gray and sprayed the car with that.  Even so, it seemed to be darker than I wanted, so I lightened it up more by spraying over that with just the concrete gray. I was trying to match the blue colour up to some on-line photos that I'd seen.

And finally, with much of the weathering done, you can also see some graffiti scribbles in a few of the panels. I haven't yet done any weathering to the other side, so this one still has a little ways to go before it makes it out onto the railroad.