A Couple of Freight Cars Weathered

 I've changed up the blog's header photo for the month of June, this time featuring my personal favourite locomotive, the JSSX 813 (formerly 815).  It sits outside of the shortline's maintenance shop waiting it's next trip around the railroad.

I thought I'd show a couple of freight cars I've just weathered up for Jamie B. I really like this first one, as it's kind of unobtrusive looking, and should blend right in to any train.

I darkened down the brown on this one by placing very small dabs of Ivory Black artist oils at the upper inside edges of the ribs and pulling a dampened flat brush straight down. I masked off the reporting marks and data before making a couple of quick vertical passes of the airbrush with really thin Craftsmart grey on the panels between the ribs.

Not always easy to get the graffiti decals to settle down over the ribs and the ridges at the door.  After a couple of applications of Micro-Sol have dried, a sharp new Xacto blade will make for a nice clean slice through the decal.  Then another application of the Micro-Sol and the decals snuggle right down.

Same goes for the graffiti on this RBOX.  When everything is all dried, I sprayed very thin Rail Brown to add some grime.  Less along the middle area and more at the top and bottom.

The original lettering was first removed and then replaced with a RBOX ghost decal lettering set from PDC. The PDC decal sets are made specifically for this type of 6-panel boxcar

Back in the real world, I happened to see this quite weathered covered hopper across from the station down at the Sarnia C-Yard

This car was the only cylindrical one in a long string of 3-bay covered hoppers.  My guess is that they were either on their way to, or had come from, the grain elevators here in Sarnia.