Yup, Another Mill Gondola

I picked up this Athearn 65 Foot Mill Gondola, lettered as Conrail 593289, 5 years ago at Gulf Coast Hobby (a great shop) in Sarasota, Fla.  It's sat in it's box in my cupboard ever since, but this past week or so I finally brought it out and weathered it.

I was sure I'd taken a picture of it in new condition, but I can't seem to find it, so with my apologies we'll have make do with the above view from Athearn's page.

The particular model I have is discontinued, but it looks like Athearn is doing another run with some other roadnames.  This link will take you to Athearn's page about their Mill Gondola.

http://www.athearn.com/Products/Default.aspx?ProdID=ATH76549

I searched for photos of the prototype car with the same number, but couldn't find any, so I just did what I felt might be plausible. Made me kind of wonder just how Athearn came up with this car number. The few pictures I did find of similar cars all seemed to show them as nearly new, or at least very clean.

The interior of my model has been rusted up using RustAll from Hobby Lobby that I've used and shown here in the past. I then went over the entire outside of the model with Tamiya Panel Line Black, which really darkened down the whole thing.

The Tamiya Panel Line and Flat Clear.  The Panel Line product is available in brown and gray as well.

All of the graffiti, which is done on one side only, is decals from a number of Microscale sets, some of which were from older sets, while some are newer.  With them snuggled down nicely over the ribs and rivet lines, I sprayed thinned layers of Rail Brown over the decals to take down the shine.

Here's the model on the workbench, with the interior done and the outside panels are darkened down, but those graffiti decals sure look clean.

Speaking of clean, here's a look at the underside of the gondola, just to show the colour the gondola was before I went over the sides with the Panel Line Black. I've long thought about trying to model the piping detail on freight cars, but I really don't know what to use for the piping.

I think that the graffiti looks a lot better when it's been dulled down with the Rail Brown to look like it's been there for a while.

I got the car all finished up, took the above picture, and then realized that I'd forgotten to add the reflective stripes along the sides.  Again, with no prototype photos to go by, I placed the Smokebox Graphics stripes where I thought maybe they should go. 

Here we go...FRA stripes in place

And just another look, with a nicer view of the rusty interior. I don't have a load for this gondola  - yet.  I was thinking maybe a removable pipe load.

One more thing...

Couldn't help but notice what appeared to be an uptick in on-line selloffs of pre-owned HO scale GP9RM and Slugs in the last couple of weeks since Rapido announced they've got their own sets coming out?  Seems many that have the older Kaslo Shops kit, Overland Brass models, and perhaps Maple Leaf Trains kit would prefer to have the Rapido version.

If you haven't seen it yet, the Rapido models look real nice.  Real nice. Here's a link to the Rapido site page for the GP9RM and slug:

https://rapidotrains.com/ho-scale/diesel-locomotives/gp9rm.html