A Touch of Grey

A couple of weeks ago I showed my new HOKX (Occidental Chemical) 17360 gallon tank car (and that would be a U.S. gallon by the way), as it looked when it came out of the box.  I don't honestly know if Occidental hauls oil products or not. I wanted the grey tank car because it would be different but still blend in nicely among the plain old black ones I already had. That's kind of the thing about freelancing the railroad...you can do what you like.  Though it's also a bit lazy, in a way.

I looked through a lot of photos of these tank cars on the internet, and they didn't appear to have suffered very much from the elements yet.  That in mind, I did some very light and simple weathering on this model.

I first removed the Chlorine lettering by using a bit of Micro-Sol, which didn't take long.  The prototype photo I sort of used for reference showed what looked to be grey spray paint overtop of what was probably a bit of graffiti.  I kind of emulated that idea through the use of some NYC Gray trim film from Microscale.  

Have a couple of looks at that before the car comes off the workbench

The painted out areas are at the right-hand end on this side.  The trim film colour is just a few shades away from the colour of the tank car, so a somewhat subtle difference. Instead of being sort of freeform like the prototype photo showed, my painted out areas are more geometric in shape.

The other side of the tank car:

Painted out or patched areas at the left-hand end on this side.  I painted the wheels and trucks with BeautyTone Camo brown spray paint from the local Home Hardware store.

And now out on the shortline for the first run

I added one small black graffiti scribble.  It's an N-scale decal actually.  I thought of using a .3mm black ink sketching pen, but wasn't sure about being able to pull that off on the curved surface and with the safety bar in the way.

Sorry for the engine being a little out of focus in the photo below. 

There's the grey tank car, 3rd car down from the engine, being switched into the local oil supplier.  It fits in nicely, I think.