This and That in September

I think had better start off this week trying to explain that I cannot sign in to blogger to reply to comments.  I don't know why this is, but believe me, I've been trying.  It's been this way for a while, and it's ridiculous.  And I'm sorry.

D&HColonieMain asked a question in the comments last week, about the rusty patches on the PHD boxcar, and how did I create them, so I'll try to answer that here and hope that he reads it.  I got the inspiration for those type of rust patches from a photo I had seen somewhere on the interwebs, of a very similar boxcar that had been weathered by Preston Stinger.  I don't know how he did the work on his model, but I thought I'd give something a try.  What I came up with worked for me - eventually - but I'd certainly say it was "not easy".

I had trouble getting those rust patches the way I liked them, and two or three times I actually removed what I had done, and started them over again.  The first step was to fade the blue colour of the blue boxcar with a spray of concrete gray through the airbrush, and then I sealed that in with a clear flat.

For the rusty patches I put tiny dabs of (Winsor & Newton) water mixable oils on a small piece of makeup sponge and dabbed it on the panels of the car.  There's 3 colours that I used, one at a time, and in the following sequence:  Sienna, Burnt Sienna, and finally Burnt Umber.  So the colours go from lightest to darkest.  Lightest colour also makes up the largest part of the rust patch, with the darkest toward the centre. I let each colour dry for a day or so before adding the next layer. I really should have taken pictures as I went along, but I didn't unfortunately.

Here's the PHD boxcar again.  I've added the reflective FRA stripes this week.

I put FRA stripes on the LLSR boxcar as well

I've never had any people/figures for the layout before, but I ordered these 2 sets of railroad worker figures this week, and received them Friday morning.

The upper set are train crew workers and the bottom set are railroad construction workers

I ran across this on a facebook post and it made me smile

I like how all the guys are standing around as though they're waiting to see what's going to happen next.