UNPX 123989 Covered Pellet Hopper

C-Yard in Sarnia is always, and I mean always, chocked full of tank cars and covered hoppers from the refineries around here.  Several weeks back when I was down there, I noticed one particular pellet hopper that had graffiti covering the side of the car from top to bottom.  Big grey block letters spelling "OZZY", which I took to be a reference to singer (?) Ozzy Osbourne.  And long ago he did have a song called Crazy Train.  That prototytpe car was too far down the yard track for me to take a picture.

I've never really been a fan of Ozzy Osbourne or his former band myself, but seeing the car did give me an idea, and I do have a few pellet hoppers for the layout, such as this one below.

I understand that not everyone really likes graffiti all that much, so just make of this what you will...

A very clean looking Walthers Plastic Pellet hopper

I laid out letters on a sheet of graph paper, cut them out and transferred their outlines to a piece of masking tape.  I then cut those letters out of the tape and laid it out on the side of the pellet car as a mask.

 Here's the mask laid out on the side of the pellet car. Jimmie. That's the way my Mom spelled my name when I was a little kid.

Next up was to spray the letters and remove the masking tape

I used the lightest colour grey that I had for the letters. That's the way I remembered the OZZY car had looked, but with black or at least dark outlines around the letters.

So I hand painted the dark outline around the letters

I decided to add some weathering to the car as well because why not.  A few light passes of the airbrush loaded with diluted ModelFlex Rust along the top of the car, followed by just a bit of Roof Brown as well.

My pellet hopper out in the wild along the GTW here.  I've also added the reflective stripes.

A look at the more "plain" side. It received the same light rust and roof brown.  There are also some really light and hard to see vertical rust streaks that the camera is hardly picking up.

Final picture shows the pellet hopper spotted for unloading on the MidWest Plastics spur.  Looks pretty good spotted there. I think I'm happy enough with the way this turned out, so I'm sure it'll see it's share of time out on the layout

Have a great week everybody. I hope you get to do some modeling railroading.

Jimmie.