ABOX Re-Weathered

 I had decided this week to re-weather this ABOX car, so here's the before and after views of my ABOX 51091...

The boxcar looked alright before, but I decided to change it to a lighter, more faded yellow.  I removed this previous weathering using 91% isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs.  Gotta be careful though to not inadvertently remove the yellow factory paint too.

Once the brownish previous weathering was removed, I faded the yellow down to a lighter colour with my usual Concrete Gray.

So that same boxcar now looks like this...

I modernized the boxcar a bit with some graffiti on the side. I like this rendition of ABOX 51091 much better.

Also, I finished up weathering this Rapido gondola model for Don this week.

The outside is faded and dirty, the inside is looking rusty.

As I happened to be standing by the entrance to the layout with my camera in my hand, I took this sort of a detail type picture from South Industrial Boulevard and then posted the photo on facebook's "HO Scale Model Railroading" group on Thursday afternoon.  I was quite surprised when 5 hours later there had been 380 views and 36 comments had been left.  Most comments were general in nature, but a few were more specific.

I like the picture, but I've never had a reaction like that from a posting before. Some of the comments remarked on the litter, the Jersey Barriers, or the guy wire.  No one even seemed to notice the boxcar.

So that was my week.  I hope yours was just as good.

Backdrop Photo

When travelling I75 through Detroit, there's a section of the freeway that runs more east-west than north-south.  And as you drive that section, if you look a little ways to the north of the freeway at the right moment, you might see the former Fisher Body Plant (building 21) off in the distance.

This photo below looks to have been taken from the corner of Harper Ave and Piquette St.

I often thought it would be cool to have picture of the building on the layout as part of the backdrop.  However, when I tried to edit the photo to eliminate the perspective, I could never quite get it to look right.

During another internet search, I found this much better view of the same building which was taken "square on" from just a bit further down the block on Harper Ave.

I cropped just a little bit from each end of the the 2nd photo and also removed some of the sky.  No sense printing the sky as I was intending to cut it out afterwards anyway, and also eliminating what I could will allow the final images to be printed that much larger.

Next, I divided the cropped picture into thirds and printed those 3 images as big as I could in portrait format on plain old copier paper.  I used portrait format so that I could print the images taller and closer to the height of the structures on the layout.

Once printed out, I of course trimmed the extra white paper from the edges, and mounted the 3 images onto a sheet of white construction paper that I had picked up previously from the local Michaels craft store.

I used 3M 77 spray adhesive to stick the images to the construction paper.  That stuff sets up really fast, and as a result, I did manage to tear one of the images in the sky portion.  You can see that tear to the left of the dust collector.  But that was OK because my plan was to cut out as much of the sky as I possibly could anyway.

It took me about an hour or so to trim out the sky from the top of the pictures with my Xacto knife.  And yes, I still have all my fingers and no bandages were necessary either.  I also ran the edge of my brown paint pen around the edges of the picture so that the white edges wouldn't show.

Here's the view from partway down the layout showing how the new backdrop piece fits in. The finished piece is about 25 inches or so wide.

This layout improvement project turned out just about as well as I had hoped, and in this view I think it blends right in !

Have a great week !

Covered Hopper and a Waffle Box

The receiving office here at the JSSX was pretty happy this week, as we've received a replacement hatch cover for that McKean brand Polysar plastic pellets/granules covered hopper that was featured here a couple of weeks ago.  The shipper, and all around good guy, was Kevin Smith who volunteered to send along the replacement part - plus another spare!

Here's the covered hopper with the 3rd from the right hatch cover missing, and the new replacement about ready to be installed

Hatch cover is in place, but looking pretty new compared to the rest of them

Just a little filing of a bit of flash on the new part before gluing into place, and then weathered with a quick dab of Tamiya's Panel Line Black to match the other covers.

I had weathered this Exactrail waffle boxcar a long time ago, and thought at the time that I'd paint one of the doors with primer to try to suggest the door was a replacement.

Truth is, I never really liked the way the door looked, but left it like that.  Until this week.

I masked around the red door with tape, and then sprayed the door black. I then sprayed clear gloss over that, and cut and scraped together new decals for the door from my decal box.  With that done, I loaded the airbrush with thinned Roof Brown and sprayed multiple light layers until I got the door to almost match (on purpose) the one beside it.

With the boxcar back in the same location you can see that the colour difference between doors now is slight, but noticeable.  I like the way it's looking now much better than before.

Have a great week everybody.  And thanks very much Kevin !

September This and That

I really like the photo that I've posted up at the top of the blog for September.  JSSX 815 (which I numbered after my sister's birthday) is dragging along empty CN gondola 143177.  Here's the same picture again so nobody has to scroll back up to the top.

The gondola isn't mine, it belongs to Don Janes, but I did the weathering on it.

This photo is from a few months ago when I had assembled the overpass, has my JSSX 815 about to roll beneath it

I'm not sure whether I'll do it or not, but I've been considering blocking in these windows with siding or maybe concrete block just to change up the look a bit.

Posed these two boxcars on the on-street trackage on South Industrial Blvd. for this photo.

And, I finally got back to doing some work on my industrial building project from a couple of months ago.  I shortened the platform where the silos are located by about 20 feet, allowing me to move the whole thing a little further from the overpass.

I've given the two silos some streaking rust, and also added piping from them into the building although the piping still needs a little weathering.  Weathering streaks have also been done on the warehouse building and foundation.

The whole structure assembly is mounted onto a piece of Gator Foam (I think that's what it's called) that's 6" x 36".

Special thanks go to George Dutka for giving me the Gator Foam quite a while ago. I've finally gotten a round to using it George. I've painted it brown before starting to add ground cover.

Have a good week everybody.