Weathering, Part III

By John "Grunge" Drye and Bill "Ruined Trains" Rutherford

This time we'll look at ways to simulate specific wear and tear and other evidence of heavy usage on our newly ruined rolling stock.

During the course of it's life, a freight car undergoes regular maintenance, which often includes partial repainting. Partial repainting is evident by differently colored paint on portions of the car. Routine maintenance often involves repainting dimensional data. One easy way to simulate recently repainted data is to apply a small piece of clear tape to the reporting marks before beginning the weathering process. When you are done, remove the tape, and voila, newly painted data.

Other repainting may involve painting out an old RR name and logo upon repurchase or merger. After completing the basic weathering, paint over the old roadname and RR logo with a color slightly darker than the original car color. The new roadname and logo can then be added using decals or dry transfers. The car number can  remain the same or change. Often the lettering style changes when a new number is applied. Best bet is (you guessed it) to work from photos. Some recently released modern era boxcars are factory painted to reflect this sort of re-naming.

Sometimes only a portion of a car is repainted after repairs. To simulate this on a wood car, weather the car, then carefully repaint several individual boards with the original color. On a metal car, one or more roof or side panels can be repainted, either in aluminum (for the roof) or the original color after initial weathering. Roof repainting is especially effective, since models are so often viewed from above.

There are a couple of things one can do to simulate rust damage on a piece of rolling stock, beyond dusting and washing the model (which does a good job of duplicating general malaise, but not specific damage...). Work from photos!

One method is to paint the area to be rusted with a base coat of dark brown. Flat roof brown (from your favorite manufacturer...) mixed with black works well. Polly-S makes a fantasy color, Ogre Dark Brown, which is fine right out of the bottle. Mix some rust color (again, from your favorite print maker) with the base color on a palette and dab this onto the dark base coat, leaving a bit of the base coat showing through. Finally, drybrush (see part one of this article) just a bit of rust (unadulterated this time) onto the area. The result is a rusted area with old, dark, rust highlighted with fresh rust. If you're weathering, say, the corner of a car in this manner, complete the process with a bit of drybrushed metal color (steel, silver, etc.) right on the corner's edge to   represent a surface subject to wear whose surrounding area is rusted. Omitting any or all of the lighter colors will give you an area of old rust.

Another method (borrowed, we think, from a recent Railmodel Journal) is to paint dripping rust spots on your cars. In this instance, take a piece of wire with a dab of dark brown on it and poke your car where you want the rust spot. Let it dry a minute or so (a good time to poke the car elsewhere...) and then repeat the process with some fresh rust color. Now, with a dry paintbrush, stroke LIGHTLY downward over the still-wet fresh rust color. The result is a rust spot similar to the one on the side of your car, that, exposed to the weather, has rust stains running down from it. Try it - you'll like it!

You can now buy graffiti decal sheets that will deface even your prettiest cars. If you're too creative (read: cheap) for decals, get some white acrylic paint and a good #0 or #000 brush and draw your own. You will amaze yourself and your friends with your artwork. Look at any CSX freight for inspiration. If you're really ambitious, do full color graffiti - it really dresses up those bland covered hoppers!

Most graffiti these days seems to be applied in waterproof paint, but one still sees the occasional amateur job in tempera or chalk that the rain's washed into a whitish muddle - work from photos and you can get some neat (not to mention awful looking) effects.

The tried-and-true method of applying minor damage - dings and dents - to hoppers and gondolas has always been to apply heat (light bulb, hot knife, etc.) NEAR but not ON to the area to be damaged, then to prod the area with a finger or knife blade until it's dented. This works well but is not all one's limited to.

Take your motor tool with either a cutting drum or an abrasive ball and GENTLY thin areas (from the inside) on the sides of a gondola, hopper, or box car, perhaps wearing all the way through in spots. This is especially effective when you then rust the area up a bit. Restraint is important here because with one slip of the tool, you'll have a car that looks as if it took an RPG in the side... Several of the older members of CSX's box car fleet look as if they got this treatment.

Very occasionally one sees a car with patches on it, a victim, no doubt, of the motor tool treatment. Cut a couple of squares of thin styrene - 5 thousandths' thickness or less - and apply them to side of a car with cement. When dry, paint to match the rest of the car (or not to match - see the tape trick, above) and weather a bit.

Lading 

Freight cars run empty as much as half the time, but empty open cars seem more boring than ones with loads. This doesn't have to be the case. Empty cars retain evidence of the load just carried and can be modeled just as effectively as loaded ones. One of the easiest ways to provide evidence of recent loadings is with scale lumber or pallets. Loads are secured with 2 x 4, 4 x 4, 8 x 8 or larger lumber. Go down to your favorite hobby shop and pick up some of scale lumber in assorted sizes. Chop into six to ten foot Lents and glue into gondola bottoms, on flat cars, or even in open-door boxcars. Boxcars are great place to put empty pallets, too. Leftovers can be scattered around loading docks on your module.

More recently, metal strapping has been used to secure loads. This can be simulated with very thin chart tape from a art or graphics supply store. Buy the thinnest you can find; 0.5mm if you can get it. Strapping often curls into circular shapes when removed from loads. You can wrap the tape around a brush or pencil to accomplish this. Just like the scale lumber, glue into the empty car.

Gondolas and hoppers seldom are completely emptied of coal, gravel, sand or stone loads. You can sprinkle a little fine ballast or dirt inside gons to simulate remnants. Empty coal hoppers can use a dusting of the finest scale coal you can find; look for the consistency of dust. Gondolas seem to get the hardest usage of any car type. They are usually dented, rusted, and filthy. Just the kind of car we love. Gons are a great place to practice extreme techniques. It's hard to overdo it on these cars; just look at some prototype pictures (have you heard that before?)

We only borrow (steal) ideas from the best of sources (i.e., anywhere we can get them!). Sometime in the next couple of newsletters, look for an annotated bibliography of recent (or at least available) books and magazine articles that deal with weathering rolling stock. In the way of preview, consider:

• Tom, Art; "Techniques: Weathering Made Easy"; N-Scale; July/August 1994; pp. 38 - 39.

Good color photos of models illustrates basic  introduction to airbrush-and-chalk weathering. Very useful.