How do you weather your rolling stock?


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The above photos show the completed and lightly weathered Southern Pacific Box Car Track Cleaner from both sides. I have been having troubles my digital camera as of late. The photo showing the washer I used as weight on the top of the cleaning pad is lost somewhere in the ether! However, you can see the washer in the two photos. Both the pad and the washer have been painted Grimy Black to make them less noticeable.

These photos where mistakenly placed here and should have been put in the thread on making track cleaning cars. Sorry. This car was lightly weathered.
 
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Here's a box car that I was originally going to throw away because it had paint dripped on it, had no trucks or couplers, but being the it was for the Northern Pacific, I figured that I would try to weather it a bit heavier and see how it would come out. Ended up being a keeper.

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My first attempt at weathering I used water to thin Floquil paint. Some how there was just the right mixture to make a wash and it worked to lighten up the oxide red of the ore car body and the yellow UP markings. And it dried after a while, but I never repeated that again, but did 12 Walthers ore cars.

Live and learn.

Greg
 
Greg, you should post photos of the ore cars the moves from Montana to Wisconsin. Tried to post them but they were too large to load.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
 
Here's a steel reefer that sat on a Chicago siding for years and the Milwaukee Northern (MN) purchased the car for a MOW storage car. the Milwaukee Northern crew used paint rollers to coverup the Santa Fe logo and reporting marks.


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Greg
 
Remember, the name of this thread is: How do you weather your rolling stock? Please describe how you went about weathering your car.

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I weathered this one specific car with Acrylic washes and colored chalks. The roof of the car was the same color as the overall car. I used Acrylic Silver to replicate spots on the roof where the paint had pealed off, leaving bear metal and then used a couple coats of thinned Microlux Acrylic Grimy Black to coat the roof, giving it an overall black appearance. The rest of the weathering was done with black, rust and dust colored chalks. Rust was used to highlight the rivet details on the car sides, then black was used along the bottom of the car where dust would accumulate and the dusty color used in the same way. Altogether, I probably took an extra 15 minutes to weather. Although I needed to wait 1 hour between the black washes on the roof.
 
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If you will look at the top of the forum pages you will see photos of modelers equipment in "Members Featured Photos". If you look at the photos of more modern equipment, say from the late 70s onward, you will notice that few of this eras modelers use weathering of any type. To weather; or, not, is certainly a personal choice. The reality is that freight cars, cabooses and locomotives do weather, The BNSF trains I see when I drive along hwy 10, here in Central Minnesota are for the most part very weathered and to see a car that has no weathering; or, rusting going on, is scarcer than hens teeth. Weathering is so easy to accomplish and there are easy ways of doing that if you don't like the results, you can simply wash them away. I guess I don't understand why weathering isn't more popular? In my own dealings when selling model railroad equipment, my lightly weathered cars will sell quicker and for more money than my heavily weathered stuff. To me it should be the opposite! At any rate, weather; or, don't weather and I guess the reality of the situation is that reality maybe has little to do with it!
 
Interesting that you note that lightly weathered equipment sells at better prices than the heavily done ones. Here, although there are many who do weather their rolling stock, I have noticed that clean, new looking stock, sells much more easily than weathered and generally for more, so there could be a desire among many to not weather in order to retain sales value. It is silly that the work that goes into making a piece more realistic, doesn't gain the recognition it should, value wise. Comes down then to a niche market, getting the right buyer along at the right time. The other factor could also be that a buyer might prefer to do their own and therefore like to start with a clean slate. Selling, is like fishing. We bait our hook with what should look like a tasty morsel and hope a fish bites that we then land. Different baits for different fish.
 
I'm also sort of Amazed at the fact that if you take and old Athearn Blue Box; or MDC Roundhouse kit freight car, and weather it, it looks as realistic as any of the $40.00 and $50.00 Ready To Roll freight cars available today. I find that for me, the single act of weathering a car does more for realism than all the tiny little parts you can put on a freight car. Then, if you weather one of the highly detailed cars and place it in a realistic scene, telling it from the prototype becomes very difficult! Being able to tell the difference between a highly detailed weathered RTR and an older kit built weathered car as it is being pulled in a train is pretty difficult to do.
 
I would say that the majority of my freight cars are blue boc cars that I have weathered. I do also have a few highly detailed cars such as some Kadee cars and when they're all put together in a train, it's hard to tell them apart until you stop the train and get in real close. I am perfectly happy with the old blue box cars.

Here's a video I posted a while back with a mixture of different cars. Some of the Kadee cars are apparent as I have yet to weather them, but try to tell the difference.

[video=youtube;3p6VEsjM1tc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p6VEsjM1tc[/video]
 
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You've proved my point, Chet! It is difficult to tell the expensive highly detail cars from the Blue Box, unless the highly detailed are not weathered.
 
Here's another point to consider in the lightly vs heavily debate. As has been bemoaned in numerous forums and magazines, model railroaders are aging. When I was riding the train into Boston (late 2000's), similar to what Mark stated, most of the cars were rust buckets and / or covered in graffiti. The only "clean" cars were the new aquisitions. When I grew up in the Midwest (50's and 60's), one a week, after dinner, the whole family would stop at Dairy Queen for ice cream then park by the side of the road and watch the Milwaukee Midwest Hiawatha heading to Chicago. Being passenger service, the cars were always pristine. But more important, passing the freight yards on the way downtown, none of the cars were covered in graffiti or that bad condition. And that's the important issue. My railroad recreates the trains of my youth, as I remember them!
 
I was born in 1950, so I guess I grew up at the same time you did Kevin. I recall the freights going by on the N.P. and G.N. being pretty dirty.
 
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