Cotton Belt Boxcar Weathering

[B_Kosanda]

I bought a new Genesis Cotton Belt boxcar. This thing is spectacular. The car was built in 1973, so I set out to weather it per some of the techniques I have learned and here is the result. I partially sanded off the lettering. The white letters are the ones that weather off, according to photos I have seen. Then I painted rust spots with artist acrylic and then used two colors of chalk and then wet brushed it vertically down the sides. The trucks were painted grimy black and the wheels/couplers were painted RR Tie Brown. The Genesis now comes with Scale McHenry couplers. Nice. The whole thing was lightly oversprayed with Dullcote.

I'll take any comments you want to dish out. This car is not perfect, but I'm gettin' there.

Bill Kosanda

 

[CBCNSfan]

OH! My, look at what he did with that nice shiny new car,
Nice work weathering Bill, it may not be perfect in your eyes, but it certainly looks real to me ( a big improvement )

Cheers Willis

 

[mushroom2]

Looks real good Bill. I'm new to weathering and so far I haven't had the guts to take a $20+ dollar car and attack it like that. So you are way ahead of me. Keep it up.

 

[elythomaslumber]

...not perfect??? It is perfect!!! And for me a good pattern when I come to do the same with some of my cars.

Hartmut

 

[RCH]

I think it looks fantastic. You might want to try to restore some of the "newness" to the lube plate, since those are updated and resprayed without regard to the condition of the paint on the rest of the car. You might also find areas that could be damaged and repaired/repainted on future cars of this type. Really, though, these are just suggestions for additional cars in the fleet so that they all don't look too uniform.

Again, it looks great. You've definitely mastered some good techniques. Most important, you apply them wisely. Keep it up.

By the way, your layout looks awesome. I'd love to see more rolling stock and more layout, so post some more photos, will ya?

 

[ak-milw]

Well Bill, It looks pretty beat up to me so I guess your system works!!

 

[CBCNSfan]

restore some of the "newness" to the lube plate

Uh, huh, just for the uninformed ( ME ) what's a lube plate and where is it on the car?
Could be handy in the future, all my rolling stock is right out of the boxes, or still in the boxes yet waiting for locos to haul it.


Cheers Willis

 

[RCH]

Although it may go by another name, I call them lube plates:

Another thing I see frequently is renumbered cars, often because of a change of ownership. Here's my first attempt from 13 years ago, done with one of my drafting pens:

These days I use decals. Too much AutoCAD and not enough "real" drafting in the past ten years, so my hands can't do it anymore.

 

[papio]

Awesome weathering job.
Cool tip about the lube plate repaint.(I've always heard them called that too)

 

[RCH]

By the way, your layout looks awesome. I'd love to see more rolling stock and more layout, so post some more photos, will ya?

Oops! I just realized I have seen your layout before, on this site, and I loved it. But I won't stop you from fulfilling my request and posting more photos!

 

[CBCNSfan]

Thanks RCH, lube plate it is. When I start IMPROVING on the newness of my rolling stock I'll watch out for the plates, it's a possibility a lot of them don't have it on them so I'll have to get some decals. I see a lot of them second owner rolling stock cars in the freight yards they're all so different it would be hard to go wrong painting one.
BTW I finished the paint job with the old Miller airbrush again, wasn't the paint this time, what came as a Paache was a knock off with an important spacer missing. It's modified and will work now. Only one more Acrylic paint job to do now ( since I have the paint ) then I switch mfg.

Cheers Willis

 

[SDP45]

Okay, here is a glaring problem. Check out the coupler height on the left in the weathered picture. One of them is wrong!