Tag, you're it!
A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to win an auction on eBay for a Life Like Canada Proto 1000 Newsprint car. It was a nice enough looking car, decorated for the Minnesota, Dakota & Western and Boise Cascade. Great looking paint and decoration. But totally wrong for what I was modelling.
Apparently, CP bought all those cars and absorbed them into the system. So I had a green and white car that I couldn't use. Around the same time, I also won some Central Vermont boxcar dry transfers. Not right for a newsprint car, but close enough. So, the boxcar went into the stripper (and it took a long time for it to work) and then I airbrushed it. I used Italeri Flat Medium Brown, which is a close match to my eyes to the CN boxcar red. Two quick coats and I was left with this:
Once I had it painted, I started laying out the CDS dry transfers. I hadn't used dry transfers since I was a teenager for doing a train car, so I took my time and laid things out and used some masking tape to keep things from moving around. Dry transfers are nice, but they're not as forgiving as decals...
This was the first side I completed, after looking for a prototype picture and finding what I was looking for. I made sure to match up the dry transfers (which were a little bigger due to them being for a rib sided car) with the weld lines on the side. But the other side was going to be different. I found a prototype picture of this particular car with different lettering on the other side. The CVC and the numbers were very different on the other side, and it probably had to do with the amount of graffiti.
A NOTE ABOUT GRAFFITI:
I don't agree with graffiti being sprayed everywhere in the world. A lot of it is just garbage. There are a few cars out there that are real pieces of art, but they are few and far between. But I model modern day railroad operations, and so I have to include some graffiti. I'm not going to spray bomb my entire collection, but a few pieces here and there will at least make it realistic. I do not support anyone going out and painting their name on real equipment.
And now back to our regularly scheduled program...
Using the picture of the car and a pencil, I started drawing the outline of the lettering on the car. I counted rivets and measured as best I could so that my replica would be true to the original. Then I started using both Golden Acrylics from the tube and Italeri Model Colour paints to bring the pencil sketch to life. There were a lot of tense moments (no new swear words were introduced...I promise!), but the results were worth it. I am not totally done with the car, as I still need a smaller brush to finish the highlights and the scribbles around the graffiti. But I like it. I also used some old Microscale letters and Herald King numbers to do the different lettering on this side. A little weathering here and there and this one will be done. This is not a fully complete job yet...there are some changes that have happened since this photo was taken...
Oh...one more thing. The trucks...they were a strange translucent green. A quick shot of Italeri rust made them look so much better. Once I have some flat black (I know, I know...what kind of modeller doesn't have flat black in his paint kit...) I'll introduce a wash to darken them up nicely. And if you're looking for a picture of the real car so you can compare, here it is!
NOW ON TO OUR NEXT VICTIM...
The internet is a wonderful thing. Quite possibly the greatest invention since sliced bread, which means there have been a lot of crappy inventions in between sliced bread and the internet. Anyway. I'll get to the internet after this...
I received a nice gift in the mail from my parents yesterday. A new CP Rail newsprint boxcar. Now, I looked up the number on the side, which was CP 81013...and got the news. There are three things wrong with this car:
1. The green colour of the car is wrong. It should be painted CP Action green. This is not Action Green.
2. No CP newsprint cars had a black stripe along the side sill. NONE.
3. CP 81013 has a flush door. This is not a flush door car. These cars fit in the 85000 series.
Walthers, for their part, has the following to say on the boxes for these cars:
Notice "prototypically correct paint schemes." One mistake...no problem. 3 mistakes? Problem.
What to do, what to do. Do I strip it and repaint it? Do I send it back? Do I run in terror!?
No. I'm going to renumber it, change the paint using some weathering, and hide the black strip under...you guessed it, MORE GRAFFITI! Now I'm off to the internet to get some photos of these cars!
Photos of the victim will be made available as soon as I have them. Bwahahaha!
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