Over the past year, in between selling/buying/moving house, losing job, finding new job, etc, I've somehow managed to cram in some modelling. Most of it has led to the usual unfinished if promising results and several more half-built kits back in the stash pile. There was one project I did complete though, proving that a) I am actually capable of completing something, and b) a deadline makes all the difference.
Couple years back I won a lot of six old Silver Streak HO scale maintenance of way cars on eB**, intending to build them as a Christmas present for my dad. His model railroad hobby was probably the biggest inspiration for me to start building models as a kid, and I spent plenty of time reading back issues from his awesome library of Model Railroader, Railroad Model Craftsman, and S Gauge Herald, stretching back to the late 1940's. My favourites were the various Maine 2-foot gauge layout articles in RMC by Dave Frary and Bob Hayden, as well as the general tone of the magazine which was subtly humourous and fun to read. Reading about model railroading during that era (late 60s/early 70s) gave me a sort of basic notion that while building kits is fun, in many ways scratchbuilding
is modelling. I never was able to run too far with it back then, but coming back to the hobby decades later it's an area I'm really drawn to. So I really owe my whole interest in this hobby to my dad, and it seemed like building these cars for him would be kind of coming full circle.
I'd previously built him a later, Walthers era (mid 70s) Silver Streak Santa Fe reefer car, which for my first attempt at a craftsman type kit actually turned out OK, and at least gave me an idea what to expect. For this project I set out to build four (later revised to three) cars at one time, an almost insane undertaking given my virtually unbroken track record of not finishing stuff. Plus, these MOW cars were much older, Tru-Scale era kits, likely from the 1950s, and somewhat more of a challenge. All the cast zamac parts had lots of flash, which created a lot of work, and in general this earlier generation of these kits leaves you more on your own. But hey, scratchbuilding
is modelling, right? I leapt in fearlessly, spending many an hour cleaning up parts and bringing all four to a decent ready-to build stage. Meanwhile I'd decided to build them as an old Canadian Pacific work train, since his layout is loosely intended as an imaginary branch of the CP around the steam/diesel transition era. Luckily I found a couple excellent reference books at the library with plenty of gorgeous colour photos, and sourced some CP boxcar decals that could be adapted well enough.
The build started in late February and rolled on at a decent pace for a few months before the whole moving thing got in the way. Resuming in early autumn, I started to realize just how much work was involved, and had to get kind of disciplined about it. For about a month before Xmas it became virtually a part-time job, which was kind of crazy, but also fun. Overall there was a lot of trial and error and the usual wheel reinvention, but I really learned a lot and gained tons of confidence. Some highlights:
- scribed planks on the inside of each car side, since I wanted to start with bare wood and the pre-painted and lettered outside didn't sand down well at all. Couple weeks of sessions to finish this
- made version of classic "ink and alcohol" wood weathering mix, in this case using shoe dye and methyl hydrate, and aged the wooden sides
- used rubber cement technique for peeling paint effect. Came out OK
- cut the pre-scribed roofwalk stock too short (duh) so had to scratchbuild those out of coffee stirrer sticks
- somehow wound up scratchbuilding a fair bit of underbody detail - air line, brake rods, levers, mounts, etc
- scratchbuilt brake rods, stirrups, brakerod chain (OK, I bought that), brake platforms - basically everything except the brakewheel
- kit turnbuckles were unusable so scratchbuilt those from styrene rod (harder than it sounds). Results are overscale but look the part at least
- evolved my own variation of the fishing-line truss rod method. Bit of an engineering feat
- scratchbuilt various external details like smokejacks, doorway grab handles, and rain shutters
For the base colour I chose True Line mineral brown/freight car red, after unsuccessful experiments with mixing something suitable from various Humbrol enamels, but since I wanted to be able to mix numerous variations on it, I got some Model Master Acryl colours - Guards Red, French Blue, Semigloss White, Tan, Burnt Sienna Raw Sienna, Dark Earth, and Neutral Gray. This worked out surprisingly well for the most part, though I did find the MM Acryls caused a lot of tip dry when airbrushing and are tough to clean up really thoroughly since they harden so fast.
The prototype CN/CP mineral brown is an interesting colour. Photos show all kinds of fading effects from dusty reddish brown to rich reddish purple, as well as the "freshly shopped" option. Using reference photos, I sprayed a different base colour for each car, then mixed three variations and brushed down individual planks with a #0 brush. After the second variation of this the cars started to take on sort of a vivid look, which was encouraging.
The zamac ends had to be painted separately as in an attempt to imitate the "peeled paint showing wood" effect of the sides, I started with a sort of "raw lumber" colour mixed not too successfully from MM enamels. Think I tried to seal that in with a coat of Future before going to the base colour. The car ends wound up looking OK but not quite the perfect match to the sides I was going for. One thing I will do next time: prime metal parts! Also, I painted the doorway windows with either Tamiya XF-11 or XF-13, to represent (spurious) green oilcloth window shades, and carefully pooled several coats of Future in between the window frames to look like glass. Didn't really work as well as I'd hoped.
After awhile everything was glued together and it was on to decals. My first time using waterslide decals since about the age of ten was pretty interesting. Spicing things up was the tendency of these minute decals to break apart, which forced an awful lot of fast improvisation with brushloads of water and moving things very gently with a cocktail stick. After drying I sliced the decals down between the planks with a fresh #11 blade and hit them with Micro-Set, and in the end got just about all of them looking painted on. For the car designations I used Woodland Scenics dry transfer letters, not quite the right font but passable, and did the same slicing trick with them where needed. Finally I peeled up the rubber cement with a cocktail stick and moved on to weathering, with Vallejo black wash and some light applications of shoe dye/methyl hydrate. One cool side effect was that the methyl hydrate melted the white decal ink a little and gave a weather-stained look to some of the lettering, which was accidental and luckily not a disaster.
The Kadee archbar trucks got a dry brush of steel and a couple layers of rust and earth/mud colours, while I believe the undersides were sprayed neutral gray and drybrushed with a two or three earthtoned layers. I was still touching this up and finishing weathering on Xmas morning.
It felt like a big accomplishment to have actually completed three models at once, but the real satisfaction was watching my dad open the box. We saved it til last, and it was worth every minute of the 100 hours or whatever it was to see how happy he was with them. I didn't really relax til we took them downstairs and put them on the layout, since I wasn't completely sure they would track properly, but they did. We ran them around behind a CP diesel switcher for a while, and I took some pictures. It was a great feeling to finally see them sitting there on his handlaid track, where they belonged.
