On The Art of Railcar Weathering | CCMR At The Bench #13
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- Опубликовано: 7 июл 2024
- Taking a thoughtful approach to weathering railcars is more than just following a series of steps. It's a mindset and a philosophy, though nothing overly complex. Here are some of my thoughts, with railcars I've weathered as discussion examples.
Torpedo cars are made by Bill Mueller. www.ebay.com/usr/wmjwmj66
Fantastic work, thank you for sharing.
Absolutely Simon. Cheers!
Weathering rolling stock, is an art. There are so many mediums to use and practice with. Me I like to use many technics on a single car or loco. Looking forward to you series and the different mediums you use. Eric, really good explanation on weathering.
Thanks Will. It's different for every car and maybe even my mood :). It's a really fun aspect of art. There are many right solutions to achieve a goal.
Learned a lot. Thank you so much.
Much appreciated Rick, glad this was helpful!
Nice vid. Agree 100% with your approach to weathering and even to the validity of the pre-weathered cars. I'd take it a step further to say if weathering isn't something you'd like to do yourself, then pre-weathered is definitely your friend. unweathered cars look so unrealistic and boring and i speak from personal experience as i have hundreds of cars waiting for the airbrush. but to have a car that's weathered, decaled, and customized by the modeler - a one of a kind - that's what's cool. your comparison of the models you weathered vs store bought was excellent - i picked yours out right away because they looked better, grimier, and more real. excellent video - i hope it inspires others to pick up the brush!
Thanks! I'm kind of in a similar situation, a lot of unweathered cars and not always enough time to get to them, so this will serve as a good excuse to get back into it! Worse than that is the number of un-weathered locos. While those are sometimes kept in better condition than cars, it's a bit odd seeing a fine set of weathered cars being pulled by a toy loco :)
I love your ConRail patch over. I spend time on the ConRail historical site looking for ideas. By the time ConRail came along PC hadn't painted all the PRR and NYC so a lot of CR stuff still had pre-PC marking poorly gone over. I have done some PRR, NYC and ERIE patch overs and plan to do some Reading stuff as well. Nice work as always.
Hi Paul, thanks for writing. I've seen some of those cars as well - the whole era provides really interesting patch and renumber opportunities!
As usual you have inspired me . I did a 2 bay covered hopper , but not sure my rust came out as it should . Used graffiti decals from Blair . If I knew were to send a picture to you I would . Looking forward to your weathering video's .
Thanks Steve - you can always shoot me a message at eric.pietras(at)gmail.com.
Hi Eric,
Simply outstanding video. Your philosophy and actual weathering is so inspiring. My model railroading has been on hold for months due to a variety of personal reasons to the point of even making having time to watch videos. Your videos are always on the top of the list!
Loved seeing the Republic Steel gondola (my Dad worked at the Chicago southeast side facility for 35 years).
Very excited for your weathering series!!!!
Have a great Sunday!
Scott
Hi Scott, sorry to hear you’ve had so much going on, at least the good thing about the hobby is it’s always there. For me spring is completely packed with career-related obligations so the models also get put down for a while. I was watching a video of switching at Interstate Steel processing and thought that industry would make for an awesome mini layout just on its own. So much interesting stuff happening down there to capture in models. Be well and thanks for dropping by the channel!!
Great video! Excited to see another ‘at the bench’ installment. Ahh… weathering. My partner has long stopped asking why I’m always snapping images of old rail cars and locomotives. Seeing different graffiti patterns, wear and rust tendencies in the real world is so important to lend realism to my weathering attempts. Btw, I loved the hot metal car, wow! No foundries on my layout or id be after one. Just about finished with the gas station scene, so I’ll be sending some images along to you soon.
Thanks for posting.
Brooklyn
Hey Brooklyn, spot on about using images as inspiration. The dust on a train in the Midwest is different than one out here in CO, so I spent a LOT of time staring at videos and images of trains from my old hometown. Looking forward to seeing how your diorama turned out :)
Very cool video on weathering!!! I always devoured articles in Model Railroader and Railroad Modeler, Mont Switzer did some articles back in the early
2000s about using gel pens for graffiti, since I model Conrail in the Mid 80s I wanted
some wore out PC cars still roaming the system I saw an article about using light amounts of Solveset on
factory lettering than using scotch tape to lightly lift some
of the printing for the faded look. My old standby for rust is
rust LOL, I had an 80s MR by
an author who would take steel wool and drop in a jar of water and let it set for a week and then dry brush the rusty water on cars, I tried it on a 90ft model of a deck girder bridge and the results were awesome!!! Your doing an outstanding job with your videos my Friend, keep up the
great work!!!
Loved reading this. Too bad I wasn't a subscriber to MR back then (I'm sure I wanted to be). A lot of really innovative techniques passed me by, I've tried to keep up by buying old Shep Paine books and some of the older MR books as well. I did rent some VHS videos made by the magazine that dealt with stuff like track-laying and weathering. I recall in the latter the modeler was basically bathing the railcars in backyard dirt and using brushed dry and wet pigments. Never saw an airbrush (I suspect they were less common back then).
@ChicagoCrossingRR I started
collecting MR, RMC and Trains magazines in the late 70s, plus sometimes I would get lucky and
find them at yard sales!!! Those
Modelers back in the day were
very limited on what was on the
market so most of the articles
back then were scratch building
structures and Brass Steam Engines!! I really didn't see any
articles on air brushing back then
either, now it's the go to for every
modeling project plus I love every
aspect of modeling so I've learned
some painting and weathering
techniques from Lou at Aztec Dummy, Oggie at Interstellar Modeler and Boyd at Trek Works!!
They mostly build Star Trek ships
and Eagles from Space 1999 and
related stuff like that but it's cool
it translates to model railroading too!!
@@conrailfan6277 for sure. I got most of the way through a light-up Enterprise-A, including some of the hull details like the unique hull plate colorations and finishes, etc. Those are challenging models because the hulls are seamless (something I wasn't great at). I remember using Polly-S paints on those with an airbrush. The skills translate both ways I imagine - I'd be tons better at those models now with the skills I got from railroading.
@ChicagoCrossingRR OH yeah!!
Plus Lou Dalmaso from Aztec Dummy makes the masks to paint
the Hull of the Enterprise and Shuttle
Craft plus the masks for the Big
Eagle one Model!! Lou built the
Ship from silent runnings with
Bruce Dern, that was a wild build!!
Check out Trek Works too, Boyd
built the 1/350 scale Enterprise
and Klingon Ship, they are Beautiful!!! Love it!!!!!
@@conrailfan6277 absolutely, those folks have been on my radar already! I love how they built and detailed those models. They're at least as good as the 6ft shooting models ILM used back in the day.
Awesome video! I'm excited for the weathering series. You're philosophy and approach to model railroading is very similar to my own. The train aspect is great and fun, but the artistic side of it is really where the passion is. I'm also a big fan of the MT weathered cars mostly because it's nice to just have a great looking model ready to run pretty much straight out of the box. I'm sure you'd agree, in the early stages of layout building I'd rather be spending my time laying track and assembling buildings. Weathering freight cars is great later on once the layout is closer to completion as your CCMR is. MT fills that void in between (and I have a lot of them XD). Cheers!
Thanks! Funny you mention about the MT cars, your layout video is where I first noticed MT's really nice weathered Penn Central boxcar model. I haven't picked that one up yet on the secondary market but probably still will. I hadn't really considered the potential advantages of the pre-weathered models at early stage layout builds, I think that's probably true though the variety of weathered car type is sufficiently limited such that if I were running something MT doesn't make (like coil cars) I wouldn't find a pre-weathered version to suit my needs. Either way, they're great. I have probably several dozen, mostly hoppers and a few choice sets of boxcars and MOW equipment that I'll run side by side with the cars I weather.
🤩🤩🤩
Hi Éric, push the challenge a bit. In good old days of riveting boxcars, steel plates were flat. On modern cars, expansion of metal during welding, then contraction while cooling makes bump everywhere on metal betwen exterior trusses. Easy to see when cars are wet or brand new with shiny paint. How to model it ? Don´t know if blob of matte medium will do it. Quite a challenge. Or different tints ?
Same with almost brand new gondolas carrying scrap, already full of bumps on the sides. Cylindrical covered hoppers tend to have balloning sides betwen sheets weld. Effect of time and loads.
Didn´t know about pre weathered cars out of the box. There is all sorts for everyone, from 100% scratchbuilt up to already alteted by time.
Just wonder when adding a cup of water in layout carboard box will materialise in an already built layout...?
Thanks for the lesson😊
Funny you mention the 'oil canning' effect on steel plates - I'm going to take a further stab at faux painting that onto the bulkheads of the NS flatcar where the effect in photos is pretty prominent. I've actually done a fair job of painting in shadows of dents/warps in the plating on one boxcar I had, though completely by accident :)
Cool it will be to see 😊
About faux painting, some railroad used that technique to copy faux stainless steel passenger cars. Effect wasn´t bad at all.
@@danielfantino1714 Thanks Daniel will be a fun challenge!
Nice hot metal cars. they use to run them down from Acme steel in Riverdale down the old Penn'sy line through Dolton.
They still run a daily hot metal car handoff between IHB and NS on that route. One of these days I need to see it (and feel the heat) for myself. When I lived in the city I never got down there.
@@ChicagoCrossingRR yes they run them east into Hammond then north into east Chicago. And yes they do put off heat back in the late 70s Con Rail was running a string down the tracks along Greenwood Ave in Dolton and had one jump the tracks had a little spill and started a small brush fire.
@@RichB0330 I've never thought of what a small spill out of those cars would be like (let alone a large one) 😄
The semi-gloss finish of commercial models always irritates me. When you view any object from a longer distance, the gloss fades - I'd be happier if all models were finished completely matt, particularly in N-gauge.
My preference is likewise having a matte finish on railcar models at this scale. The light reflection doesn't look quite correct (particularly on flat horizontal surfaces most prone to shining after being hit with light) much the same as shadows don't register quite right either, necessitating pinwashes to accent these features.
The problem with getting better at weathering is that it makes your first attempts look bad 😊
The subject of my next video maybe…
wmjwmj66 Doesn't show on Ebay.
Hi Paul, I don't think he always has models in his store. I can ask him if he wants to share an email address.
@@ChicagoCrossingRR Thank You