The Hudson Bay Railway in HO Scale

When Arrowhead Models came out with their Railgon gondolas I picked up a pair to add to my car fleet as these were fairly new in my era and when you are modelling a mining and smelting operation you can never have enough gondolas.  These were also the most expensive freight cars in my fleet; they were purchased direct from Arrowhead so factor in exchange rate, shipping and brokerage costs.  I have been slowly weathering my freight car fleet to get the "look" I envision.  I approached weathering these cars with some trepidation. I didn't want to screw up something worth that kind of money.  I looked at a lot of photos of prototype gondola photos, a few with overhead views of the interiors.  There is a lot of variation between cars depending on their age, general use and how roughly they are treated. These cars were built in 1980 so would have been fairly new in my 1981-83 timeframe.  I didn't want to beat them to within an inch of their lives, but they neede...

I finally got my CP 8 hatch tank hopper weathered, at least the roof and body.  This car was built from a custom run of  Sylvan Scale Models kits with my custom etched end cages from Black Cat Decals .  I still have a few of the Sylvan kits (in CP Multimark) and etchings available.  You can email me at mesagkits <AT> gmail <DOT> com for more details. I used a combination of Vallejo dark rust applied with a sponge to get a rusty tone to the black car as well as to tone down the white lettering.  Pan Pastel titanium white chalk was applied to the roof and side using prototype photos as a guide.  The white over the black body gives a good representation of spilled cement or lime in my opinion.   I'm still needing to weather the trucks and underframe with some road grime, but I'm happy with how it has turned out.  Sponges are turning into one of my favourite ways to weather cars.  

Example of a weathered wood roofwalk.  These were already weathering heavily in the early 1970's when this photo was taken Cropped from an image I found on Facebook of a 40' boxcar being scrapped.  You can see the heavy weathering on the roof and roofwalk. Wood roofwalks by the early 1980s were not well maintained.  Cars that kept them often had rotten wood, missing planks, etc.  Rooftop photos from the period show a lot of weathered wood, often with little paint left after sometimes decades of exposure to the elements.   While I haven't gotten to the point of removing boards (yet), I am trying to represent paint failure and lack of maintenance.  A mix of greys, browns and blacks with a bit of wood colour in the mix gives some variety to the wood roofwalks.  I tried to vary the level of weathering between boards and cars so there wasn't any uniformity to the weathering patterns.  This is quick work, literally taking 5 minutes per car to get t...