A mixed bag of 40 foot boxcars, tank cars and hoppers

My most recent builds are a mix of 40 foot boxcars that I have been working on are a mix of cars for Kaslo Shops, myself and a few for friends.  





A pair of Ontario Northland 40' 10'IH boxcars with 8' doors was the first thing off my workbench.  These are a recent offering from Kaslo Shops, and I built these cars for the box cover art.  These were not frequent visitors to northern Manitoba, but I have a slide scan of an ONT boxcar tucked in behind the road power heading north out of Wabowden MB. At least one car went as far as Gillam or Churchill so I have a prototype example!

These were a straight forward kit build, one car (ONT 91037) with roofwalk and one car (ONT 91006) without.  ONT 91037 got a Jade Green paint scheme using the MRH Acrylic Paint Guide formula for NYC Jade Green that I tweaked a bit to get something close to the jade green in photos.  

ONT 91006 was painted with Rapido Protocolour ONT green; I don't recommend this paint as it is difficult to use and took a lot of work to get applied evenly and thinly.  Vallejo 71.014 Gunship Green might be a better starting point, tweaking it to get a close match to the green ONR used.  

Both cars were decalled with Highball Decals ONT decals along with a few Microscale and Black Cat decals for small lettering, ACI labels and COTS. I still need to weather the cars but the Jade Green paint will stick out in a train of boxcar red cars.  


I also completed a quartet of CN 40' cars for grain service.  These are Kaslo Shops NSC cars with NSC3 ends, diagonal panel roofs and 6 foot doors.  These models represent some of the last 6 foot door cars CN purchased, as they switched over to 8 foot door cars in the late 1950s.  

I built a pair of cars with roofwalks and a pair without; one of each pair got a version of the Maple Leaf scheme and one of each pair got the later noodle scheme.  My personal favourite is CN 428809 which was refurbished for grain service and received the Wheat Sheaf on the right side of the door indicating that the funding was provided by the Canadian government.  These cars were a stopgap measure until completely rebuilt cars were delivered - the well known Buffalo boxcars built with funding from the Manitoba and Canadian governments.  

These cars still need some weathering, especially 428809 which was never as clean as seen in these photos.  A task to be done in the near future.

Another project that was completed was building a trio of  40 foot double door boxcars for my friend Al.  These were used in lumber service on Vancouver Island which he is modelling.  I built these cars from Sylvan Scale Models kits.  

One thing I did was swap in Accurail 40' boxcar underframes instead of the resin underframes to simplify the build.  The Sylvan cars are nicely cast resin bodies that I used Kaslo Shops etched ladders and Black Cat Decals roofwalks on.  The cars were painted with CN red #11 paint using the MRH Acrylic Paint Guide mix, followed by decalling with the kit supplied decals from Sylvan.  I used Vallejo Ultra Matt finish to seal the decals and give a nice flat finish to the cars.   







I also did some weathering of cars for my friend Scott.  These included three coal hoppers and a pair of tank cars. The exteriors were weathered with oil washes and rust patches, and the interiors got a more complicated finish.  

I first airbrushed the interiors with Vallejo steel.  This was matt finished and initially weathered with oil washes for rust and coal dust in the seams and on the rivets.  I followed this up with PanPastel chalks to get a dark dusty finish with rusty patches similar to what I saw in prototype photos.

I also completed a pair of tank cars for the Boundary Sub.  These were older tank cars so got rust and grime to reflect years of hard work.  They will look good hauling petroleum products around Scott's layout, hopefully not leaking too much as they traverse the countryside.   

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