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A Grab Iron Jig

The Bachmann On30 box cars (goods car for you UK readers) has nice wire grab ends on the ends but on the sides the opted for what looks like a ladder and quite frankly I don't like the look of. I was willing to put up with it on the non C&N box cars since it helps set them apart. But I wanted grab irons for the C&N. My first problem was trying to figure out how to get a consistent spacing and location. That's what jigs are for. This evening I constructed a jig and performed surgery on my poor decal test car. Overall I would call it a success. However, I didn't realize that the grab irons I purchased were actually white metal castings. While they work, they are a bit soft and I'm not sure I like them. They might look better after they have been painted, I think I will go looking for some actual wire ones though.

I kept track of the trials and tribulations in vivid color.

The issue, the ladder instead of grab irons on the right side

The victim, the box car that has my first run of decals on it. I have removed the ladder already

The opposite side, plenty of room for more decal experimentation

What I want, wire grab irons like the ones that appear on the ends. Why didn't they use these on the sides?

First jig attempt. A piece of sheet styrene cut to fit between the top of the eves and the top of the step

I thought I should cut it down to make it easier to use

Drawing the first lines to figure out where to drill the holes. I'm having second thoughts at this point

I decide to take a slightly different direction. I grab a piece of new plastic and set the jig so that the machined edges, which I know are square, line up against straight edges on the box car.

I mark the jig so that I remember which edge is which.

Drawing the lines to determine where the holes for the grab irons need to go. Each place where the lines cross is where a hole needs to be drilled.

Jig in place complete with holes. I used a #73 bit for this.

The grab irons. I never really looked at these before and I didn't realize they were cast instead of wire.

The holes are drilled, need a little cleanup.

Cleaned up and grab irons in place. They look a little rough partially because they bend a bit when inserted and my holes are a tad to close together.

In place on the other side. The one, second from the bottom, that looks really off is because the drilled hole concided with the original hole for the ladder. When I glue it in I'll push it up into the right spot. For now I have left them unglued, while I search for some wire ones.

Boxcars for Calamity - The C&N RY borrows some rolling stock

I received some new decal paper to try out today so I tried to get back on track making C&N decals. I can't seem to get the long Switzerland Trail logo right so I decided to set that little project aside again. However, I stumbled across some dry transfers for the Colorado Central and the Denver, South Park & Pacific. These are from the New Creations line from Clover House. These aren't exactly prototypical, the designer decided to utilize the company logos as part of the design. Since this falls in line with my proto-freelancing concept I figured I would go ahead and sacrifice a couple of boxcars and use these up. Mostly because I really want to get back and weather something!

Its been a long time since I used dry transfers but I think these came out pretty good. Now time to get ready for some weathering!

The Georgetown Loop logo is okay, it does add a nice bit of character.

I really like the South Park logo. I think it looks very sharp

A little freight car weathering

Calamity's new station was left at home this weekend. I didn't want to start assembling it and then transport it back to the workbench half built. That's always when accidents happen. To keep the current themes going I decided that I would work on a few of the freight cars that should see service in Calamity. I grabbed four boxes kind of at random (put back anything that was a passenger or passenger related car as well as cabooses, apparently I have a lot of passenger cars). The four boxes contained 2 D&RGW stockcars, 1 D&RGW gondola (short) and 1 unlettered tank car. I hesitated about working on the tank car since I didn't have any decals for it yet (I need to start working on some custom decals). I figured that it really wouldn't take a lot of work to add the decals afterwards when I finally had them. I'll just have to do another round of weathering. I also hesitated on doing both the stockcars, they have the same number and I really should change that or its going to look a little funny on the board (okay I admit that within the context of a game no one else is likely to notice).All of these are from Bachmann's Spectrum series and are RTR not kits. I also decided to try out a couple of different materials from my regular pigments, I purchased a set of Pan Pastels from Stoney Creek Designs sometime ago so I grabbed that box and I picked up some Prismacolor Pencils to see if I could be a bit more precise with some of the rust work and highlighting. I sat down and pulled everything out and got started. I remembered to take pictures so you don't have to put up with my ramblings to much.

Oh and (like many of my posts) this one is rather picture heavy.

A couple of things that didn't make it into the pictures. I didn't take pictures right out of the box, the models are a bit plastic looking right out of the box, so they all received a quick coat of testor's dullcoat to take away the shine and give the pastels a little tooth to hold on to. I also removed the trucks and popped the wheels out to make things a little easier to deal with.

Here is stuff I'm using; Pan Pastels (I actually only used about six of these), Liquitex Inks (ended up only using the Burnt Umber) and Prismacolor Pencils (again only used two of these). You can see disassembled trucks in the picture as well.

Here are the victims plus my cheap weathering brushes. What is missing from this picture are the sponges that I used to apply the Pan Pastels. The sponges work much better than a brush.

The gondola (all of the freight cars have had a coat of dullcoat at this point)

The tank car

One of the stock cars with their underframes in the foreground

Step 1, knock down the very black trucks with the pastels. On the left side is the straight plastic on the right is after a quick brush of Pan Pastel Neutral Gray Extra Dark. This looked good so I went ahead and did all the remaining trucks.

Here I have applied rust with a Prismacolor Pencil, Sienna Brown. this was went really fast, I just used the edge of the pencil on the edges of the metal. Looked pretty good and was fast. Its hard to really see the trucks once they are mounted back on the cars, but I hate to do anything in half measures.

Didn't forget the wheels either, each set received a coating of either Pan Pastel; Red Iron Oxide Shade or Red Iron Oxide

A truck with the weathering finished and re-assembled

The gondola gets a quick brush of straight Liquitex Burnt Umber Ink

This ink will re-activate with water so in a couple places where the decals were to dark I just went back in with a wet paintbrush and removed the excess ink.

The flatbed of the tank car gets the same coating of burnt umber

Okay, I forgot to take pictures of the gondola in progress but I remember to do it with the tank car. First I dulled the black again with another coating of Neutral Grey Extra Dark and streaked it down the sides. I worked in a little rust as well using both the Red Iron Oxide Shade and Prismacolor Burnt Ochre

The other side

The photos got a little skimpy but here are the underframes for the stock cars. On the left I have applied both Pan Pastel Burnt Umber and Yellow Ochre shade to grime up the bottom. On the right is the other underframe waiting for its turn.

The finished D&RGW Gondola

The finished Tank Car, it will get decals someday

One of the stock cars. Quite frankly I find them hard to tell apart at this point. I definitely need to go in and change that number. Maybe I'll just get some paint and change the 3 to and 8.

And that wraps up a weathering session for Calamity's RR.

Calamity gets a Watertank - Banta Modelworks

I took the plunge and ordered the watertank I wanted with a little bit of Christmas money. This is an On3 watertank from Banta Modelworks. Its a $45 kit plus shipping which sounds expensive but its definitely in line with some of the laser cut kits I see from the gaming manufacturers and I much prefer the extra detail that comes with a model railroad kit. I took some time at lunch to get started on it. Its usually a good idea when working with a wooden kit like this to pre-weather the wood components. I figured I could do that to the stripwood and it would have a chance to dry since I won't have time to start the build until tonight. Yep, pretty excited about this one. After this I'll probably go ahead and start working on Calamity's railroad station.

Now that's a lot of parts!

Pre-staining the stripwood. Its not a good idea to pre-stain the sheet wood parts as they may warp.

Cattle Cars for Calamity's Railroad

I'm always keeping an eye out for deals on rolling stock for Calamity's railroad. This week, in the after Christmas sales, I found a couple of cattle cars. At this point I'm pretty much just need boxcars. I wish I could figure out why Bachmann doesn't want to keep ordinary boxcars in production. The only ones currently available are $50+ each from a couple of other companies. The only ones available from Bachmann are some ventilated boxcars that I have no interest in. Hopefully I'll find some cheap ones at some point. Here are a couple of shots with the citizens of Calamity for a little scale check. I'm sure some nefarious plan is in the works since Dave "Mac" is on the scene with his ever present deck of cards.

Locomotive Scale Shots

I took everything down to the workroom today and took some new pictures of my On30 Locomotives. I used Reaper's Female Huckster from their Savage Worlds line for scale. She has been modified slightly, the original base has been removed and replaced with a lower profile one. All my western figures will eventually end up on this base. On to the pictures.

These are all Bachmann Spectrum engines, according to their site they are simply based on locomotives from the Baldwin company.

First up the beauty and scale shots: