weathering

Forty foot long boxcars are getting harder to find on the prototype. They're still out there, but just not used anywhere near as often as their longer 50' or 60' brethren. So, whenever I see one, I make sure to get a photo of it. This car, ONT 92065, is one that I saw while on vacation in Northern Ontario in 2003 (yes, with a much smaller camera than I have now). Notice the rust patterns on the car side and how they differ between the left and right sides of the door. On the right, where the door slides, there are horizontal rust streaks from the door scraping the car side (the side sometimes bulges from the load pushing on the wall), while we see a much more scattered rust pattern to the left of the door.

As model railroaders, many of us are trying to duplicate the real world in miniature. The ready-to-run rolling stock that we purchase at the hobby shop is better than ever, but then it's up to the modeler to make it really look real. We have to have a firm understanding of what kind of weathering occurs to freight cars, both what it looks like and how it occurs, to know what we need to add to a car to make it look less like it's straight out of the paint shop. Let's take a closer look at one specific covered hopper car that I found today to see what we need to duplicate on our models.

Graffiti, whether it's called art or vandalism, is a fact of modern railroading. But it didn't always look like what we see on the trains passing us today. Railroad graffiti has evolved over the past century and a half from simple chalk marks left by railroad workers to notify other workers of issues to marks left by hobos to vanity tags made in permanent ink to the elaborate and often enormous painted "pieces" (as they're termed by those who create them) of today. Let's take a look at how these markings were developed and, for those interested, how to model them.

When equipment is sold to another railroad, the buyer will often paint over the car with the new owner's official colors. Sometimes, the original owner's logo and paint shows through, giving us a clue as to the equipment's heritage. The same effects can be seen when a railroad upgrades its official paint scheme as can be seen here on this former Chicago and North Western Railway hopper. The old and larger CNW logo outline is clearly visible under the new and smaller logo, which thankfully has not been itself painted over yet. This car and another of CNW heritage were spotted behind the MG&E power plant in Madison, Wisconsin today.

If you're going for a merit award with your rolling stock models, take a very close look at the prototype you're modeling. Most cars have quite a bit more detail than ever get modeled, like on this detail shot of an airplane parts car. The brake chain is probably on the model, but is the AEI tag (in the upper left corner of the photo) on the model? Did you add the embossed numbers or the car's reporting marks to the truck sideframes? Also notice the different shades of rust colors on the truck parts; most of the sideframe is a fairly even dark gray color while more orange and red appears around the axle bearings. In NMRA Achievement Program judging, the AEI tag will help with the detail grading while the color variations and reporting marks will help with the paint and finishing grading. These aren't big additions to a model, but they could add that extra 1/2 point where it's needed.

Not all graffiti on railroad equipment is a gang symbol or overtly offensive. I found this bit of graf on a tank car in San Pedro, California, over last Thanksgiving weekend. The signature next to the ladder is likely that of the person who left the message. If you see this car in your railfanning adventures, leave a comment so we can watch where it goes.

Sometimes when a graffitist sprays a freight car, he will paint the reporting marks in a location that doesn't interfere with the main part of the tag. On this car, it looks like the same white paint was used to reposition the car number as was used in the tag. From the patches of blue bubble shapes above the tag, it also looks like the black and white colored tag is covering up a more colorful tag in the same location.

Unless you're modeling equipment straight out of the paint shop, it's OK if your decal is chipped. It happens on the prototype too, like this UP locomotive passing through Rochelle in 2005. A lot of railroads use large scale "decals" of their own to apply uniform lettering and numbers on their equipment, and their decals chip just like ours do on our models.

Rust streaks often start at points on a car where two pieces of metal intersect, such as where the roofwalk supports meet the top of the car or along the weld joints in the side panels on this covered hopper. From the origin point, the rust normally flows downward, pulled by water and gravity.