For a variety of reasons, I’ve settled on using a Con-cor lightweight C&O coach (1600 series). As made its representative of these coaches when the corrugated siding was replaced with smooth sides. The plan is to use the this model as a visual stand-in for the coaches when first introduced (1950) with corrugated sides below the windows. While I need to block out two windows near the center on one side and add an interior,etc the rub is how to represents the corrugated sides.
One thought I had is plastic half-round strip or small diameter wire, glued in place and then painted. Has anybody tried this or have some other idea that might work?
The plastic stuff mentioned by Smitty sounds like your best bet, but when the first prototype lightweight cars with corrugated stainless steel sides appeared, some roads came up with a novel method of making their older heavyweights blend in with the newer cars. They called it “shadowlining”, and it involved painting the older cars silver, then applying black lines to simulate the corrugations. The photos that I’ve seen looked pretty convincing. I googled “shadowlining heavyweight cars” and got lots of pictures, and the technique was also covered in either Trains or one of the modelling magazines. An “Index of Magazines” search should yield more. Btw, googling “shadowlining” by itself brought up something to do with BMW painting techniques, and while I didn’t bother to check it out, it looks like there’s still nothing new under the sun. [swg]
I was about to bring up the same thing as Wayne. I’ve seen some of these shadowlined cars in person when the Santa Fe was still running some heavyweight diners on the Super Chief. The effect was amazing. You had to walk up and touch the car side to believe it wasn’t a corrugated car. I’m sure it would be a lot easier to use the plastic car sides but trying your hand at shadowlining might produce some good results and a unique car.
Smitty , et al… thanks for the ideas…Decided to go with the Union Station Products approach. Photos I have show the siding as being a cosmetic overlay so this seems to be the best approach.