I recently picked up a 3-pack of UP CA-1 wood cabooses that I would like to take apart and repaint from Armor Yellow to Mineral Red.
Close inspection reveals the roof separates from the body (the subfloor is one piece with the shell), but I just cannot get the two pieces apart. Based on prior experience, I’m assuming the roof has locking tabs that engage with the car sides (don’t know how many), but I can barely even widen the seam to insert a blade or wedge to disengage the tabs.
Anyone have some experience or advice on how to separate the two pieces without wrecking the car body in the process? Any help is greatly appreciated!
Oh - and any recommendation on a good representation of the UP mineral red color with currently available hobby paints (acrylic/lacquer/enamel, doesn’t matter) would also be very helpful as well.
I’m transitioning hobbies from scale modeling to model railroading and I’m just not familiar with hobby paints for railroad colors. Compounding the problem, I’m color blind so I really have to rely on the color description to be even close to accurate - I can’t visually compare a color to determine if it’s what I need.
It’s probably glued together. If all you want to do is paint the car, you can do that with the roof on. Just mask off the window glazing. I have the same problem with Athearn Roundhouse RTR wood cabooses. I want to be able to get inside the car to install some window shades and some minimal interior detail but will just have to write it off I’m afraid.
If you’re color blind, I wouldn’t worry about which Boxcar red to use. In reality, one color could vary quite a bit from when first painted to after enduring years of exposure to sun and weather when they all got substantially lighter.
I do not understand at all your differentiation between scale modeling and model railroading.
I am very partial to those Union Pacific wood cabooses. The first HO trains I ever saw were Revell train sets back in the late 1950s, and this caboose was in a lot of those sets. To me, they looked a whole lot like the SP cabooses we saw across from the depot back home all the time and I had to have one.
This is the first car I ever got beyond my HO train set. It looked so much like the SP caboose I was beside myself. The fact that it was lettered for the Santa Fe didn’t matter to me at all. A couple of years ago I bought this one for sentimentality sake and restored to operate on my layout.
A little bit later, I felt like my life wasn’t complete unless I got the Union Pacific car too. I got a beat up Shell for two dollars and restored it also to operate on my layout.
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