Recently I’ve painted and lettered a few undecorated freight cars and locos for my railroad. I have a number of factory painted cars I purchased with the intention of repainting them “someday”, which is now here.
I’ve read lots of posts on ways to strip paint - alcohol, brake fluid, oven cleaner, etc. But has anyone just tried painting over the mfg. paint job? I am using darker colors like tuscan red or brown which should cover OK. I can see where a light color might suffer bleed through from a dark logo under it. Or maybe a light colored logo should be removed but not the whole paint job, perhaps. Obviously you can’t put on so many coats that the details get obscured. I do have a couple of cabooses to paint that are in C&O yellow that may turn out lighter but a bit varying color is ok - paint fades over time and not every batch would be the same.
Anyway, before I gave it a try (and had to strip off even more paint!) I thought I would ask. Am I saving time or buying a lot of trouble?
The old lettering will show at some angles and lighting conditions. The paint will not “bleed thru” but the thickness of the lettering will show up at some viewing angles. It will vary with the paint or ink used for the lettering. Also if decals or pad printing was used.
We strip paint off decorated models because the original lettering will most often show through. Not the actual lettering, but the shapes of it. While the paint isn’t really very thick, it does give a “shadow” effect. A whole lot better to strip off the paint, and don’t forget to prime the model before the actual coat goes on. People do this because it works.
Or don’t do anything and find out the hard way yourself! Nothing like first hand experience.
Factory painted cars get their lettering added after the base coat of paint is applied. I think they use a pad printing process to do this. Anyway, the thickness of this additional coat of printing can vary, so what you really have is a second layer of paint on top of the original layer. Even though you are adding an additional layer of paint that might be dark enough to obscure the original color/lettering, you might still end up with a shadow effect where the lettering was.
If the loco or car has a quality paint job from the factory I usually just repaint weith my chosen colour.If I am going from dark to light I will dust on enough light grey primer to just cover the origonal dark paint.
If the victim has a heavy coat of paint on it I will strip (you would be surprized at the detail under some of those trainset car paintjobs)
This started life as an Athearn BB ice-bunker reefer kit. It had a factory paint job, including lettering for some product I’ve forgotten:
Starting with a $6 kit, I wasn’t too fussy about the outcome. I used rattle-can spray paint, and gave the sides of the car two or 3 light coats. That was enough that I couldn’t see any bleed-through of the original color or logo. I applied decals and weathered it heavily, as the Strumpet Brewery is no more particular about maintenance than they are about their beer. But, it came out OK for a cheap plastic model, and I’m happy with that.
You can get the lettering and decals off with 000 steel wool which will also dull down the original finish --unlike wet or dry grit it won’t take off the rivets etc
Keep in mind real railroads sometimes just paint over an old paint scheme, or buy a used car and paint over it. It’s not that unusual to see a picture of a boxcar where you can see traces of an old paint scheme showing thru under a newer paint job as the new paint starts to weather.
I’ve been considering this approach of just painting it over lightly—to give it just that added touch to the weathering I’m thinking about also doing. Light touches of both would lend a lot of colour to the loke—in my case–a couple of RS3’s.
Generally I strip, a horrible sight, but that is another story. The exception is the car that I want to look like it came from another source, and was just painted over and lettered for a different railroad. I do this with the freelance Oklahoma Northern railroad that is part of my Santa Fe in Oklahoma, 1989.
It may seem like a lot of effort, but I just have never been satisfied with “painting over” in most cases.
“Shadow” is not necessarily bad; twenty or more years after the 1970 BN merger I was still encountering old Great Northern freight cars with–whatever that goat’s name was–staring at me from beneath a coat of new paint.
Don’t knock a method you don’t fully comprehend… There are different ways of getting things done.My Geep looks far better in person then that picture shows and regardless of lighting you can’t see the Santa Fe…
BTW…I know a G Scaler that paints his scratch built wooden G Scale buildings with a small trim roller…
Or play the merger game and paint a block of color over only the roadname information and then put your lettering on. Watch any train and you’ll still see this being done today.
I model n-scale, and have painted over without any evidence of “shadow” or noticeable loss of detail. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, it just means I have had some success with this technique, as, evidently, have others. And there is certainly nothing wrong with stripping the paint.
Your work shown on the forum always looks great, and I’ve long been an admirer of your photography skills, being a long-time photographer but just getting into model railroad photography in the last few years (since I discovered this forum). But I’m a little disappointed in that your post comes across as sounding condescending to those of us who don’t do everything just like you do. My expectations could, in fact, be just as high, even if I choose to do it a different way sometimes.
I would be doing a light coat because what I am looking for would be the shadowy lettering coming through. We may say that there are proper ways to do certain things but then sometimes to get an effect WE want may require us to ‘break’ the rule—
I know, it seems like Art school—we ask–do ‘laws’ exist in the arts? The answer is usually no—in spades–but then we’ll act as if there really are ‘Laws’ in the arts that say–no way through—when there in fact is[:-,]
