Okay all you pre-WW2 modelers I need some rolling stock weathering tips and suggestions. Alot of the discussion here on weathering seems to revolve around rust. So what do you do when there is little or no rust possible? I’ll exclude door hinges, latches, etc. since I know how to weather these already. So what are the techniques that you use to model weathered wood?
I’m assuming that since these cars were made of wood the maintenance performed on them was both pretty good and often or the silly things would rattle to pieces. The short summers and long winters here in the Northeast could not have been kind. I know it’s killing my pressure treated deck! So maybe only slight weathering of the wood and paying more attention to weathering of the wheel sets, trucks and undercarriage is needed. Some small amount of road grime up the sides, and I’m done?
This would be so much easier if color pictures were available of the cars!!!
So please let me see what you have done and how you have done it. Thanks guys.
Check out Ted Culotta’s on-going series “Essential Freight Cars”, in RMC magazine. While he models the immediate post-war period, many of the cars are wooden ones from the '20s and '30s. Lots of very impressive modelling, including weathering tips and there’s also prototype info and photos.
I’m modelling the late '30s, but not overly pleased with my weathering efforts on wood cars. Obviously, dirt is still dirt, whether on wood or steel, so that isn’t too difficult. Cars sheathed with vertical siding, such as double sheathed boxcars and reefers often showed signs of replaced boards, usually detectable by fresher-looking paint. Single sheathed cars also got sheathing repairs, although this is a little more work on a model with all that bracing in the way. The Accurail 9 panel single sheathed cars display fairly heavy weathering damage in the way the boards have been cast, so paint may be all that’s required. Sometimes the paint on the wood parts weathered differently than that on the steel parts, resulting in the car looking like it had been painted with two different colours, but this one should be done very subtley, unless you have a prototype picture to use as a guide.
Here’s a Tichy USRA boxcar, with a few boards brush-painted to show age. Paint is Floquil, with lettering by C-D-S. Most of the cars shown also got a thin wash of PollyScale and airbrushed Floquil weathering:
This scratchbuilt Fowler boxcar represents a car recently rebuilt, so the weathering is mostly some airbrushed road grime, plus dust from lading leakage around the door seals. Lading spilled on the roof has dissolved in the rain, but is mostly confined to the hatch areas and the car eaves:
Doc Wayne’s post is a great guide for weathering. Only thing I can think of to add, I admit, I looked at the pics more than I read, but the tops of the cars were a lot dirty than today. From the smoke of the steamers got the roofs pretty dirty so dont forget.
To help me with my weathering, either older transtion era or modern day, I take a prototypical cue from the car itself to how much weathering I do. If I am stumped say on a car that I want to weather for my present day fleet, I will go off the build date from the car and weather accordingly. 10-15 year old? Not too much. Got a veteran of the road from 1975? Bring on the brush.
What you have done is what I thought that they would look like. But a picture is worth…
I did not know about the Pollyscale bringing out the individual boards. Great tip. As is the tip about the roofs being dingy. I never thought of that. Duh.
Thanks guys, off to the paint room…drybrushing here I come. I’ll post pictures when I feel I have something to contribute.
The Library of Congress has uploaded quite a few of it’s collections to Flicker. Included in these historic photographs are lots of color shots of freight yards and freight cars, By Jack Delano like this:
With wood cars I like to do some “toning” by giving the car an overall application of powdered charcoal, then wiping most of it of with a paper towel (especially on the sides) to get the charcoal in between the boards and to tone down the lettering etc. I seal that with flat finish then so some weathering over that with chalk. Remember wood cars spent their entire lives being pulled by steam engines, the ends and roofs of those cars tended to be almost black with soot.
Just like in real life, variety is key to reproduction as there are extremes. Notice some of the roofs are pretty clean considering and some, well there was a war on.
My thanks to all for the kind comments. [:)] Neutrino, thanks for your link - I had seen that site before but neglected to “bookmark” it - won’t get fooled again. [swg]
Here are a couple of links to some weathering ideas which you may be able to expand upon:
Here is an old 50’s Athearn metal reefer and a new plastic Accurail wood reefer that I weathered in about 10 minutes. I first rubbed on Chalk and then washed it down with india ink diluted in alcohol. Since I was doing a dozen wood reefers, I tried to do each as quickly as possible.
Neutrino’s post reminded me that since wood was much easier to get than steel during WW2 (since steel was needed for tanks and such) that builders starting making wood-sided cars again during the war, a decade or more after steel cars (especially for boxcars) had become standard. So oddly you might have a better chance of seeing a woodsided boxcar in 1946 than you would have a decade earlier - during the Depression, railroads used their newest steel cars on revenue runs as much as possible, because the cars were still being paid for so needed to earn money rather than sit idle.
