Weathering a flat car deck Extreme weathering for a ravaged deck/Gregor Moe W
hile in Kansas City in late 2001, I spent an afternoon pho- tographing trains. A portion of
the time was spent shooting from a bridge. This looking down perspective allowed me to see the tops of cars from the same angle that one often views models on a layout. It also provided a guide to weathering the car tops. One piece of rolling stock that caught my at- tention was a flat car with a deck in an extremely decrepit condition. The deck- ing was rotted and broken up and a good percent of it was missing. From what I could see of the car I photographed, it matched an InterMountain HO flat car that had the three-piece wooden deck. Immediately I knew I wanted to model this flat car and recreate its run- down condition. I started by building the model as per the instructions, ex- cept for the deck. I used the kit’s deck pieces for a size reference and then cut individual pieces of 2″×6″ lumber for the deck. After cutting a large number of pieces, I started studying the proto- type photo to see where to begin. I began at the brake wheel end on the left side. I could not see all the decking on that end; so I copied the gap at the end on the right side to the left. The boards I could see looked fairly good so I just laid in lightly weathered boards up to the area of the truck bolster, which is exposed in the photo. I left the bolster exposed with a little bit of debris on the model to match the photo. After that, I used the trays on the side of the car as a guide for the placement of gaps and ex- tra heavy weathering of the deck boards. This helped me to match the de- tails in the photo the best I could. To weather the deck boards, I used
the back and side of a hobby knife blade point and dragged it along the grain to heavily distress the individual boards and to get the splits and tears in the
PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
KANSAS CITY 2001
boards. It was also used to remove pieces of the boards. I then scraped the sharp edge across the surface of almost all of the boards to just rough up the surface. The metal patch on the far right end is a piece of aluminum foil cut to fit and was pressed in to show where the car ribs were. In the center pan, where the boards had rotted away, I used dried, finely chopped up leaves. Chains and wood de- bris were added where I could see them in the photo. All the boards and foil were glued to the plastic frame with canopy
glue. The leaves were attached with Elmer’s glue mixed with water. The deck was weathered with mix-
tures of alcohol and liquid shoe polish in ratios of 8:1, 16:1 and 32:1. I started with the weakest solution and did the whole deck a couple of times and then came back with the stronger solutions and hit individual board or areas. The strongest solution was utilized on the dried leaves to obtain a rotted look. The sides of the car were weathered with AIM products to get a rusty look to match the deck of the car.
The decrepit deck on this flat car (top left) served as the inspira- tion for the author’s model (top right and above), which was built
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
from an InterMountain kit that received a new deck made from indi- vidual, scale 2″×6″ boards that were distressed and weathered.
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