Alco
Switcher Above: No. 4 clearly has been doing battle with the elements. Lots of mud has been kicked up on the front trucks.
DL&W F3A Below: The pilots get spattered with dirt and mud kicked up by the locomotive wheels. Care- fully build this effect up with your airbrush from the bottom up in line with the railheads.
F-M 934 Below right: The pilots and walkways have a light accumulation of dirt. The coupler has also had a touch of rust added to it.
ably by using a paint booth that vents to the outside. Also, use a partial face respirator with a P100 air filter for organic sol- vents and wear nitrile “rubber” gloves (the purple ones) to pro- tect your hands from organic chemicals. Using solvent-based paints without these precautions is a serious health risk. Even us- ing acrylics with an airbrush is a health danger without prop- er ventilation because of the particulates.
Wheels, Trucks, Fuel Tanks, Pilots and Couplers
If you can remove the shell from the frame or chassis, it makes weathering somewhat easier. In many cases, the shell is held on with the coupler boxes and a couple of screws attaching the chassis to the frame. Also,
depending on your skill level, you may wish to disassemble the trucks so you can paint the wheel faces separately. Some lo- comotives allow you to remove the truck sideframes without re- moving the wheels from the truck assembly. If you prefer not to disassemble the trucks, you can paint the edges of the wheels by running the locomotive while it is on its side on your workbench as described later. While this may seem fussy by some modelers, seeing shiny wheel faces on an otherwise weathered model is not realistic.
The first step is to clean the wheel faces or at the minimum the wheel edges. An easy way to do this is to take a Q-Tip wet with 91 percent alcohol and clean the wheel edges that are visible from the side to remove any oil or grease. If you have the shell off, you can clean the wheel faces by clipping leads to the left and right track inputs on the circuit board. If you are not removing the shell, just touch track inputs to the wheel treads, so they rotate slowly as you clean the faces of the wheels.
In general, unless a locomo-
tive is brand new, the wheels are a dark color, but not black. De- pending on your research of your prototype, mix up a “standard” wheel/truck color. My personal choice is a mixture using Grimy
Black as a base, and then adding some Rail or Roof Brown to give it a slightly brownish shade. Howev- er, if you are modeling a western road that uses a lot of sand going up grades, you might want a color more toward a gray tone. To paint the wheel face, ap- ply power to the locomotive so the wheels are rotating slowly, and paint the edges using a small brush. Don’t worry about getting paint on the wheel treads; they will be cleaned later. Be sure not to paint the axles or the flat surface around the axle ends because this conducts current from the wheels to the trucks and locomotive. To paint the trucks and fuel tanks, use an airbrush to ap- ply a thin coat over the existing truck color. NOTE: Locomotives with silver trucks, such as those typically found on Santa Fe units, need to be treated differently at this stage by using an even thin- ner coat so that the underlying silver shows through. Some of the recent models have lettering on the trucks, and you don’t want to totally obscure that, so dilute the “base” color about 50:50 with thinner. A double-action airbrush works best for this, so you can carefully control the amount of paint being delivered. Once you have the “base”
color, you can add some more weathering. A good starting point is to use a light color, such as
62 RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
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