a pipe cleaner dipped in lacquer thinner to clean the wheel treads. Touch track power leads to the wheel treads to have the wheels rotating while you are cleaning them. Don’t use too much lac- quer thinner, and try to keep the pipe cleaner on the surface of the wheel tread, so you don’t remove any paint from the wheel rims that you carefully painted.
A Note About Consists
In most cases, diesels are oper-
ated in consists. While in the early days of diesels, the same locomo- tive consists such as an A-B-A set were generally kept together. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, railroads began to mix up units from different manufacturers. The point is that unless you are modeling the late 1940s and early 1950s, it is more realistic to vary the weathering on units within a consist, even if the diesels are the same model. As an example, the two Erie Lackawanna SD45s are weathered differently — one a bit more heavily than the other even though they might be lashed up together in the same consist.
Murphy’s Law Weathering is more of an art
than a science. Even with careful planning and the best reference materials, sometimes the results don’t always go according to plan. A case in point is the weathering of a Western Pacific F3 that was part of a Western Pacific consist. Since that unit was in the freight livery, as compared to the oth- er A-B-B passenger units with the stainless steel side panels, I planned to weather that unit a little heavier than the first three. One of my first steps was to
paint the roof a weathered black since it was shiny black from the factory. An easy step….So I thought. I used a low-stick mask- ing tape to cover the sides of the unit and painted the roof. No problem! Except when I carefully removed the masking tape, some of the “Western Pacific” lettering peeled off with the tape! This had never happened before and not with any of the other 100 loco- motives I had weathered for the CMRM. I was horrified, but there was nothing to do but continue weathering. Now, I thought, this unit will have to be very heavily weathered.
My next step was a black wash,
which I had done countless times without impacting any factory fin- ish. To my added horror, as I ap- plied the wash around the nose, the silver paint started to dissolve and run. I did a search of WP F- unit photos and found a B+W photo of one that looked a lot like the one that I just weathered — with missing lettering and all! So you see, as the saying goes, there is a prototype for everything. The moral of the story is that
no matter how carefully you plan, unexpected things happen, so be prepared to work with the re- sults, even if they aren’t exactly what you had in mind at the start. In this case, despite my thinking I had ruined one of the Museum’s locomotives, the weathering ef- fects were wholeheartedly accept- ed. Some volunteers told me how most of the WP F’s looked even worse toward the end when they were relegated to freight service. Nevertheless, the golden rule of weathering is “less is more.” You can always go back and add more weathering, but it is difficult to remove weathering once it is ap- plied.
WP F3A&B Sometimes a seeming weathering disaster can be salvaged. In the case of this heavily weathered WP F3, masking the sides with masking tape inad- vertently removed some of the lettering, which was actually proto- typical.
FEBRUARY 2016 67
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