Peter's Model Railroading | The Layout | Equipment | SP A-50-6
Construction: Painting

I hand-painted two coats of Vallejo acrylic-polyurethane "Black Surface Primer" (part #74.602) on to the model. I have an airbrush set-up, but it takes a long time to set up and then clean up and tear down, and I have to do that in the garage, which is very cold this time of the year (January). I was very happy with the results on previous scratchbuilt cars that I hand-painted, so I am now doing so as my new "standard practice". The Vallejo paint is very thin, so the first coat left an uneven coverage and clear brush strokes. However, the second coat did the trick, as you can see in the photo. I painted the entire model and it took me about two weeks of relaxing hobby time to get the two coats on there. Airbrushing always made me nervous, because you can make a mistake or things can go wrong very quickly, but that is not the case when hand-painting, and so I find it very relaxing work.

The final coat of paint is the typical "box-car red". While one can argue back and forth what a proper red the car needs to be, once the car starts moving around in a train, its paint ages and fades under the sun. It will also weather. All of these things affect what our eyes perceive as the "box-car red" color. So, I have long ago stopped worrying about which specific shade of red to use, and I certainly don't want to get into mixing percentages of paint (which is hard to reproduce in the future). So, for this car I wanted to continue to use Vallejo paint for the final body color, but Vallejo doesn't really make railroad-specific colors. As I was searching for what people are using as a good, close stand-in, I realized that I had bought a bottle of their "German Red Brown" surface primer paint (part #73.605). It is a close match to some of my other "box-car red"-painted cars, and so decided to just use that. This photo shows the car with one coat of the red. You can clearly see the brush marks and the black bleeding through. So, yes, a second coat is needed. I am only painting the body of the car. The underframe will either just remain the black, or I may come back and paint it with a grimy black in the future.

I actually like the look of the roof with just one coat of paint on it, because it looks aged or weathered. However, this car is only one year old in the era that I model, so the roof should look fairly nice, so I will apply a second coat. I wanted to take and keep this photo as a reminder of making older freight cars' roofs look like this in the future.

I wound up having to apply three coats of the final paint color on the roof to get it to look right. The sides and ends only needed two coats. So far, I am happy with the paint color choices I made.

Back in February 2024, I sprayed the car's sides and ends with Testor's Glosscote, in preparation for applying the decals.

It took me about 3 weeks of (limited) hobby time to complete the application of the large number of individual decals that this car requires.

It was then a matter of finding some time where the humidity was low enough in the garage to spray Testor's Dullcote. Between the major storm in May, hurricane Beryl in May, the subsequent many rain storms that we got this summer, and a personal injury that made me immobile for a good while, I didn't get around to applying the Dullcote until October 2024. This is the car the day after it was sprayed. I had put blue masking tape over the couplers, as I didn't want them to get gunked-up.

I re-installed the trucks, and so after almost exactly three years (!) after I started the construction of this kit, the car is finally finished.

Although not perfect, I am quite happy with how the model came out. For a kit, this car was a ton of work, but worth it. Since the car is only one year old in the era that I model, I will at some point in the future apply some very light weathering near the bottom edges of the car, to reflect some running time. But, for now, I declare this project finished.