Interior Group Weathering

Its been one of those days today. Not feeling well, getting over yet another winter bug has made me feel exhausted. Had to go to the bank today, after having a bath in the morning and ate out for lunch, followed by a nap to recover from all this excitement and carrying a small amount of groceries home.

So I thought to myself what can I do to at least feel that today has been a little bit productive?



So I decided to rust up the interiors of eight hoppers and one mill gondola.

I used Scenic Rust, which is iron filings/dust with what appears to be Matte medium and Gun blue. The process is to mix the iron filings with the matte medium and paint onto the surface to be treated, Allow to dry, and then brush on Gun Blue, which then rusts the iron coating. Quite ingenious.

I then worked over some Kadee hopper coal loads using Matte medium to fix some real coal to the top of the plastic mouldings.

The Kadee hopper loads are designed with integral weights that are ingeniously suspended from the coal moulding. Unfortunately, in my mind, this means that if you remove the load you lose the weight, and the cars are ridiculously light. I want to run empty hoppers so I've been weighing up all my hoppers using liquid lead over the past few weeks.

So, now the loads can be a lot lighter, but I do add about an ounce of steel weight to the bottom of the moulded coal load so that they run when full at the recommended weight, and to allow me to use magnet to remove the load from the car.

And here are five loads, two I did earlier, as they say on Blue Peter, and three drying out.