As of right now BC, it's just paint. If I can stumble across some real fine green ground foam or powder, I might add it?
That moss effect on the roof of the house really gives it an even better look of long abandon. The roof on the barn turned out great as well. Nice work sir!
You are a master Allen love the looks Don't forget to have the raccoon in the garbage laying on its side
Once again, going off on another direction, I'm taking a bit of a break and trying to wrap up another smaller project that I found buried on my workbench after cleaning up from the barn build. Delaware Valley released some of these blue Rock airslides in N scale a long time ago, but when BLMA released theirs, the difference in fidelity was night and day difference. Then when Atlas bought BMLA out, I've been waiting for them to release some in Rock Island, which they have, a stacked block lettering. Recently I did several up in the 70's speed lettering, but I still wanted a blue car. Joe at MTL said they were still planning more of their versions of airslides and would put a request in for a blue version when I asked him recently. Nothing against Joe or Atlas, but I have waited long enough and with a bit of time to kill due to a snow storm that rolled through here, I have a couple of days off to make something happen. I started out with a couple of Cotton Belt cars. I removed the lettering with a toothpick and some 70% alcohol, cleaned them up and dismantled the trucks and couplers. I first shot a primer coat using TCP light primer. Followed by a coat of TCP-166 Rock Island Blue. Once it had dried I gave it a shot of thinned Dullcote so that I can start applying the decals. Even though I'm not looking forward to applying all those DATA decals, it should be a fairly easy project. Easy yes, time consuming, OMG....54 decals per car! But they're done! Now Atlas or MTL will release their version...
Don't forget or discount all the prior efforts necessary to develop the skill and confidence to do it at this exquisite level. Skill like that does not happen overnight, or in a vacuum. But it sure is sweet to see the results!
Thank you Hemi! I really liked the Blue and White when I first started modeling the Rock Island, but after years of modeling them and studying pics, I really like pretty much any scheme. I think my favorite is the Red and Yellow to be honest. But the Blue and White really stands out.
I worked on a couple of locos again before working on the layout. I did up these two U25B's back around 1995, a few years before I switched over to DCC. These units have been in storage since then. I recently was deciding how many U25B's I wanted for my fleet and which paint schemes I wanted to portray them in when I remember I had these two. They're both U25B's but the 253 is actually numbered for an early version U28B, which were for all practical purposes U25B's except they had 2800 hp. The late U28B had the cab moved forward which gave the traditional stubby nose look of the later GE units. Overall these looked pretty good as far as the paint and weathering went, but the only thing I had to do was to repaint the handrails as most of the paint had flaked off since they were made from Delrin and I didn't know about using a plastic adhesion promoter. I redid the number boards with Shell Scale decals and also swapped out the older DC chassis for a newer DCC chassis then added an LED headlight.
I have always liked the "speed" lettering paint scheme. Those nose chevrons on the other unit sort of have a Mopac type feel.
