Dear Friends,
the good thing about starting many projects at the same time (usually a bad thing!) is that you can easily finish something that's nearly done already. So did I today by finalising the weathering of my first C&S 55ton 2-bay USRA design hopper.
The car is kit built (I found it hard, especially with that poor instruction sheet. No chance doing the brake gear right without prototype photos) and I soon found out that the provided plastic grab irons come off like ****. I therefore used wire grab irons throughout.
The Colorado & Southern had 300 of these cars in service. Oh oh, andrews trucks! I learn a lot from master builder George Podas who showed me a method to lower Atlas anderws trucks to the correct hight. Next problem were the decals for that class and road. I decided to go custom with a nice German company named www.decalo.de who layed out the sheet with no grumble. I have now enough numbers to letter every particular car of that series between 1943 and 1946. And by that chance I learned a lot about car lettering in general. I am on the way to getting it right, still there are a couple of flaws, especially decalling and blending the weathering together nicely. I work under 4000 kelvin light in the workshop and the warm sunlight turns out the car totally different.
C&S 18014 is the first of a fleet of hoppers and it took me quite a long time to build it.
The car originally had letting as built in 1919.
After priming the model I mixed a warm brown color with maybe not enough red in it. Custom decals went on. I primed the car with too much air pressure and ended up with a sand paper surface. Next time I will take care not to make that mistake again.
Lowered Atlas Andrews trucks.
Thanks for reading – I am here modelling all alone (that's O.K.) and really enjoy to share my work with you guys! Hopefully I'll make it to the O Scale March Meet in 2020!
