Heavily weathered NYC boxcar

This NYC boxcar was built from a factory painted Proto 2000 auto parts boxcar kit. It’s built pretty much as intended with the kit, but the roofwalk has been replaced by a Kadee see-through roofwalk. Additional parts include coupler cut bars and trainline hoses.

This car represents a boxcar in older paint before being repainted into PC colors, so I weathered it rather heavily. First, I used the corner of an X-Acto chisel blade to make a few horizontal gouges in the sides next to the doors (you see this a lot on older boxcars). Next, I lightened the lettering by scraping the chisel blade lightly over the lettering and big NYC logo. I intentionally focused on removing a good portion of the red lettering to make it look like it had faded or washed off. Some fine grit sandpaper helped remove the paint on the rivets to make them stand out more against the logo. I modeled the roof to represent paint peeling off the galvanized steel using the same techniques explained in the post on the Southern double-door boxcar. I applied a little of the dark rust color to the gouges as well as the roof.

The final steps were washes. The first wash used Testors acrylic Dark Tan heavily thinned with 91% alcohol. When in doubt, mix thin and add paint if needed. You can test your mix on the bottom of the car or somewhere it won’t ruin your model if it’s too thick. To get the streaking, I applied the wash to a section of the car (e.g. half of one side) using a large brush, let it sit for about 10 seconds, then used a damp paper towel and wiped carefully in the direction I wanted the streaks. It’s important to make your streaks completely vertical or it won’t look right. For areas such as between the ladder rungs and the doors, I used a Q-Tip to wipe the wash off.  I moved around the car a section at a time until everything had been washed. After the tan wash dried (about 3 minutes), I did a second wash using Testors acrylic Interior Black thinned even more than the tan and using the same streaking technique. Finally, I took a Q-Tip soaked in 91% alcohol and wiped it down the sides in vertical strokes. This started to whiten the paint in sections and gave the model a more faded look.