Coal Range: weathering the coal container saga

DB says: From the About Bloody Time file, here is the final installment of the HLC series. The assembled vehicles were tarped, ghetto-decaled with wee black squares and yellow panels.Weathering on the containers was washes of Model Master matte acrylics. For my first year or so of NZR scratchbuilding in S scale, I never weathered anything. Then I went through a phase of attacking my pristinely awful models with Humbrol Black paint thinned with turps. Hi Tech I know. About five years in I discovered Faber Castell chalks at a Dunedin art shop (the dry ones, not the greasy ones) and sandings of these applied with a stubbly paint brush gave things a nice sooty or dusty look until you sealed it with matte varnish or touched it with your greasy paws.

Over the past few years in American N and now NZ120, I've gone back almost exclusively to washes, but this time using a wider range of acrylic colours thinned with alcohol (the rubbing kind, not the drinking kind). Strangely enough, I've never used an airbrush to weather anything, but I'm sure that time will come.These HLCs mainly used Gull Gray (this has to be my real find of the last few years) on the tarps, a bit of Black here and there in the corners to represent coal dust and Desert Sand as brake dust on the sides. Sometimes I'll mix the colours, sometimes I thin them more, sometimes less, sometimes I apply rust dots unthinned and smear them down with a finger to represent rust streaks, sometimes I'll apply the thinned wash and wipe most of it off with a cotton bud. Sometimes I'll drybrush with a lighter version of the base colour. Often I'll wash the underbits darker than the upper bits. When you start to look closely at prototypes, the weathering is rarely black, so don't be afraid to experiment with other colours. Usually, the more the merrier. On an upcoming UK wagon post I used a really bluey gray wash on bits and this worked out surprisingly well. As Mao's Little Red Book of Huoche Weathering states: once you go black, you'll always come back.

Weathering is quite an art and there is some amazing work being showcased on a number of websites. Here's one to get you started.

On the first pair of HLCs from a few weeks back, I used thin styrene as the metal bars used to roll the tarps from one side to the other, but these stuck out like the proverbial dog's testes, so today I found some very old, very fine steel piano wire instead and contact glued it onto the tarps (between the corner posts). This has some rust spots on it as well. For added authenticity.