I picked up an undecorated Athearn Genesis 5161 covered hopper at a show. I'm not sure I realized at the time that not only was it undecorated, it was also a kit. Well, I have fun with kits, so I decided to dive in.

I had a set of decals for this car, so started yet another project (I start a lot of projects, at some point I need to get better about finishing them- sound familiar?).

The kit is beautifully done- intricate and yet not a terribly difficult build. there are definitely some tricky spots, which I try to outline below.

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One car (the RF&P, with the nicer, thinner, higher quality paint job) required more. Step 2 is the auto-shop degreaser (Purple Power, though it goes by other names too). I use this as my primary cleaner for my airbrush, letting the parts soak after use. It seems to do a pretty good job on most of my paints, including acrylic but also of course the oil-based older paints that I sometimes use. That did a lot of the work on the RFP car.

After a few timid applications, I declared victory over the paint, and moved on to the reclamation.

I found a number of good prototype photos online, and recall that this project is based on a Microscale article from an old newsletter, in which the author resurrected a Life-Like boxcar and modified it into something quite nice. To that end, I decided to model a couple of prototypes I wouldn't normally do, based on East Coast railroads: Conrail and Canadian Nation (CN), the latter of which obtained a number of these cars.

Using my new technique-du-jour, I primed everything with Tamiya Flat Black. I chose this in hopes that an uneven coat of color which yield some interesting variations in the panels- we'll see how I did in a bit. First though a photo of the patched-out cars that will become the CN boxcars.

First up, the pair of Conrail cars (now painted with decals applied). I opted to go for a couple of different colors here, one a bit more purplish, one a more faded boxcar red.

Here's the pair of CN patched cars- these I intentionally made closer to one another.

I did manage to extract a little bit of panel variation in these cars- the seams look just a touch darker on a couple. I like this enough so that I think I'll keep doing this for a while yet.

The prototype cars are in decent shape, which a few rusty patches to model on the sides and the roofs to attend to.

I turned a little bit of attention to the underframes, which seemed a bit plain. I added cut levers, and trimmed off the Kadee pins. Metal wheels, yada yada.

Fun project, which produced some cars that are unique in my collection- I don't do a lot of east-coast cars.

Microscale article here

Microscale follow-up article, based on The Weathering Shop challenge, here

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