Candian Pacific # 241039-Improving an Old Athearn Car
This morning, I decided to improve an old Athearn boxcar that I had acquired a few years ago. The car was an old blue box kit, and had okay basic details. It was painted and lettered for Canadian Pacific, so I had extra incentive to improve it. Also helping the car's case was the fact that it had the right number for the series of CP boxcar that it most closely represented.
As my next layout will depict the section of the Canadian Pacific transcontinental mainline which ran on the joint track with the Maine Cantral for 56 miles between Mattawamkeag and Vanceboro, I need all the CP cars I can find. I decided that in the case of this car, which isn't badly detailed but is not as well detailed as my other cars, I could use the car on CP mainline through freights only, so ttje lack of some details wouldn't be a problem.
The main problem with this car was the bad weathering job that I had done on it. This car was the first car I that I ever weathered, and it was very obvious.
Here is what it looked like early this morning:
You can see where the floor had to be scraped flat in the photo above. After this, I glued the underframe in place below the weight.
To weather the car, I gave it a fairly light wash of black and brown acrylic paint over the entire car. While the var would still be fairly new in the 1950s, the CP in Maine was still roughly 50 percent steam powered into the late 50s, so I gave it a fair amount of black paint wash to represent soot from steam locomotives.
As my next layout will depict the section of the Canadian Pacific transcontinental mainline which ran on the joint track with the Maine Cantral for 56 miles between Mattawamkeag and Vanceboro, I need all the CP cars I can find. I decided that in the case of this car, which isn't badly detailed but is not as well detailed as my other cars, I could use the car on CP mainline through freights only, so ttje lack of some details wouldn't be a problem.
The main problem with this car was the bad weathering job that I had done on it. This car was the first car I that I ever weathered, and it was very obvious.
Here is what it looked like early this morning:
As you can see, the car did not look very good. Fortunately, the weathering was just watercolor, so I cleaned it off in a few minutes.
After cleaning, the car looked as good as new. However, I noticed that the underframe was not attached properly to tthe car shell. To remedy this, I first removed the trucks from the car. The problem then became very apparent, as the underframe and car weight both fell of the plastic floor as soon as I turned the car up. It turned out that the weight and underframe had never been glued to the car floor, but were instead jeld in place by the trucks.
I also found that the weight could not sit flush with the car floor. The reason for that was that there were small, raised, plastic areas on the floor that were preventing the weight from sitting flush. I trimmed of these raised areas with a chisel blade, and then glued the weight in place.
You can see where the floor had to be scraped flat in the photo above. After this, I glued the underframe in place below the weight.
To weather the car, I gave it a fairly light wash of black and brown acrylic paint over the entire car. While the var would still be fairly new in the 1950s, the CP in Maine was still roughly 50 percent steam powered into the late 50s, so I gave it a fair amount of black paint wash to represent soot from steam locomotives.
The finished car on the layout after being weathered.
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