Boxcar Double or Nothing: Part 2

It was originally my goal to finish these two boxcars by the end of January, but I had to settle for March instead. Free time has been scarce recently, and I ran into a couple of snags with this project too.

TP&W 60031

Finishing this car went about as expected. I had no issues with the Herald King decals despite their age. I knew from previous experience with this decal set a few years ago that the stripes require a lot of tedious trimming and fitting. The pieces of  thick stripe that have the car numbers in them are narrower than the solid white thick stripes, so the latter have to be trimmed to match. My original plan was to number this car 60038, but to minimize cutting and splicing I went with 60031 instead because of how the numbers were arranged on the decal sheet.

I applied the thinner stripe first, then the car number, then the rest of the thicker stripe.

It took many, many applications of Micro Sol to get the stripes to settle down over the door and the rivets. I cut and fit 4 small pieces of decal to make it look like the white stripes pass under the ladder. The ACI tag is from Microscale set MC-4280. I didn't apply the COTS decals because the prototype cars apparently didn't have them.

I finished the car with a couple coats of Vallejo 70.520 Matte Varnish. This stuff is pretty thick straight from the bottle and I hadn't used it in a while, so I looked back at old blog posts to see how much I thinned it the last time around. My post from last year about the 50' TP&W boxcar said I thinned the varnish 3:1, and I don't know how I even got it to spray at that ratio. (Maybe it didn't!) This time I thinned the varnish 1:1 with good results.

TP&W 6001

I had no trouble touching up the paint on #6001 where necessary due to masking miscues. Then it was time to start applying the decals. I purchased Microscale set 87-57 from old hobby shop stock several years ago, and I knew I was taking a risk by doing so. In my experience, Microscale decals are more fragile than other brands and don't seem to hold up as well with age. I could tell from the packaging that the 87-57 set I purchased dated back to at least the 1990s, maybe even the 1980s, but because the hobby shop was located in a basement (i.e., a relatively stable temperature environment) I thought it was possible that the decals might still be usable. Nope. The big "TP&W" speed lettering disintegrated when I tried to float it off the backing. Luckily this decal set is still available, so I purchased a new one online and waited a week for it to arrive.

Once I had a good decal set, the decal application went very quickly for this car because the stripes were already painted. I used the COTS decals from the Herald King set because I thought they looked better than the ones on the Microscale set.

Last year when I painted and decaled an orange 50' TP&W boxcar, I was unpleasantly surprised to find out upon final assembly that the doors somehow ended up a noticeably lighter shade of orange than the rest of the car. This time I remembered to check the color match before applying the decals to the doors, and, sure enough, the doors for #6001 were also a bit lighter orange than the rest of the car. After debating for a while whether it was worth re-masking the white stripes and spraying on a couple more coats of orange, I ended up using a brush to carefully apply 3 more coats of orange to the doors without masking. Once that dried, I applied the remaining decals to the doors and clear coated the car with the Vallejo Matte Varnish. 

This project had been languishing for a while on my workbench, and it feels good to finally finish it.