Over at Gallimore Railroading, Galen has been running an interesting series called Four Flats where he is revitalizing some Ulrich flat car models that were released in the early 1950s. It got me thinking that I should try a little spiffing up of some toy-like Bachmann freight cars I bought in the '70s and '80s to see if they might be usable with the E. L. Moore dioramas. I have a couple of 'old style' - era indeterminate other than 'old' - flat cars, so I thought I'd take one and see what I could do with what I had on hand.
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| Before and after |
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| Vats that were pried off |
The car was painted a green I thought might be some sort of Moore Green. All the other components were painted with a variety of dark and dingy washes. The rub-on EVRR lettering is decidedly an anachronism, but that's what I had on hand. I'm hoping that by sticking to using on hand materials, I can create an eclectic little fleet that at least captures something of the spirit of the EVRR.
Terrific work!
ReplyDeleteAs for oversized, crude details, I have found that if you don't upgrade some parts, you don't have to upgrade the others. That is, if all the details are at a similar size and scale thickness, it can look okay if painted and weathered so as to downplay these elements. Lance Mindheim recommends a similar strategy with clunky track - paint it a uniform dark color, ties and all, and the size becomes less noticeable.
If you compare the old stakes on the original flat to the truss rods, they're about the same thickness. Remove the stakes as you did and now the thickness of the truss rods is less obvious.
There's got to be some definition in your non-existent terms book that encapsulates this idea.
Thanks for the shout-out!
Galen
Thanks for the kind words! I'll need to dig around in the dictionary and see what I can find :-)
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