Kitbashed High Hood GP30

[Herc Driver]

Here's some pictures taken on the layout today. I repainted the entire engine matte black, but over the semi-gloss first coat, it did little to tone down the brightness of the semi-gloss. The trucks are painted as well as the fuel tank. It's finished with the paint shop...now I'm just waiting for decals to hopefully cover up most of the glaring errors in painting.











As you can see, there are some serious flaws in this first attempt. First off the incorrect choice of semi-gloss paint. (I won't do that again...from now on everything gets matte paint.) You can also clearly see the horizontal line where the two shells are attached. I should have cut off the entire low-nose from the Atlas GP30 BNSF shell, then added the full high hood from the Bachmann NS GP50. That way, the seam where they attached would have run vertically along the cab and not horizontally. (I've never taken a saw to any of my engines and I was trying to do as little damage to the GP30 unit in case this whole project wouldn't work out.) Next time, I'm making a vertical cut and completely removing the entire low nose from the shell. This will make it far easier to mount the high hood from the GP50, plus, using the Squadron Putty (green) to fill in the gap will be an easier challenge.

Since this first attempt is more of a "proof of concept" than "final solution", I'm only somewhat pleased with the result. There were quite a number of things I'd do differently (now that I know where most of the biggest mistakes are.)
- I'll take the entire model apart and paint each part separately when I try this again.
- The BNSF decals bubbled off both sides of the cab below the windows, and I had to wipe them off and repaint there. You can clearly see the remains of that attempt. When the NS lettering and numbers are placed there, I don't think that will be as evident. But the next time I try this, I'm going to remove all decals and as much existing paint as possible.
- You can still see the line where the two shells are joined, and I plan on working on that more to make it less visible. But the white stripes of the NS symbol should hide where the two shells attach well enough.

The decals are on order and should arrive in about 10 days or so, according to Walthers. Once installed, I think the overall effort will be good enough to place on the layout, but not spend a lot of time in front of the camera.

Well, this is the first time I've tried to build something that doesn't exist in Nscale. I really like the GP30 high hood, and now that I've tried this, one of the major manufacturers will probably announce their intention to mass produce them. But I've learned a lot from this first attempt. I could have planned things out a bit better, and taken more time to prepare the model for painting. But, at least you can look at it and say..."Hey, that's a high hood GP30."

And as always, I'm open and hoping for some critiques, criticism, and suggestions.

Thanks!