Stein's Minneapolis Warehouse district 1957 (HO)

[steinjr]

It's been fairly slow going model-wise over Christmas.

After a couple of false starts where I just had to stop and wash down the model before starting over again, I have finally gotten a halfway decent start on painting a couple of switchers (a GE 44-tonner and a GE 70-tonner) in Omaha Road colors (which in 1957 was basically C&NW yellow and black, with the C&NW herald, plus lettering for the Omaha Road).

Example prototype switcher from cnwhs.org:
http://www.cnwhs.org/memberphotos/albums...8-1958.jpg

Switchers primed with Tamiya white primer:


Switcher sprayed with a couple of coats of yellow:


Plan now is to wait at least 24 hours for the paint to cure - preferably wait a whole week, if I can muster the patience for it, to allow the yellow paint to cure, and then mask the sides of the engine from the walkways up to the horizontal line across near the top of the hoods, and mask V-stripes across the front and rear, before spraying over a little yellow to seal the edges of the tape, let it dry and then spray with black to get a black top, cab, top stripe on hoods, walkways, railings etc.

By that time, hopefully the C&NW heralds etc I ordered before Xmas will be here, so I can let the black cure, spray with glosscote, decal, weather, spray with dullcote, clean the mask off the windows again and so on and so forth.

Still far to go on these switchers. But at least it feels like I have gotten a little start on them.

I've gotten a little further on the first of these two switchers. Above you can see the GE 44-tonner after priming and the yellow coat.

Here is how it looked when the areas that were supposed to remain yellow had been masked and the rest sprayed with dark green. Not quite CNW green, but Tamiya Dark IJN Green, which was the closest I got for a spray can around here. Leaning up against the engine are stripes from Microscale's set of H0 decals for early C&NW switchers and hood units:



The sheet of instructions that came with the Microscale decals also explained that C&NW actually used three colors on early diesel switchers : sides of hood were C&NW yellow, cab, sills, walkways, railings and pilots were C&CN green, and the stripe at the top of the hood and the roof was black.

After spending quite a bit of time trying to work out a good way of masking this way, I grossly simplified the area painted green vs the area painted black. I reduced the green to just the cab sides and the side sills (areas easily masked off), and did the rest in black.

This is how it looks now - still needs a touchup with a brush here and there, some gloss cote, decals, weathering and dull cote. Windows also probably need a bit more cleaning



In other modelling news, I finally got the pack of stuff I ordered well before Christmas - my 25 ton rail crane kit, quite a few small styrene brick sheets, and Microscale decals - black & yellow stripes for the engine fronts and rears, and "Route of the 400"/"Route of the streamliners", "C&NW logo" etc.

Will probably be a few weeks before I get much chance to continue working on my layout. I started a new job not quite two weeks ago, and I still spend a fair amount of my "free time" working on ramping up as fast as I can my level of competence about my new employer's customers, the IT systems of the customers, my new employer's IT management systems, naming standards, billing routines and all the other stuff that change when you change employers in the MIS business. But it feels very fun to give my somewhat graying "noodle" a little workout.

Grin,
Stein