Finished U.S.M.R.R. Passenger Coach

You may remember the difficulty I had repainting the Bachmann Old Timer coaches to wear the livery of U.S.M.R.R. passenger cars. It's been about two months since then. Frankly, I forgot to include the results in any blog post since then. So, here it is.

You'll see the color is now completely different than I had intended. The tan color wasn't going to work with the black lettering from Microscale. As much as I wanted to make this work to look like all the historical images of U.S.M.R.R. coaches, with light lettering on a dark background, it's better to make them look good with the options available.

After carefully stripping the car—I already ruined two of them using chemicals that were too harsh for the plastic—and scraping down the factory lettering, I began the primer coats of sunflower yellow by Testors. I almost exclusively use flat, since gloss looks too toy-like at this scale.

Once the body of the car was painted and dry, I masked off the roof and fascia just above the lettering board. Flat black was applied to the roof and grab irons.

The final touch was the decal work. Those suckers along the roof were long. Thankfully I was used to working with the decals at this point, or it would've been a disaster.

Maybe I got overzealous with the decals, but I think the number-over-shield in the center of the coach body looks really sharp. There are two small numbers on both end doors.

Overall, I'm very pleased with how the coach turned out. It was easily the most involved painting project I've done so far and I'm not sure if or when I'll have time to do the other coaches.

Other Odds n Ends

You can also see how I've added real dirt, gone over with a strong magnet, to the trackbed. It's only installed near the depot.

In the background you'll also see those Sibley tents I got on eBay. They're not painted yet, but from this distance and being out-of-focus, they look very nice.

And in the far background, you may notice it's different. That's because we had to move the table into the other side of the basement. The corner this was previously in was where we'd get some water during bad stretches of drenching rain. It was such a pain to move the table, I decided to get it up to dry ground. It also forced me to clean up the basement this weekend, so it worked out for everyone.

Till next time...