More Spoor!

Three weathered cars for Mike

Mike Spoor stopped by this afternoon to work on some projects for his new switching layout.  His layout is based on an industrial switching district on the former Rock Island line in Houston Texas in the 1980s.

First we weathered three boxcars. Mike doesn't have an airbrush, so we used mine. Of course, the airbrush was acting up because I had damaged the nozzle when I last used it. After swapping out the nozzle we were able to spray some basic rust and grime on the cars. Then we added some rust spots, scratches, streaks and other weathering using acrylics and brushes.

Next we built some trees using Supertrees and some plastic styrene tubes. Mike's layout is set in  the summer time. So he needs green trees. I have a lot of excess Supertrees so we used them to make a batch of deciduous  trees.

To thicken the trucks, we used 1/8th and 3/16th inch Evergreen tubing. To taper the trunks we used sandpaper and sanded gesso.

Finally, Mike went to work on PoLA finishing up remaining work from the last op session, since I hadn't touched the cars in the interim. There was only about 20 minutes of work to do and he took care of it before dinner.

At dinner, Mike told Alicia and I that he plans to switch to the Army reserve and stay in the Charlottesville area for a few more years as a private contractor.  This is good news for us, as Mike is a good operator and a nice guy. He will continue to be a welcome addition to our ops group.