Freight car graffiti, Part 8: a couple more

This post is to present more examples of the graffiti applications I am doing on the freight cars from Seth Neumann’s layout, modeling the UP in the Bay Area in 1999. These are of varying ages, as indeed is often seen with cement cars, and they will be finished with varying degrees of dirt and graffiti. (To find the previous parts of this series, you can use “freight car graffiti” as the search term in the search box at right.)
     I will begin with a model of classic American Car & Foundry two-bay “Center Flow” car, this one lettered for D&RGW.

On the left side of this car, I applied a medium-size graffiti piece from Microscale set 87-1534:

    For the right side, I wanted to add one of my paper overlays, this one taken from a wall seen here locally. It spells the word “NESTA,” the middle name of musician Bob Marley, and a widely seen word in this area. Here is the original photo, obviously fitted around a window in this particular wall. and reaching right down to the dirt. You may also notice that it was applied over an older, green piece, a common sight on highly visible wall areas, which are irresistible to many “writers” (as they call themselves).

Sized in Photoshop, printed out on a color laser printer, and trimmed to size, then sanded on the back and applied with canopy glue, here is how it looked (to see my description of how I carry out this technique, you can visit this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/01/my-latest-column-in-mrh.html ).

Since this is an older car with a fairly old paint scheme, I dirtied it a fair amount, but on this car, kept the cement staining down to a modest amount (for more about weathering these cars, see the previous post in this series: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/03/freight-car-graffiti-part-7-weathering.html ). You can also see along the lower part of the car that I added some “tags” also, a topic to which I will return in a future post.

     The second car I want to briefly illustrate is a model of an outside-post cement car, lettered for Burlington Northern. I began by applying various decals. Shown below is its left side, with the graffiti from Microscale set 87-1534. As with many graffiti, this was applied to reflect the “writer” having avoided covering the reporting marks and car number, so they wouldn’t be “patched” and renumbered (you can see more on that topic in this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/02/freight-car-graffiti-part-5-relettering.html ).

The other side received a graffiti piece from Microscale set 87-1535 (the word “CORKY”), and is shown here after the car was somewhat heavily weathered and cement stained.

     These two cars illustrate the range of work I am doing in adding graffiti to 1999-era freight cars. I am continuing with this series of cement cars, as I will report presently.
Tony Thompson