Freight car graffiti, Part 13: SP rock cars

This lengthening series about application of graffiti to post-1980 freight cars has mostly described cement covered hoppers and, recently, rock or ballast hoppers (in particular, see the previous post about the Granite Rock cars: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/04/freight-car-graffiti-part-12-granite.html ). Subsequent posts may be readily found by using “freight car graffiti” as the search term in the search box at right.
     The present post also addresses the same Walthers model of a 100-ton Greenville hopper as the Granite Rock cars, but in this case the cars are lettered for Southern Pacific. Again, these are cars that are active in rock service on Seth Neumann’s 1999 layout depicting UP in the Bay Area.
     The older paint scheme on these cars looked like the photo below, typical of 1980s and later SP rolling stock, to show a single example, SP 465541.

     The dark color of these models required careful selection of graffiti decals to show up well on this background. This was done for several models in turn. First, the car shown above; here is its left side with no weathering yet applied. This decal is from Microscale set 87-1536.

Similarly, the right side also received a colorful piece, this one from Microscale set 1533. Also applied here is a paper overlay (the dark blue letter “O,“ and this side of the car is shown weathered and tagged (you can click to enlarge if you wish). I will return to paper overlays in a future post.

     Here is another car being worked, SP 465014. First, the left side of the car, graffitied with Microscale set 87-1523 (yes, that is the word “barf”), and weathered and tagged.

The right side, by contrast, was given a really large piece, as does sometimes show up on prototype cars like this; it spells out "inko" though the meaning is unknown. The origin is Microscale set 87-1534. This side also is tagged and weathered.

     Finally, the fleet included one model with a post-UP-takeover paint scheme, with SP reporting marks still used but in UP lettering style and with a UP emblem, SP 466329. As a more recent repaint, this car was not as heavily weathered nor given as complete graffiti coverage. Here’s the left side, with two graffiti pieces, from Microscale sets 87-1535 and 1536:

The right side has a decal from Blair Line set 2262.

     These three cars are not the entire group of SP rock hoppers among the Seth Neumann fleet I’m working on (there is one more car, an interesting example to be covered in the following post about freight car graffiti), but it’s most of them, and I wanted to present them together.
Tony Thompson