Making a silk purse . . . Part 2

Recently I posted about making a “scenery” version of an old Athearn reefer, lettered for Fruit Growers Express, by modeling it with its doors open (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/10/making-silk-purse.html ). I had only intended to describe broadly what I was going to do, and then show the final result. But I received an email asking if I would show more of the process. Luckily, I did take a few photos during the process.

First, having removed the old ice hatches that were shown previously, I also sliced off the “hinge” bulges and the bulge for the latch bar, along with removing the clunky running board. Then I cut off the Athearn locating posts under the running board, and glued them into their roof holes. This is shown in the photo below, at left. 

Then I used Tamiya putty to fill the hinge holes and scale 1 x 6-inch styrene strip to cover the latch bar hole. Some of the running board post holes also needed putty. This step is shown at right, below, with the roof also cleaned up. 

With those steps completed, I touched up the new areas with brown. I added a Walthers white metal Ajax brake wheel (no longer produced), and turned to the underframe. I used the Athearn coupler boxes, secured with 2-56 screws, to host new Kadee no. 158 couplers, and replaced the steel-axle wheelsets in the Athearn metal sprung trucks with InterMountain wheelsets. 

Next I reattached the Athearn ice hatches, replacing two that were damaged with new Athearn parts, and installed the Plano running board with canopy glue. Lastly, I represented latch bars with scale 1 x 3-inch styrene strip. This doesn’t really look much like a real latch bar, but will suffice for this “scenery” model, following Richard Hendrickson’s dictum that this is a place where “there should be something there.” 

Now I could mask the sides and ends with Tamiya tape, and spray paint the entire roof brown, to blend everything together.  And with a coat of protective flat overall, I proceeded to weathering, following my usual method using washes of acrylic tube paint (for more on that, see the “Reference pages” linked at the top right corner of this post). 

I now added the doors, using strips of ordinary Scotch tape as hinges. This allows a choice of how widely open the modeler wants the doors to be, dependent on how strongly creased are the pieces of tape. Here is my choice. And though I don’t plan to do it, the doors can be closed, too.

The purpose of this model, as mentioned at the outset of these two posts, was to model as “scenery” a reefer with open doors at a loading dock. It’s shown below alongside the dock at Guadalupe Fruit Co. in my layout town of Ballard.

This was an interesting project, because not many of my freight cars are intended as scenery; and I learned a few things in the process. Can’t beat that.

Tony Thompson