Dick Scott shared a recently weathered O scale New York Central box car on the Steam Era Freight Car discussion list. He supplied extra photos and details for a blog post.

Recently I upgraded this New York Central boxcar I built from an O scale Intermountain kit in 1992. It now has new roof walks, uncoupling levers, flexible brake hoses, brass sill steps, and placards. 

Here’s a look at the model before I upgraded a few details.

The new brake hose assemblies started out as Precision Scale lost-wax castings. I wanted them to be flexible so I cut and filed away the center hose portions and replaced them with electrical wire insulation. The photo above illustrates the steps. It was much easier to do than I had expected.

I updated the roof walks using Evergreen strip styrene. I spotted the bolt head holes with a sewing needle mounted in a scrap of dowel rod. Then I drilled very shallow holes with a #76 bit.

I brush painted these parts with Craft Smart Deep Grey acrylic paint from Michaels. The next day I applied thin washes of Tamiya German Grey and Flat Earth acrylics. A light application of AIM Grimy Black weathering powder followed the washes and the work was sealed with Testors Dullcote.

I made the placards on my laptop using Microsoft Word. At the time I really didn’t know what I wanted, so my UNLOAD file has lots of variations. I picked a version that seemed to follow one in a prototype photo.

For thirty years, the only weathering on this car was a little Dullcote. I weathered it heavily with Tamiya acrylics, AIM powders, and Pro Art colored pencils.

Dick Scott

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Thank you, Dick Scott, for sharing your upgrades and weathering tips on a fabulous O scale box car model. I’m sure your work will inspire other modelers to upgrade some cars in their fleet.

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