Weathering - The Subtle Art of Adding Age

These are before and after pictures of cars that were weathered to make them look more realistic. We want them to look like railway equipment that actually saw use rather than looking like a toy under the Christmas tree. In time, I hope to have everything in the collection weathered, including the locomotives. I'll save the locomotives for last and practice on other things first. If I screw up a cheap caboose, that's not a big loss. But screw up a locomotive - well, that's not so cheap. The buildings will also be artificially weathered in time. A lot of the model buildings are made of plastic, and they don't age gracefully without help.

The "before" picture of this caboose doesn't reflect how glossy it was, in addition to its unrealistic color. This was my first effort at any significant weathering, and I was happy with the outcome.

Not particularly difficult, but this is another one of my weathering efforts.

I weathered my log cars because they didn't look realistic. When I got some of Lothar's log cars, the new unweathered ones looked even worse alongside his. Besides the weathering, I added some real wood logs. I had cut down a sad looking arbor vitea in the yard, and its trunk made for great looking logs that were also light weight when dried. I still need to add the chains that will hold the logs down. I even found tiny little G scale chain binders that will add some realism.

I had purchased the steam donkey on the left quite a while back. Then I found the steam donkey on the right on eBay. I recognized that it was a weathered and customized version of the same thing, and purchased it as an example to learn from. It was sometime later that I then found Lothar's version of the steam donkey, and of course he has them all beat.

This is the before and after version of the working caboose. I had purchased the weathered and customized one on eBay, and later found the new untouched one on the left, cheap, on eBay. I bought the new one just to have another example of before and after, and will eventually find something fun to do with it myself.

This is a shot of some of the cars I've weathered. The air brush Joy (my wife) got me for Christmas came in very handy!