Weathering passenger cars is difficult. Because in general, most railroad took good care of the rolling stock intended for the public, so many of the techniques used for giving freight cars a heavy weathering should be avoided.
So I was in doubt when starting to work on the this very nice model made by the Austrian company Roco, #44589. The image above shows the car from the box.
How could I tone the plastic gleam down, while at the same time not turning the car into a total wreck, unfit for paying passengers?
I began mounting as many of the extra details parts as possible. The roof ventilators and the handrails went ok, but after battling with a large number of roof details, I was confronted with the choice of either throwing the model out the window or giving up on the last details. I chose the latter!
The I proceeded with a very light wash of Agrax Earthshade (from Games Workshop), a brown-grey wash without too much pigment, on both the sides, roof and undercarriage. Then everything except the roof was very lightly drybrushed with a tan colour. The roof was instead given a couple of medium grey washes to tone down the very silvery roof.
The final touches was brushing the undercarriage with some brown and dark red powders and the roof with a dark grey weathering powder.
A few more details to the puffers would look good, but otherwise I am pretty happy with the result, although the model might look a bit too worn now. What do you think, should the weathering be even lighter?
Epoch 