Whazza Habbiinsing - airbrushing a boxcar silver

Wassen, Dec 2015

Some of the more distinctive trains seen at Wassen were boxcar trains. While there are a surprisingly high number of four wheeled boxcars running around for this day and age, they are mainly of this 23.3m long silver bogie type, of which some (or all, or many) may be of the classification "habbiins" or something similarly mysterious.

Often they run in clumps like the above train (which may be carrying paper), but they will often pop up in general freight trains too. Many have silly yellow "Transwaggon" labels on the side as below, but that's completely reasonable since that seems to the company that owns many of them in these parts.

Tosh-railways is a nice source of pictures of these and other Euro wagons

As seems to be their business model, Marklin produces a range of weirdly painted "collectable" wagons of this style in Z scale, yet they don't seem to make (and may never have made) the silver ones that a Swiss modeller might actually like to buy a few of.

Fortunately I managed to pick up a few older stragglers off ebay that would be suitable candidates for Transwaggoning.

 And with a quick de-topping:

Now I decided to do something out of my comfort zone: use an airbrush to paint them silver. I'm not much of a player in the dark arts of airbrushing. In fact I've only airbrushed one model in my life, but here I am, seeing if this equipment still works.

Before slathering the silver, I thought it might be interesting to mask off a few areas that could allow some factory-painted details to remain.

I've not used Tamiya masking tape before but boy is this stuff great. I used the blue calipers below to measure the width between panels and then cut off a few rectangles.... and applied them as you can see here on the wagon's lower end as it appears in the pic:

The stuff cuts easily with a knife, is forgiving and holds a line well. I taped off the roof centre and end walls on the white PanGas one for something different:

Out with the air blowing equipment: my old Aztek airbrush with a few nozzles that aren't completely clogged up with old dried paint, indecipherable airbrush instructions, a spray booth made from a card box, a nearby window is open to prevent me dying, paint, thinner, pipette, mixer, kitchen towels for the inevitable mess, latex gloves that I forgot to wear:

And a stick to hold the wagons with: old foamboard offcuts taped together:

Work in progress:

 And with the little masking tape pieces removed:

All in all pretty decent. There's still a little of the previous paint showing through, especially on the dark Marklin one.

I could give them another coat, but I'll probably just apply some weathering to hide it.