Railworks America

I'm catching up on some projects that were WIP in 2014-5, before life intervened. The first of these, now wrapping up beta testing, is a series of Plate B and Plate C boxcars picked up by the RW&A in the mid-to-late-'80s, after the incentive per diem regs were abolished. The short version of the long story is that the Plate B cars were painted in a bright yellow livery, consistent with the loud paint jobs worn by many contemporary IPD cars, but this was found to weather badly. The Plate C cars were painted in the reversed livery, and the Plate B cars were then similarly repainted as they came due.

The Plate B cars come in three versions, weathered yellow, clean (lightly weathered) red and weathered red:



The Plate C cars come in two versions, clean (lightly weathered) red and weathered red:



I'll be posting additional projects as they near completion.

Very nice work

Some famous model railroads:

Can you do Columbia Gorge Lines? That's the model railroad club I belong to...

If you want to do the repaint Larrys new SP FMC boxcar I did these fictional ones for filler. I can give the number ranges and fonts if you need em.

PNWR1854 wrote:Can you do Columbia Gorge Lines? ...

ErikGorbiHamilton wrote:If you want to do the repaint Larrys new SP FMC boxcar I did these fictional ones for filler. ...

These certainly sound like interesting projects, but I'd like to clear out a lot of what I have in the pipeline first. I have maybe a dozen or so, most of which are near completion, and a set of double door RWA cars I have to get through, at which point I might be able to give one or more of these a try. A big part of what delayed all this is some nasty back issues that I'm just starting to recover from, so I still have a fairly limited amount of time to work on things. PM me with any details, particularly if you have larger (500 pixels wide, for example) of any of the logos. So far, I've had to re-draw all of them except the RWA logos, and that's taken a lot of time.

Some nice work here Phil!

Thanks kindly for the compliments. I appreciate the encouragement.

Here are four more, non-fiction and very incomplete this time:

Very nice. Good to see more of the Incentive Per Diem cars.

MaineLines wrote:Very nice. Good to see more of the Incentive Per Diem cars.

Thanks kindly, Larry. Your models are a real pleasure to work with.

TexMex and Bigbee are essentially complete:




Two variations of CIRR's extensive fleet are also in the pipeline:

Beautifully done!

MadMike1024 wrote:Beautifully done!

Indeed, ''estupendous'', wow, I'll have to improve my repaints

QcRail

That's high praise indeed from three people whose work was a large part of the reason I started this project. I appreciate it.

I'm using an enhanced version of Larry's paint kit, to which I've added several layers based on the weathering tutorial on 3DTrains' website, but using gradients which are more consistent with how I observed freight cars of this sort weathered. Each of these layers use gradients which offer a fair degree of precision as to how dirty I the model in question can appear. As a rule, I'm attempting to show what these cars would have looked like in the '90s or so, when the paint was still reasonably fresh and and rolling stock wasn't generally tagged. There's no reason why my approach couldn't be adapted to cars in worse shape. In fact, I've fiddled with a few examples myself. I'm still tweaking the layers to some extent, but I'd be happy to put a blank copy out there if anybody's interested in it.

Meanwhile, three more in the pipeline:

philmoberg wrote:That's high praise indeed from three people whose work was a large part of the reason I started this project. I appreciate it.

This is the reason why I took time to compose a highly illustrated guide to paint or repaint anything aimed to be imported in TS, it is to encourage newbies to take the first leap into a rich and complex step to computer graphics. People with an artistic background will have an edge, but one has to learn the intricate menus of graphic softwares such as Gimp or Blender.

The only way to improve is through mistakes - sad to say but essential (After 50 years of graphic professional background, I still make mistakes and STILL learn from others). As I fondly say : ''Practice makes perfect''. If you don't get satisfaction for the Railworks community, get satisfaction for yourself; after all it is a hobby to enjoy.

Please, newbies welcome to the virtual graphics world, there is plenty room for your talent. and do post questions of any nature, some one will respond.

QcRail