Model Railroad Weathering Tips for Stock and Structures

How do you visually tie everything together on the railroad? Well, I've always felt that what you see as paint, when you build models, you can slave and cuss and do all you want to get it right. But in the end, what you see is paint. So everything is painted very carefully. Everything is painted down. Everything is weathered. I've been weathering model railroad stuff for 30 years. I really don't know how to paint anything without weathering it. So everything is painted down. It's either got white in the basic color or an earth tan in the basic color. And by having that present in everything, it does kind of weld everything together. Well, let's take a look at some of your weathering techniques. One of the simplest weathering techniques that anybody can use is weathering with pastel chalks. I probably learned about this 35 years ago, in Model Railroader magazine, and I've been using it ever since. First and main ingredient in pastel weathering is a set of pastel chalks. This is a very simple set from the art supply store. You don't need oil pastels. These are just plain pastel chalk sticks. You also need a swatch of coarse sandpaper to grind them up and a brush. We'll start with a white chalk stick, grind it up on the sandpaper until you have a little pile of dust. Then we'll take the dust to the model with the brush. Dump it on there. Oh, I've never seen that before. And then streak the chalk dust down the side of the model till you get an effect you like. Now we're going to coat this with a clear flat finish when we're done and about half of it's going to disappear. So you want to lay on plenty. And again, this replicates the effect of sun fading the paint on the boxcar. You keep brushing until you have an effect that you like. One of the nice things about pastel weathering is if you don't like the results you get you can take a brush moistened with a little bit of water and remove almost all of it so you can try again. And the final step in this will be to take it to the spray booth and lay on a coat of clear, flat finish which will hold the chalk powder in place forever. A structure like this needs a little bit of dirt around the foundation where it's splashed up by the rain. So I've mixed up a little bit of brown pastel here and we can apply that right along the bottom edge. And you'd seal this with a dull coat or some flat finish, right? Use dull coat afterwards, sure. In structures where you don't handle them very much, technically you can get away without the dull coat. Oh, you could? You really need it on a rolling stock because you have to pick them up from time to time. Mm-hmm. But the drill here is just a brush and pastel on and then brush it back off. How do you know how much to take off? That's, I mean, that's just experience. Yeah. I mean, you really can't go wrong with it. 'Cause if you get too much on, just brush it off again. And the clear flat finish, the dull coat, really makes at least half it disappear. Really tones it down I think. So, it's a technique that actually becomes more subtle when you add the flat finish.