Repainting Walthers Coal Cars, Part 1

Today I am going to walk you through my plan for some Walthers coal cars I ordered recently. They were supposed to be in by now, and I was going to write a product review for them, but they haven't come in yet. I will do a product review after they come in. But for now, let's talk about my plans for them.

I am repainting them. Because of that, it didn't matter what roadname or numbers I ordered, so I got the cheapest ones, which happened to be Walthers Trinity RD-4 coal hoppers. Model Train Stuff was having a sale, and I got four 6-packs for half price, I honestly don't remember which ones, I just got the cheapest ones they had. I am repainting them as Greenbriar Management Services, reporting mark BNBX. Let's just call them BNBX for short. BNBX is a car leaser, they have coal hoppers and coal gondolas running all over the place. They often lease cars to power companies that burn coal, which is what I am trying to model. While the power plant in Bow, NH does not lease any coal cars in real life, I thought it would be cool to have some of these modern coal cars running on my layout, and it would give me some more experience doing a simple repaint job. To start, here is a photo of a BNBX coal hopper:

Photo from www.rrpicturearchives.net.

The paint job should be easy, simply need to spray the cars with aluminum spray paint. After painting the cars, I will need to decal them. I found virtually all the decals I need for this project from two sources: Highball Graphics and Microscale. Here is a list of the decals I will be using:

Microscale TF-18: This will be used for the red ends of the car. It seems easier to cut the shapes out of the decal sheet rather than masking and painting those areas.

Microscale 87-260: This has most of the data I will need for the coal cars. As far as I can tell, nobody makes data sets for these coal cars, so some of the data that is unique to the cars will not be on the models, but this set will cover most of it.

Highball Graphics AD-14: This will do the yellow reflective striping found on most modern freight cars.

Finally, for the reporting marks, numbers, and Plate F signs, Jim at Highball Graphics is doing up a custom sheet for me. If I only had a few cars, I could order an alphabet set for the reporting marks and numbers, but because I have 24 cars, that is a lot of alphabet sets with a lot of extra letters and numbers! Jim has agreed to make a custom sheet with the reporting marks and numbers that I need, sized appropriately. If you need custom decals, I would recommend going to Highball Graphics.

Last but not least, Sergent Engineering has Type F couplers that I want to install on these cars. Most modern coal hoppers and gondolas use Type F couplers. However, last time I checked, the Type F couplers were out of stock, so for now the cars will keep the couplers they come with. I also want to order a working FRED for one car. I'll have to do a little more research on that first.

I am looking forward to painting up these cars. It will be a fun project and will get some modern coal cars on my layout, which is something I've been wanting to do for a while. My standards for a model unit train is the 20-25 car range, so the 24 cars I ordered will be a full train for me.