Accurail Milwaukee Road Rib Side Boxcar. Finished.

[fishbelly]

Accurail factory painted.

I have three of these cars and all look the same except for the road number. All three are finished now.

A few things to say about the kit and assembling it.

Lots of mold flash to be cleaned up. Due to the cleanup, you remove a good amount of paint that reveals the plastic color underneath. The ladders especially needed a lot of attention. Better than 75% of the paint was removed from them. It is not a matter of what was repainted, but rather what was NOT repainted. Everything received a new coat of paint except the car sides with all the lettering on it. Naturally the sides did not need any repaint due to the fact there is nothing to clean up on them. The underframe, ends and roof all received a fresh coat of Milwaukee brown paint. As for kit assembly, it went really well. Two things about that though. One, for those that want to install the roof walk. You have to take great care to make sure it is centered side to side and end to end. There are no locating guides to help you. Second, the roof walk supports at each end do not fit properly. Easy to make fit though. Fill the pin holes at each end of the car with styrene rod. Cut the locating pins off the supports and simply glue them in place..

Now cleaning up the model is not the issue. The real challenge is to match the paint. Luck was on my side. It just so happens I recently finished a Milwaukee Road gondola and had a bottle of True Color Milwaukee Road brown. On top of that, it is a PERFECT match to the Accurail factory paint. To keep from painting over the reporting marks and road number on the ends, I cut a piece of masking tape that matched the height and length of the lettering. When it came time to paint, I only misted over that area so as to not leave any paint lines along the tape edge.

As I was getting ready to finish the three cars, I noticed that there were no bolster pins. So now I had to go back and make bolster pins. Not really an issue. I drilled the bolster centers out to 0.125" diameter and made a new bolster pin from 0.125" diameter Evergreen styrene tube. The inside was tapped for a 2-56 screw. While I was working on the bolsters, I figured I better check the coupler height. I am using Tahoe Model Works trucks so I thought I should do that. It turns out I had to add a 0.030" spacer to get the coupler at the correct height. Thankfully I had designed and 3D printed a bunch of these washers a long time ago for other projects. I glued the new washers in place and then repainted the washers and bolster pins to match the car color. I then gave the entire car a gloss clear coat of Alclad Aqua Gloss. I let that cure over night and followed it with a satin clear coat. My satin clear coat is a 2:1 ratio mixture of 2 parts Tamiya clear flat to 1 part Tamiya clear gloss. I then thin that 50% with Mr. leveling thinner.

So as mentioned, trucks are Tahoe Model Works. Couplers are Kadee scale head whisker. Wheels and couplers are weathered with pigments and pigment setting solution.

It is a great car and I am very happy I bought the three pack. It appears these cars are all sold out at Accurail.

[stevewagner]

Very nice! Thanks very much for posting. I'll save the thread for future reference.

[migalyto]

Another great job, You do fantastic work!

[grabirons]

I wish accurail would get around to making more of these cars. I believe the initial run sold out nearly right away. On the original run of these cars they debuted their new paint, and the paint looks great now, as before the paint was very dull. Your car(s) turned out looking really great with those trucks.

[Colin 't Hart]

May 30, 2021 16:00:44 GMT -8 grabirons said:

I wish accurail would get around to making more of these cars. I believe the initial run sold out nearly right away. On the original run of these cars they debuted their new paint, and the paint looks great now, as before the paint was very dull. Your car(s) turned out looking really great with those trucks.

They still have some left over from a special run they did to coincide with Trainfest. Also some on eBay still, and probably at many other online reatilers.
Also, Accurail often has a few left over -- years ago I contacted them to see if they could help me locate a particular car and they had (at least) one left over and informed me they close online purchases when they're down to fewer than 6 cars left. So if you're desparate for more cars, they are still out there.