I picked this fellow up at a trainshow. It is sitting on my work bench for this photo. It was complete except the factory grab irons were missing. I replaced them with pre bent wire grab irons from my parts stash and hand bent a few from 0.020 brass wire.
Here it is. I painted the under carriage with dark gray auto primer, drybrushed the cut ends of the pulpwood with white, and painted the new shiny wire grab irons using Floquil SP Daylight Red. ( I still have a stash) Pretty good color match with the Atlas factory paint.
Here she is, just ahead of the caboose. Runs fine. Note the wide variation of color of the cut ends of pulpwood from car to car. Third car up from caboose is loaded with real wood, cut in my back yard. My Floquil stash lacks a reasonable color match to the real cut wood. And a search thru the craft acrylics down at Wally mart did not yield a really good match either.
Closeup of a couple of bulkhed flats.
David Starr www.newsnorthwoods.blogspot.com
Nice work on the bulkhead flats.
On the "fresh cut log" color, mixing to match might be the way to go. I usually have pretty good luck with that, but YMMV.
Another possibility is to mix an appropriate color, then paint all the log ends the same. Which is more work, but may be worth the effort on such a visible issue.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL