Freight Car Friday #71 – CN 557417 Model

CN 557417 is a 52′ inside length combination plug + sliding door boxcar built in the mid 1970s for lumber and forest products service. It’s part of a large group of such cars (740 cars built in three orders between 1973-1974), but its paint job is one of a kind.

This car was one of 4 boxcars painted by CN in 1984 as a promotion for the upcoming 1986 World’s Fair in Vancouver, BC, branded as “Expo86” by the event organizers. Each car was painted in a similar black and white scheme with 4 diagonal coloured stripes, although each of the 4 cars was in a different colour.

The four cars to be painted this way were:

CN 557417 – blue stripes (52′ combo-door boxcar)

CN 557420 – purple stripes (52′ combo-door boxcar)

CNIS 417093 – green stripes (52′ single-door boxcar)

CNIS 417225 – orange stripes (52′ single-door boxcar)

Also painted in the Expo86 scheme was SD40-2 5334 with multi-coloured stripes (yellow, green, blue and purple).

The model was built using a Kaslo Shops resin kit for a CN 52′ combo door boxcar which matches the prototype and painted and lettered using a decal set from Highball Graphics (this set appears to be now discontinued). This was a challenging paint job, requiring a lot of masking (including diagonal masking to paint the stripes) over the raised details of the car doors.

Since I’m modeling 1985, the car’s paint job is still pretty fresh so the car just received a clear coat and will remain un-weathered. Eventually the car will see service on my future layout hauling lumber, plywood and other forest products from mills on the CN beyond Hearst westbound via Oba or south to the United States via Sault Ste. Marie. It’ll be an eye-catching change from the regular CN brown boxcars hauling paper and lumber out of the north.

Log Truck Cab and Details Painted

Took advantage of a little time to kill Saturday morning to finish up the painting on this guy.

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First I masked off the wheels and gave the frame a light misting with ModelFlex “Rust” to weather the frame and soften the start black colour. The cab body was airbrushed with a light green colour I happened to have on hand (in this case, PGE/BCOL Light Green). I think it’s a good colour for a truck.

The details (wheel hubs, headlights, taillights, turn lights, horns, roof lights, etc.) were touched up with a fine paintbrush.

Walthers Log Truck

I’ve had this old kit kicking around on a shelf somewhere probably for well over 10 years now!

This is a resin kit that was offered by Walthers. I don’t think it’s currently available anymore. I finally decided to actually glue some of the pieces together, and gave the whole frame of the thing a shot of black in the spray booth. It’s not a super-detailed model, but it’s building up into something that will look right at home near one of the sawmills on my future layout. (I’ll just have to give it a load of logs and place it closer to the rear of the scene so you can’t see that some of the wheels are a little cock-eyed on the axles.)

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The truck cab piece has obviously not yet been mounted; I’ll need to paint that another colour yet before assembling the model.