Sugar Beets and Tail Lights

All my rolling stock has been bought at trade shows and are of the overaged models, old stock, ‘el cheapo’ kind. Still they came ‘new in box’ and I do like to make them look a bit less ‘plastic’. I’m by no means a ‘weathering artist’, but often some simple changes can help to get the new look off. 

This tanker car has had a few strokes of black eye shadow applied to it, with the foam applier that came with the set (see this earlier blog on that). The wheels had a touch of brown. Not precisely a work of art, yet the goal of taking off the newness was easily reached.

Then I also had two empty open cars. They could use a filling. To avoid the standard coal, or sand, this time they were filled with ‘sugar beets’. The beets are actually grape stones. They were acquired after actually eating a kilo of grapes. 🙂  Washed, dried, and just one layer applied with wood glue on a polystyrene filling that was first painted brown.

Four closed cars have been equipped with a tail light. The light is made up of a 2mm thick plastic, roughly painted yellow. The bulb is a 3mm red led. The thing is actually too big for HO scale, but I don’t care that much about preciseness, I just like the effect it has.

The led is powered by a rechargeable battery inside the car. It can be switched on/off manually from the outside, with a magnet that operates an internal reed switch. This magnet may be a monstrosity to most modelers, but since it is in between cars it is hardly noticeable with normal operations, it’s ok with me and it works fine.

The current project is to build new led lighting into the coaches, using self made rail pickups and a DCDC bucket converter. As soon as they are done there will be a post on those.