While the brick paper was drying I used 3M Super 77 Contact Cement to glue a 3′ scale strip of the foundation paper to each wall panel.  After this had dried I first painted the brick a brown color, using a PolyScale paint.

This became a problem later when I attempted to wash the brick with the white paint for the mortar.  Wiping this off ended up taking most of the brown paint with it.

I ended up moving on to installing the rest of the brick paper, but later painted the foundation a gray color later as the brown did not look good with the color of the brick.

I cut the brick paper to the correct height and length.  By carefully measuring I was able to score the back of each angle so that it would lay correctly.  The time spent doing this was well worth the effort as it took form made with cardboard walls and made it impossible to tell once the paper was in place.  I used the 3m contact cement to stick it in place, after I had masked the foundation and insides.

My project over the last couple of days has been to prepare the brick paper.  The first step was to paint each sheet of the brick paper with Floquil Oxide Red.  I used a fairly wide brush, but in the future I think I will use an airbrush as I finally bought an air-compressor.  An airbrush would have made the painting go much quicker and would have given better control over the thickness and coverage of the sheet.

Once this had dried (I waited until the next day, but you could probably do it in a couple of hours) I used a wash of Cermicote off white.  I thinned it with about 3 droppers of water mixed in.  I started by using the wash on only a quarter of the sheet at a time, but by the time I got to the last sheet I would do it in much larger sections without any problems.  Letting the wash dry for only a couple min I used a rag (I used an old t-shirt) and wiped most of it off of the paper.  I varied the directions in which I wiped it so that the wall would develop different patterns to the color of the brick.

After allowing the wash to dry for a couple of hours I sealed it with a quick coat of Testor’s Dullcote.

Before completing the chalk weathering on the model I painted the metal parts with silver paint.  Over this I dry-brushed a rust color, adding heavy color where it would be likely for rust to form.  Once this had dried I used the chalk to blend in the areas and add even more rust color to the metal.

One of the other final steps was to fill in the small gap on the upper window by using white glue.  This had the effect of filling in the gap, but was able to be hidden by the weathering so that it was not noticeable.  Once all of this had dried I coated the entire model with Dullcote to protect all of the weathering.  On most models I would have done this before installing the windows as it take away the clarity, however in this case I wanted the windows to be slightly opaque so that you  were not able to see inside the building.

Once this building was complete I donated it to the San Leandro Historic Railway society to be used as a generic industrial building on our layout.  This building served as my “try piece” and landed me the job of working with another member to create the buildings for the Selby area of the layout (Selby, CA during the 1950′s contained a lead smelter and not far from there is the C&H sugar plant).  I will provide pictures of this current building and any future buildings in that area as they are built.

After wiping off the excess paint to color the grout in between the bricks I glued the acetate on the window frames and doors.  The reccomendation from most sources is to use some form of white glue to hold it in place, but as I intended to weather the building so that the glass would not really be clear anyways, I used Zap-a-Gap.  This allowed me to install the “glass” much faster than using white glue would have done.  Here is a picture of the building after all the windows and doors had been installed:

The next step was to airbrush a layer of dirt on the building.  Unfortunatly for me I did not thin out the paint far enough so it ended up leaving some rather large splatters.  This ended up working out in the long run as I then used chalk to blend everything together.  Here is a picture showing the roof with one side showing the airbrush and the other showing the chalk blending it in:

I also used chalk to blend on the rest of the building, using a piece of sandpaper to grind the chalk into a fine powder.  I usually use a couple of different colors and use the application brush to blend them.  Here is a picture showing work on the walls of the building:

As you can see in the picture, I also used the chalk on the windows which had the effect of making them very hard to see through (just like most industrial buildings that I see in Oakland, CA).

As I was on vacation over the Christmas holiday I did not have any time to work on any of my projects so I decided to post some pictures I took at the San Leandro Historic Railway Society while running some of my trains.

This picture shows my F7 A&B units from Proto 2000.  They were the first two models that I installed NCE decoders into, a really easy process as it was just a matter of removing the existing DC chip and plugging in the new decoder.

This picture shows a view of the same train heading across the top of the small helix heading towards Antelope.  Notice the weathered look of the boxcars and gondola in the picture.  This was done by drybrushing two different colors of paint, and then using pastel chalks to complete the affect.

Happy Holidays from RailroadRedux.