Many of you are aware that I have been laying track for my engine service facility. As I have almost completed the track work I will be starting the scenery soon which leads me to this question. The Bachmann fuelling and sandind facility comes in yellow and grey, to me this does not look very realistic. Any suggestions on what I should paint them?
Very scratched and bits of rusty- Hmmm... Guess that's more a description than color. Maybe some bright white here and there, for a Safety/OSHA look, on the stairs and handrails. The tanks Aluminum with wash streaks of rust and such. Above ALL... A clean messy!!
I'd suggest painting the walkways t a metallic silver, then dullcoting them. That'll make the walkways look like aluminum, which I believe those are. As for the sand towers, I've usually seen those in gray. We have such a wide color palette in model railroading!
The ony one I have seen had Yellow walkways (apparently seemend to be some kind of plastic-rubber composite material coasted on aluminum) and the towers were a soft creme color, with road name on it, and very dirty.
The walkways are probably made out of galvenized steel, which would be sort of a dull silver/gray. The handrails or stairs might have some yellow and black safety striping. The tanks, tank legs and piping are probably painted carbon steel. Industrial gray is a likely color, although I would bet that most railroads use some sort of "trademark" color to identify themselves. See if your favorite road had a standard color for structures. A bit of rust weathering would be appropriate as well. It would probably be light rather than heavy. Facilities like this would receive sufficient maintenance painting to keep visible at a distance rust minimal.
Thanks for the help guys today I dropped by my LHS and bought some Tamiya chrome silver (x-11) paints for the platforms. I think I have some grey which I will use for the tanks. Hope to attempt painting next week so will post some pics once i've completed it.
I have just finished painting the service facility. I painted the tanks etc grey and the platforms a chrome grey. It came out pretty good and I'm pleased with the results although it was pretty difficult to cover the yellow platforms. I will let the model dry then use chalks to weather. Here are some pics
I have just finished weathering the engine facility, I used a mixture of rust colour and black chalks then used hairspray to fix the chalk. Here are the results. I am going to ballast the area and install the facility in the next few days.
Wow that turned out great ! I'll have to try that out on mine when I get around to it. Very nice looks, very prototypical.
For further progress on my engine service facility see this thread Engine Service Facility thanks guys for all your help I'm really pleased with the results.