Repainting Athearn CN 50ft Mechanical Reefers

Canadian railways were relatively late adopters of mechanical reefers. CN placed its first order in 1962 to Pacific Car & Foundry and started to receive them by late 1962 and early 1963. These cars were completely alien to anything CN ever owned, being painted in bright CN Yellow No. 11 and black and in stark contrast with its fleet of brown and gray cars.

A poorly factory painted vintage Athearn reefer

I got the idea to model these cars a few years ago when I acquired Black Cat decals with the goal of repainting a few Athearn 50ft reefers. I knew they were 100% prototypical, but they were also being quite close. I had one of these cars in ATSF scheme with poor pad printing decoration in my stash and a visit at the local hobby shop provided me with another one for a few dollars. The bargain bin is quite often you friend!

A bargain bin find at the LHS

A few details were wrong, including the sides having 7 panels on each side instead of 6 and two rows of rivet. The clunky Athearn roofwalk was more a parody than anything else too. As for the roof, no picture I've found of these cars provided a clue as their exact type. On one picture, they seem to be flat panels but I simply decided to live with that blurry compromise.

Super Clean can't cut through the old Athearn paint

The first step was to remove the lettering by soaking the model in Castrol Super Clean. It worked wonders, but the paint stayed in place. I wasn't that much bother to do a second bath in 99% alcohol but in hindsight, I should have known better.

Removing rivets carefully with a chisel blade

The second step was to remove the second row of rivets with a chisel blade and smooth the surface with fine sandpaper. Unfortunately, the sanding process slightly gouged the paint layer and left a dipping surface parallel to the river rows. This is why I should have removed the paint. It's too soft to sand it.

Grabirons were carved out and the stirrups were also cut flush. Everything was replaced with wire grabirons and A-line stirrups for a finer appearance. The running board was made by splicing together two Tichy running board. By using 3 of them, it was easy to make two... if you wonder what happened to the leftovers, they became grilles and radiators on the Faguy generator!

A car ready for primer

The models got a generous coat of Tamiya grey primer then the nightmare called painting "yellow" started. First, all the prototype pictures I had were poor quality and often suffering shifting colors. I didn'T have CN Yellow No. 11 on hand (well, I did have the paint but wasn't aware of it at that time!) and tried to match it using various oranges and yellows from Vallejo. These colors had a hard time to cover the primer so I painted the car white prior to coating with yellow. Several coats were required and I ended up with a somewhat grainy surface.

Yellow pigments are notorious for their poor coverage

The black parts were painted dark grey and I oversprayed the raised details with a slightly lighter shade of grey. I rarely paint cars using plain black because it hides the details on scale models. And anyway, in real life, black is always dusty and looks greyer. When done, everything got a generous coat of Microscale gloss varnish and decalling started.

Decalling wasn't a walk in the park because the decals were extemely brittle and in poor shape. Even if they looked alright when set in place, they would fissures when Microsol was working its magic. One set of decals was also poorly printed and a notice in the envelope let me know that Black Cat was aware of that and they provided a second sheet with better decals.

Faulty decals with a frosted/fissured surface

Anyway, after of side decalled, I emailed to Al Ferguson from Black Cat Publishing and explained the issue and he sent me two replacement sets for free. Thanks Al for your prompt reply! That's how you gain long term loyalty from your customers!

The second side was decalled with success but I also made sure to not add the reporting mark nor the roadnumber. Indeed, these cars had a complicated renumbering story. When CN received them, they were lettered NIRX because they were in fact leased from North American Car Corporation. Then, CN acquired them and patched them, keeping the NIRX roadnumber. It would take until 1965 for CN to then renumber the cars according to its official renumbering scheme and they became the 231100 to 231174 series. This interesting story means that the cars were patched twice in less than three years. Some got CN noodle logos as reporting marks, others had very dark yellow patches. It was all over the place and brings a lot of interest in this fleet.

Small details such as patches tell a story of their own

To patch the cars, I decided to use Tru-Color Yellow Reefer and add drops of white and black until I got the color right. During this process, not only did I find the Yellow Reefer color was almost spot on for these cars but also that I had a bottle of CN Yellow No. 1. Once again, I should be careful to periodically look through my collection of paint bottle to keep knowledge of what I had. Lesson learned!

Completed cars ready for future weathering

The cars then received their last coat of gloss varnish to seal the decals, followed by a generous coat of AK Interactive Ultra-Matte varnish, which to be honest, works so nicely!

All in all, I'm quite happy with the final results. These cars are now ready for weathering and will be part of the Monk fleet in service to the Maritime. While they aren't prototypical, they look their part and to be fully honest, I will probably try to get one of these wonderful Kaslo Shop newly tooled CN mechanical reefers to complete the fleet.