CP Rail hopster…

I seem to be the king of bad puns at the moment, a few months ago my interest in Matt Brewery's railroad siding led to the purchase of a Walthers Mainline Canadian Pacific hopper...

I'd forgotten I'd ordered this to be honest, it was only £29.99 from Gaugemaster in the UK with free delivery, but gosh what a wait for it to be delivered from Walthers in the US to the UK (the delay is what led me to buy the trio of Walthers Canadian grain cars direct from the US shortly afterwards)! This is not quite as finely detailed as the Canadian cylindrical hoppers, the roof walkway is not perforated and the end steps are a little clunkier, but the body shape is right and at least it has the right number of body seams!

The car arrived decorated with the more modern 'beaver' logo, which wasn't the livery on those I'd seen on the video of Matt Brewery in Utica, so I tried a few technqiues to remove it. Despite it being pad printed Micro-sol didn't touch it. In the end I very very gently scraped at it with the blunt edge of a blade, tidied up with fine wet and dry and polished with a rubber. I thought it was worth mentioning here that the 'myth' of Micro-sol removing pad printed markings rings out again and again for me - I always give it a try but it never works. I wonder if Micro-sol is a different formulation in Europe?

The new 'CP Rail' is from a twenty year old Micro-scale sheet for CP Rail multi mark locomotives, I can only assume it was used on an ex Soo repaint? Anyhow, it's not quite red enough, but looks the part and once weathered will be another little bit of variety for the feed mill on Beaverbrook. Until next time, more soon...