Fleet Weathering: Subtle Variation

Pennsylvania Railroad’s Sam Rea shops starting building the home-designed X58 boxcar in 1964 to satisfy the need for modern plug door cushioned boxcars for handling high class merchandise shipments. It took until 1966 for them to be built in sufficient quantity (over 2500 copies), and they would comprise a substantial share, indeed the backbone, of the boxcar fleet for PRR and Penn Central that followed.

I have a number of these cars in my rolling stock fleet in PRR and PC livery, and I’m getting around to weathering them so they’re ready to use on the layout. Starting in 1968, Penn Central repainted X58s out of their PRR livery. As the new railroad’s identity evolved, so too did their freight car lettering diagrams, and my models reflect three slightly different designs. Two were offered by Tangent when they did the first run of this model, and the other is one that I applied to a Railyard Models resin kit that I built. I’ve weathered them with subtle variation to represent cars that are well used but have been repainted relatively recently.

Here are the PC X58s in my boxcar fleet at this point.