One of the products my scrap industry ships by rail is carloads of metal scrap separated by type and grade. Not having exactly what I wanted in my stash of cast resin loads, I decided to make my own. This load will be for steel scrap that has been chopped up. I needed some thin plastic and is was suggested that I try plastic bottles as a source. I tried that first and it looked good but I had trouble with both adhesives and paint sticking to it. What I have had nice results with is the type of plastic from a food tray like the one shown below.
The load was built on a scrap of clear acrylic plastic cut to fit inside the gondolas. I drilled a hole in the middle and glued in a cut off roofing nail so the load could be picked up with a magnet. Gluing a thin piece of steel to the acrylic base would also.
The top surface of the acyrilic was painted flat black. The black plastic tray material shown in the first photo was cut up into small pieces which were about 2 to 3 scale feet square. This material works well with Plastruct Plastic Weld. In the photo the process is just started and can be built up to whatever depth is required. Looking carefully in this photo part of the round head of the roofing nail can be seen.
After building up the scrap to the desired depth, I brushed on a heavy coat of rail brown that was somewhat diluted so it would run down into the small spaces. After that dried I airbrushed a light coat of rust and after that dried, I dry brushed some lighter colors on some of the individual pieces. The photo below shows the finished result.
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As was envisioned, the load can be easily removed using a magnet without having to remove the car from the track. In this photo it can be seen that much of the overall thickness of the load is made up from the thickness of the acyrilic base. This load is about 3 scale feet thick.
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