Conrail's Amoskeag Northern Line | Body and Paint Restoration

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Railcar Repairs and Restoration

Body and Paint Restoration

Written by Ian MacMillan

Thursday, 22 March 2007

Preliminary work

Even though there was 5' of snow still on the ground here in Wakefield, and we were forecast to get another 2', I decided to take advantage of a brief 70 degree day last week to get body and paint work done on the speeder.

Harvey's A car in new paint

I've stored my speeder over the winter at my father-in-laws as his garage could be heated and I would be able to rewire and fix some other issues before the snow melted and it would be time to ride the rails again.

With the warm weather here it was time to pull it out of the garage and prepare it for repaint. I decided to change the color to a darker yellow, matching what I felt was a better color for MOW equipment. After consulting with Harvey, another CVRTC member, who repainted his A car last winter I setteled on National School Bus Yellow.To prep the car for paint a lot of work had to be done. There were several spots of the fiberglas body that were damaged that needed repair or refinishing. I scraped and sanded down the areas that needed to be patched and added Bondo for Fiberglas. This special Bondo has fine fibers of fiberglas to help restore and strenghen the cab. The patches still need to be filed down and sanded out, but due to it becoming colder, those will need to wait for another day.

Bondo patches

While I was waiting for the Bondo to set I began preping the cab for paint, including removing the roadnumbers and decals. I scraped and sanded the cap to remove any imperfections and glue residue. By sanding the entire cab it will provide a nice smooth surface so that the paint will cover evenly. As you can see in the photos, the previous owner had used several different colors of spray paint to fix issues.

Once again because of the cold I was only able to get one coat of paint on the cab. The cab will be getting a several layer finish,

1st coat of new paint

with wet/dry sanding between each layer so that it has an automotive smooth finish. Also to be changed and require additional work will be the new headlight, marker light, and ditch light housings. These will be recessed in the body so that they professionally flow with the contours of the cab. The headlights will be recessed in the top of the roof, the markers in the corners of the nose, and the ditch lights in the lower corners of the nose. You can see the first coat of paint in the photo showing the begining of the new color.

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