Rock Island GP38-2 Athearn Genesis Before and After

[rock]

Last fall I purchased one of the new Athearn Genesis Rock Island GP38-2s.  I was planning to keep the factory paint job and save me some time in putting it in service... but when I took it out of the box, the color was a little too green and dark.  I have a few other custom painted Rock Island motors and it didn't match their paint, so I decided to repaint it and am glad I did.  In the process, I upgraded the cab to an Atlas, which is much easier to reinstall the window glazing.  I also renumbered it into the new numbering system that Rock Island was plotting in late 1979 and then added an SPSF patch to incorporate it into my system.

Here are the results:

[icghogger]

Nice Work, Eric!!

[antlorch]

Looks good. Let me ask you this, since you weathered it anyway, if you had sprayed over the original color with a mix of flat coat and either dust or white that should have toned down the original color.

Not having one to experiment on this is just an observation. I have always liked your work and keep it coming.

[rock]

Thanks!

Good question, Anthony. I thought about fading the unit, which is what I always do with Rock Island blue freight cars (especially from Athearn), but I didn't do this on the GP38-2 for a couple reasons: one, I wanted the engine to look like it was kept fairly clean and cared for so that means I didn't want the logos and lettering to be faded as well and two, the Athearn color is slightly too green, so I repainted it to exactly match the rest of my fleet.

[m a y o r 79]

The repaint looks good, so does your weathering job.

[analogbeatmaker]

Nice work Eric! I know what you mean about color matching. I have a couple F7's I'm going to have to repaint because the factory paint doesn't match my custom models...which have a closer to proto color.