When the movie 'Unstoppable' came out in 2010, 7-year-old me thought it was the coolest movie to be released within my lifetime. I would spend much of my free time watching any videos online about the movie or the trains themselves, even building Lego replicas of various locomotives from the movie. AWVR 777, which was the lead locomotive of the runway in the movie, quickly became my favorite locomotive, as I would see many AC4400s in person living right next to a Union Pacific mainline.
The movie is still a personal favorite of mine, and throughout the years, I purchased several models that I intended to repaint into various schemes from the movie, which I unfortunately never ended up completing. When I saw that Scaletrains had announced their run of the Rivet Counter AC4400s, I knew it was my chance to finally model one of the movie locomotives accurately. I was lucky enough to get my hands on one of the Canadian Pacific models before they sold out. As much as I would have liked to completely repaint the model into the AWVR scheme, I had been looking for some foreign power to go with the rest of my BNSF fleet and knew a Canadian Pacific locomotive would look great thrown behind some BNSF power. With this considered, I found some prototype photos of CP 9777, which was one of two AC4400s that were used in the movie. After filming wrapped up in 2010, it was sent back to Canadian Pacific and almost immediately repainted. However, Canadian Pacific had only repainted the upper half of the locomotive, leaving the trucks slightly grimy and, more importantly, left the yellow safety stripe snowplow from the movie.
With all that considered, I set out to recreate its unique look from early 2010. I started by renumbering the locomotive. While the decals were settling, I removed the snowplow and masked off the safety stripe pattern, then airbrushed it with some yellow paint. While that was drying, I finished applying the decals around the locomotive. After removing the masking tape, I reinstalled the snowplow onto the locomotive. After that, I masked off the top half of the locomotive and hit just the trucks and fuel tank with a dullcote, followed by a few coats of a grimy brown paint with the airbrush. With that dry, I masked off the trucks and hit the body with a glosscote to really give it that fresh paint appearance. To finish the model off, I hit the trucks and exhaust area with some weathering powders. I am very pleased with how the project turned out, and needless to say, I am a huge fan of the Rivet Counter AC4400s. I look forward to seeing what amazing models future runs may bring.
