The last week or so I pretty much took a break from layout work, and instead have focused on engines and rolling stock. I stripped paint from a couple of old Hawthorne Village cars in preparation for repainting them, and then added numbers and lettering to two more locomotives, the Bumblebee 2-6-0 and the outside frame 4-4-0. These are my two best runners and are likely to be the mainstay of operations on this incarnation of the L&SE.
Number 23 is lettered like the inside frame 4-4-0. I'm not sure I'll keep it this way; this style looks good to me on the smaller, fancier engine, but this one may look better with a more typical road name on the tender and number on the cab.
The Bumblebee is lettered in black, mimicking the original D&RGW engine.
I had one Hawthorne Village boxcar that I repainted a few years ago, but never lettered. I decided it looked a little bare, so I did that.
It's striking what a difference some lettering makes. Mind you I'm doing this letter by letter using decal alphabet sets from various sources. I've been lettering cars and locomotives this way for years, and have done dozens of them.
The boxcar still looked a little bare, so I got thinking about adding a herald. There are places that will print custom decals, but the numbers I need are pretty small and I'm not sure it's worth the expense.
You can buy waterslide decal paper and print your own decals using a laser or inkjet printer. The only downside is, you can't print them in white.
But I had seen Colorado & Southern cars with a logo like this one, white on a black background.
You can buy decal paper that has white film instead of clear, and it occurred to me that I could reverse the white lettering on a black background. I opened up the logo in Paint, converted it to a negative, printed it on plain paper in various sizes, then cut them out with an Xacto knife. After trying them out, I think this is the size I like best.
This is just a paper logo tacked to the car with a dab of glue, but I'm pretty happy with the way it looks. I ordered some white decal paper from Amazon. Should be here tomorrow, and I'll try it out.
7/23/25: I painted the other two boxcars and the excursion car today.
I'll give them a day for the paint to cure, then start decaling.
7/30/25: Here's that first car, with a laser printed decal.
8/17/25: I just ordered a Bachmann 2-6-0 in the D&RGW green boiler paint scheme, and I want to reletter it for L&SE, mimicking the D&RGW lettering scheme. The road name on the tender is easy, but I also like the colored version of the logo. So I made this one.
I'll print this on white decal film on a color inkjet printer; unfortunately, my color printer is on the fritz, so this is going to be on hold until I can get it working or replace it. But I think the logo looks pretty cool. I used Microsoft's AI tool in Paint to modify the condor picture with a white outline and a transparent background -- it was a lot less work than trying to do it "by hand."
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