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The Model Railroader article and plan had the livery I wanted shown, but it was in the wrong scale: I scanned and enlarged the images needed. The result was ‘not good’ – there was a lot of pixel scatter, this is because I was using the lettering from the drawing but it was not a font so there was no smoothing of the edges: the errant pixels were slowly removed one by one, and then the rough edges filled in with extra pixels. This took a very long time before I was satisfied. The (railroad name) tender side lettering was needed with red shading to gold lettering. This was done by printing it in both red and gold on separate transfer sheets. I had tried to find a font that was suitable but with no luck.
There is a filigree design on the headlight side, domes(both different), and the tender flare sides as well, I chose to put one on the rear of the tender as well, it is not known if there was one there or not.
Finally a tiny set of numbers were wanted for under the cab windows – those were easy they are from the font ‘Cheltenham’
All these were gold. I enlarged them, reduced the design to ¼ of it and cleaned it up as well. Then it was replicated, turned over and all sewn back together in the sizes that I required. The sand dome version was then extended to allow the number in the centre using the same extended version, but at a different size on the tender flares.
All this cleaning up was done at a five times magnification so the wayward pixels could be seen and removed.
Here are three photos of the transfers fitted but still with some work to do. The transfers were produced by Stan Cedarleaf in Arizona, on an ALPS printer. This can print in gold, and also (for freight cars) in white and is the only printer I know that can do this. It only prints a single colour, so the tender lettering was done twice in red and gold. They are printed on Bel Decal paper are and strong and easy to apply. I as a matter of course add a coat of protective varnish (I use the Johnson’s kitchen floor product ‘Klear’. Stan says this is not needed but I find it give some protection at once to them, I have had a scare with some white printed transfers that started to break up, (not Stan’s) so I developed this method to stop it.
When the transfers are in position give them another coat of varnish to bed them down after a coat of Micro Sol, or such.
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