I got the July issue of Railfan at the local Barnes and Noble yesterday and noticed a serious goof up on the cover. They have a photo of UP 4014 and right away I noticed the number board had an extra digit on the fireman’s side and an extra marker lamp. What they did was when they digitally put the magazine masthead behind the top of the locomotive, they did a bad job of putting the engine back over the words, so there was an overlap in that corner.
Odder still, a friend's subscription copy doesn’t have the error.
I can only assume they made one production run with the error, realized they had messed up the cover, then went back and printed more with the cover looking as they’d intended. I’ll be sure to keep this one, as I have a feeling this will be something train fans will be talking about for a while (and I now know that not every issue has the error).
I'm thinking of calling this, "Big Boyy, the race to publish"...

Maybe the extra number came from the 8444. My subscription copy has the correct number of digits and marker lamps.

Gentlemen,

Neither photo has marker lamps on the 4014. Those are CLASS LIGHTS --- Markers go on the rear of the consist, usually the caboose or tender. The only time you would see markers on the smokebox of a steam engine would be if they were making a reverse move on the main line. The rulebook will confirm...

Fine, class/marker/whatever, the word I used isn't the point. My point was there are two on one side where there wasn't in real life.
They clearly cut the front end of 4014 out of the photo, dropped in the header, then tried to put 4014's face back in.
And missed.
Oddly, some have this error and some do not. Makes me wonder how rare the "40144" with the extra lamp and handrail portion covers really are.

Hey everyone! Welcome to one of the biggest goofs in my professional career!

When I am laying out Railfan & Railroad, we design two covers; one for subscribers with a big white box where a mailing address is laser-jetted on, and a second one with a UPC code for newsstand sales. Both get printed at the same time, at the same printing plant.

I usually lay out the subscriber's cover first, because that big white box ruins most designs. We a selected dramatic photo by Erik Lindgren for the cover, and I decided to make it more dramatic by having the locomotive "pop" in front of the logo. There's three layers, the bottom photo, the R&R logo, and then a top layer with the locomotive silhouetted. Once I was happy with the design, I copied it to a new document to create the newsstand copy. For whatever reason, the top layer changed scale, and we missed it during the proofing stage. So subscribers get the layering effect as intended, newsstand sales get the newest addition to the Union Pacific Heritage Fleet, Big Boy 40144.

"And now you know... The Rest of the Story™."

-otto m. vondrak
associate editor/art director
railfan & railroad magazine