Richard, Scott and Tom.

Thanks for the compliments. Tom I forwarded your to my Dad.

Scott,

What you suggest is sort of how we are going about this. We have seen different photos of all different typefaces and lettering schemes. Some even have the name Pennsylvania spelled out 17' long above the windows.

One idea we have been seriously toying with is painting a different scheme on opposite sides the car, thus giving the photo taking folks some options. Not sure how that would work with the shadow keystone era though.

Bill

Several years ago I purchased a Graphtec plotter/cutter to make vinyl paint masks. If I have the lettering on the piece of equipment my first task has been to trace it on tracing paper. From there I scan the tracing and redraw it in Corel Draw though on my last project I have used my digital camera and scaled it off of that. I can't even think of doing lettering by hand or with hand cut stencils.

While not cheap having your own cutter allows you to remake letters as needed if you find a change or if the paint mask gets damaged while applying it. When I put the Monad logo on our 1957 Northern Pacific tie tamper part of the small letters got damaged so I had to recut the mask.



My cutter is 24" wide and I buy a vinyl in 10 yard long rolls for about $25 a roll. For two Northern Pacific boxcars I lettered I used about two rolls per car.



I paid about $1800 for the cutter, around $300 for the software, and then the vinyl mask and the transfer tape to apply it. While this is a lot for a single project if you have a large collection I can't envision doing it any other way.

Richard Wilkens
Northwest Railway Museum