Paint and Lettering

Jeff Wien sent us a scan of this slide and says: "Hopefully you'll be able to recreate this photo!"

Photo by permission from Dan Pantera.   All rights reserved.

Well, we'll do our best.  The three cars shown are 453, 457, and 451.  Two out of three ain't bad.  The 453 will have to wait until the 451 is ready, but we hope that won't be long.  The 453 is the last car in existence that still has paint and lettering from Wheaton, so on Saturday we were looking at it and discussing what we want to do.  The first thing you notice is that the "grey" color is very blue, much bluer than the paint on the Trolleyville cars.  How we'll handle that remains to be seen.  The red, what's left of it, has faded to pink, as it did on all the cars while they were in service.   That's not a problem -- it's pretty clear what the red color should be.  We also noticed that the lettering seems to have been done by expert hands with little if any help from stencils.  Good luck with that.

Another mysterious thing is that there appears to be a stripe of lighter red color just under the belt rail, where the red meets the grey.  I can find no photographic evidence of any such thing in service, but it shows up clearly enough on this picture I took last Friday.  So that remains a puzzle.

In any case, thanks again to all those who have helped with this project so far.

Update: I just remembered I have a photo of the 453 from forty years ago.  Here we are in the shop at North Olmsted, in May 1979.  Back behind the late Jeff Brady is the hangar queen with that same stupid stripe.  What gives?

The most likely explanation so far seems to be that we know some of the cars were repainted in the years after service ended in 1957, and it's probable that they weren't nearly as careful.  The stripe perhaps indicates masking tape that was carelessly applied, and Zach pointed out another picture of 455 on the scrap line with a similar stripe.  The nice thing about this explanation is that there's no need to try and replicate it.