Please accept my apologies for any typos that you may find in this post. The spell checking routine on the blog software isn't working correctly and it has been difficult to check for all of the errors. They tell us that they are "working on it..."
Milepost 613
Things have been really strange here in NW Ohio weather-wise... in a nutshell, HOT and DRY! So that means that when it's 105° outside, it's time to take advantage of the heat for painting and the A/C on the inside for some relief. So I did some painting and some decal work lately.
You may remember the car above... quite some time ago, I talked about how I cut out a section on each end of the car to shorten it from a 50' outside braced wooden boxcar to a 40 footer. That all went well; I even got the thing painted but hadn't done any decal work on it... until now. I don't know if there is a prototype for this car that was on the Indiana Harbor Belt but I specifically chose these decals because I thought they would be easy to work around those ribs. Believe me, decalling around ribs is very challenging... even more so when the ribs are both vertical and diagonal as they are here. So I chose markings that I though I could squeeze in between them. My strategy seems to have worked out OK.
This next car is kind of a sentimental one and as far as I know is purely fictional. When I attended college at Bluffton, there was a professor who owned a very small business called the Bluffton Slaw Cutter Company. Yes, they made slaw cutters and with sales of $10,000 - $12,000 a year, it wasn't listed on the Fortune 500 but it did serve as some hands on training for those of us in the Business Department. Each student was required to spend at least one semester at "the plant" where we assumed roles of management, accountants & marketers. So I decided that this old MDC boxcar would be my tribute to the company. While the advertisement is fictional, the road markings, LE&W, belonged to the Lake Erie & Western, a rail line that did go through Bluffton. It was eventually bought by the Nickel Plate and later absorbed into the N&W and most recently, into NS. The car number, 1975, was the year that I graduated from Bluffton. So there's a little fun on the line.
Next, we'll take a look at some more of my painting & decal work as I still try to beat the heat!
dlm
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