A Couple More Freight Cars

Milepost 619

I have mentioned in previous posts that when it gets hot outside, I retreat inside and do some painting & decalling instead of roasting outdoors.  My latest "kick" has been older style cars since the lettering corresponds to some roads that I'm interested in.  Hence, the Toledo, St. Louis & Western car above, aka, The Clover Leaf.  There is nothing particularly special about the model itself; it's just an older MDC-36 foot boxcar that has been painted with one of the several brown paint spray cans that I have on the shelf.  The lettering is another of my "home brew" sets that I have printed myself. The photo backdrop is of a row of old building backs here in Findlay.  As you may or may not know, the Clover Leaf became a part of the Nickel Plate in the late 1920s.

 

Car number two is a Toledo, St. Louis & Kansas City Railroad car that I did only because I liked the lettering.  I'm not sure but suspect that the TSL&KC must have had some relationship with the TStL&W because of the clover leaf logo.  Again, the car is an old MDC 36-foot boxcar that was painted kind of a terra cotta color because I thought it would look good with the green clover leaf.  Back then, car colors were anything but consitent or standardized.  Paint was often purchased by the local agent from the local hardware store and "brown" has about as many different shades as chili has flavors.

The lettering created an interesting challenge since both of the top lines of text had been done along an arc.  The software that I use to create decals doesn't have that capability so I had to rotate each letter then line it up by eyeballing it.  Doing this on the computer monitor was much easier than messing around with individual decals.  I think that the lettering turned out OK considering.

It will take a little bit of research for me to figure out what eventually happened to this line but in the meantime, the car looks pretty sharp.  Next up is a car based on some old photo research.

dlm

Comments

[Gordon Schmidt]

Weren't these 3-foot narrow gauge cars? These lines were narrow gauge railroads that ran in western Ohio. They may have converged at Delphos.

[Mark Schwinn]

Fantastic models! They are both very attractive. You do good work.

Toledo, St Louis & Kansas City was the predecessor company of Toledo, St Louis & Western. Both were known as the Cloverleaf Route. The line was part of a grand scheme to link Toledo with Texas via a narrow gauge chain of railroads. South of St Louis the the line became the modern St Louis Southwestern - Cotton Belt Route - controlled by Southern Pacific since 1930 and now an important Union Pacific mainline.

Delphos was a station on the Cloverleaf mainline between Toledo and St Louis and was a connection with the affiliated Northern Ohio Railway - purchased by the Akron Canton & Youngstown in 1920. The Nickel Plate (Buffalo-Chicago), Cloverleaf and the Lake Erie & Western (Sandusky-Peoria)combined in 1923 as the new Nickel Plate. Both the Nickel Plate and the AC&Y became part of Norfolk & Western in 1964.