Graffiti

[jwb]

Walthers had some Blair Line graffiti sets on sale, so I decided to get caught up on putting graffiti on some of my cars. Here's the first one done, an Atlas Trainman with "full monty" graffiti and Micro Scale MC-4389 conspicuity stripes:     This is pretty much what many freight cars look like these days:     I have a couple more cars waiting for flat finish.

[Herc Driver]

That looks good. It certainly would fit right in with most of the rolling stock that's out there.

[jwb]

Here's another Trainman. EEC is East Erie Commercial, the GE plant railroad in Erie, PA.    
I've been looking at my DVDs for ideas on graffiti. I have a number covering the Northeastern US (where I grew up) from the 1980s and 1990s, and I notice there was a lot less graffiti then. It seems to have gotten extremely common just in the past 10 years. Here is a car representing the 1990s, an LBF/Huberts car:    

[Mr Fixit]

Hi jwb It is my understanding from researching conspicuity stripes that you need to double the amount of stripe at the ends of the cars.

Have a stripe no more than 9 feet apart all equally spaced along the car.

They can be mounted horizontally or vertically but must be the same all the way along the car.

Tank cars stripes are to be mounted vertically just below the centreline of the tank in order to reflect car headlights, again with double the amount at the ends.

The majority of stripes are yellow, although white can be used, but requires the application of 50% more material.

Just a quick primer on conspicuity stripes.

Mark

[jwb]

My observation says that as a general rule, you're probably right, but there's a lot of variation. I've seen a number of cars with the horizontal short stripes all the same depth, and here's one with both vertical and horizontal stripes:     For that matter, notice the short vertical stripes on the car to the left. I don't know if Microscale has sets other than the MC-4389 set I used. I'd prefer not to fiddle with doubling the thickness of the short ones on that set. Do you know of other Microscale sets, or sets by other manufacturers, that have the thicker stripes or the vertical style?

[jwb]

Here's another one with both vertical and horizontal stripes: