Remembering biL Marsland...

[doctorwayne]

Hey, that JGL hopper looks real nice!

Thanks Gary, and thanks too for the JGL decals. I'm still planning on doing a boxcar, too, but that won't happen immediately.
Oddly enough, the first photo of the hopper which I had planned to used revealed that the "G" in the reporting marks was actually a "C" - not surprising when my home roads include both the GRAND VALLEY and the ELORA GORGE & EASTERN. There usually aren't very many "G"s in an alphabet lettering set, and one learns to make-do using "C"s, then "Q"s, and "O"s. I had finished weathering the car and taken photos, and put them into photobucket, then placed one in my post here. It was only when I previewed the post that I noticed the missing foofarah on the "G"s. A couple of "H"s made the ultimate sacrifice (the lettering is dry transfers) and a quick touch-up of the weathering with a brush got the car camera-ready.

Wayne - what make are the gondolas? They resemble Pressed Steel Car Co prototypes, only with rungs instead of ladders on the sides. I'm guessing Accurail?

I finally sat down this morning and resumed work (nearly a month later) on my own pair of gons, both metal-bottom/plastic-bodied Mantuas. Hopefully in a short while I'll have a pair to post on this thread. You seem to have arrived at what I believe is the inevitable conclusion for placing the herald on a ribbed car - cutting away the "su" and the "na". For a while I was considering 'back-dating' the cars, or some such farce, by dropping the Susquehanna altogether and making a 'Lehigh & Western' car so that I wouldn't have to split the susie-q. Ah well, I'll be in good company lettering mine the same way.

Galen

You're right, Galen: the gondolas are from Accurail, and I have another in MoW service which looks very similar and may be from Tyco, although it doesn't have a metal bottom.




I had some doubts about that herald on ribbed cars, too, but I was quite pleased to see that the split word didn't appear all that unusual. If the ribs had been really close and required the curved portions to be split, I would have opted for an applied "sheet metal" lettering board, as on this car:




Straight-line words seem to split okay, although if you have the option, it's adviseable to select the best location(s) to place the split(s). Picture heralds and many word-type ones where the words are arranged in a shape (circle or arch especially) don't split very gracefully.


Wayne