During the N Scale convention held in Reno in June, Scaletrains sent out their PS-2 4785 3 bay covered hopper painted for Golden West Service and patched for Cotton Belt (SSW) to everyone who attended the manufacturers breakfast on Sunday morning. What a nice surprise that was. Because my wife also attended, we received two of these models with the same number so I wanted to re-number one of them.
I always like to start with a prototype photo and so looked through a bunch online. The patches on these cars were done in several different ways. I settled on this one although it is less weathered than the model. While the stock Scaletrains model has a dark blue background with yellow characters, this one appears to have a black background with white characters.
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First thing to do was to remove the original patch. I found that with a soaking of Microscale Micro Sol and gentle scraping with an Xacto blade, the original patch comes off fairly easily.
For the black background I used some of the wider stripes from a black stripe set I had. None of the stripes were wide enough so I doubled the rows to get the width I needed.
This is the area with the black stripes applied. The black stripe decals were applied in between bunt not over the panel seam to match the prototype photo. These were then given an application of Micro Sol before the characters were started.
This is how the model looked after the characters were applied. As the weathering on these cars was identical, I added just a bit more to this one to make them seem different. This was a fun project. Most prototype patch jobs tend to be held to lower standards then original paint jobs so a few crooked decals or mismatched character fonts can be forgiven. These are great models and I'm really happy to have them on my layout.
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