MikeOwnby
Active Member
I found an extremely good deal on some F59PHI locos, so it looks like Midland Valley Railway will now have a Midland Valley Express division rather than (or maybe in addition to?) an Amtrak service. The biggest reason I just couldn't resist these was that these (formerly) West Coast Express units are more or less painted in Midland Valley colors so all I have to do is put decals on over the WCE logos. Their purple is darker, yes, but that just differentiates passenger ops from freight ops, much like Santa Fe used to do. I then picked up some Virginia Railway Express bi-levels and got Photoshop fired up.
What I've done here is actually lay both the loco and bi-level on the scanner and scanned them. This way I can literally use the actual vehicles themselves to design the decals perfectly. Unfortunately that only works with flat-sided things, which is why I had to find line drawings and use calipers to design the GP33ECO decals. But with these having full flat sides I can actually use photoshop right on those images without having to take any measurements, and the decals will print out perfectly sized. I've already done a test print of the loco's logo and yep...perfect size. Thanks to my printer's and Photoshop's excellent "as the eyes see it" color conversions for printing, even the colors appear to be a perfect match.
So anyway...here's the Photoshop proofs of what I'm intending to accomplish. I was stumped on what to cover up the little stripey thing VRE had on either end of the cars, but I sorta brainstormed my way into using those for Operation Lifesaver "billboards" on the cars. There will be maybe a half dozen different ones based on OLS posters and ads, with the "See Tracks Think Train" thingy on the opposite end of each car. I thought that'd be kinda neat.
As you can probably tell from the door detail, the CEO of Midland Valley Rail likes the London Underground. Unfortunately, once it's all said and done, a lot of the finer print won't be legible once it's printed in actual N-scale dimensions, but I'll know what it says and it'll still look nice even if it's not quite legible. Tell me what you think, or for that matter if you have suggestions or see something amiss.
What I've done here is actually lay both the loco and bi-level on the scanner and scanned them. This way I can literally use the actual vehicles themselves to design the decals perfectly. Unfortunately that only works with flat-sided things, which is why I had to find line drawings and use calipers to design the GP33ECO decals. But with these having full flat sides I can actually use photoshop right on those images without having to take any measurements, and the decals will print out perfectly sized. I've already done a test print of the loco's logo and yep...perfect size. Thanks to my printer's and Photoshop's excellent "as the eyes see it" color conversions for printing, even the colors appear to be a perfect match.
So anyway...here's the Photoshop proofs of what I'm intending to accomplish. I was stumped on what to cover up the little stripey thing VRE had on either end of the cars, but I sorta brainstormed my way into using those for Operation Lifesaver "billboards" on the cars. There will be maybe a half dozen different ones based on OLS posters and ads, with the "See Tracks Think Train" thingy on the opposite end of each car. I thought that'd be kinda neat.
As you can probably tell from the door detail, the CEO of Midland Valley Rail likes the London Underground. Unfortunately, once it's all said and done, a lot of the finer print won't be legible once it's printed in actual N-scale dimensions, but I'll know what it says and it'll still look nice even if it's not quite legible. Tell me what you think, or for that matter if you have suggestions or see something amiss.
