Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 6 - Fertig

There were a couple of wee things that I had intended to add onto the Re 4/4 a long while back but I completely forgot about them in the interim. Must be my intermittent incredibly-early-onset dementia...

Firstly the air conditioners that sit behind the driver's position (near the front of the port side). These were retrofitted top the real things a decade or so ago; and I see that Marklin's recent 'Gotthard Panorama Express' set has an Re 4/4 included that actually has these A/c units printed on the sides, so here's a rare "well done" bouquet from this blog for them.

I figured I'd print an outline of these onto clear decal paper with my laser printer, but it took several frustrating goes at this.

My first effort in photoshop came out all dotty (600dpi, my buttocks).  So, lacking any sensible vector drawing programs that I'm really au fait with, the accountant in me came out and doodled up something in excel.

I started out with some quite detailed ones, but when printed out to each be about 5mm tall they were all black blobs, so I simplified them and even now they look a bit strong. And now that I write this up they are a little small too, so I might do some more a little bigger for the other 4/4s.

The little white aerials over the starboard side of the cab roof were tiny squares of Plasticard glued on that will probably fall off on its first run. I also drybrushed the bogies and underbits lightly.

More on the old InterRegio cars...

Following on from the last exciting episode....

The Re 460 was tested, and somewhat unexpectedly, it runs smooth as. I'm impressed, and pleasantly surprised... Obviously it can't haul the whole expanded consist up the grades but I'm very pleased at how well it runs.

I painted over the '2000' logo on the front ends with my 'go-to' SBB red, which was picked up fairly randomly from a model shop in another city a year or so ago. Despite this, it's a perfect match for the Re 460 red straight out of the bottle.

It also seems that the 'chrome SBB directional arrows on the nose' are only appearing on refurbished Re 460s. This program is ongoing as I type this and very few locos had been completed when the Gotthard base tunnel opened, so that's a task I don't have to attempt for this one.

As for the 'old school' green-stripe passenger cars, after reviewing some pics, it was decided that the cream coloured sides on the Marklin models should be painted white. The green is also a little dark for my liking, but as often happens with photograph, in different light the real things seem close to the very dark green (almost black) on the models, so I can live with that. 

So I attempted to carefully paint white over the cream, starting with the roof stripe above the windows.

I wasn't crazy about how neatly this turned out, so for my second attempt, used strips cut from white decal paper over all bits except for the red-logo/SBB/CFF/FFS markings on the side.

Despite being very fiddly with tiny thin strips, with much cursing and rework it turned out ok - certainly good enough when viewed from the mandated distances in Z scale. In the blurry pic taken below you can see the comparison between the cream colour in the upper car (I've painted the end bits white and painted and decaled the roof stripe) and a fully decaled car below (taken before the large decal patches had set smooth). Close enough I reckon.

A final touch was the addition of the very thin black stripe along the white sides (something I had never noticed on the prototype until looking at these pics up close!), which was added with a .05 black pigment marker. This should have a gap with some lettering in it, but I just did the stripe and reckon that looks ok.

BLS 486 Alpinist -3

After the painting was completed it was time to start applying decals.

This all went swimmingly. Mr Mountaineer man went on fine, as did the various texts. As on the real locos, the wording differs each side - one in (Swiss-?) German and one in Italian - "Die Alpinisten" and "Gli Alpinisti".

An added detail-decal that I had printed previously (but didn't use on the 485) was the various details on the very bottom of the sides - various classification numbers and little black square doors and hatches. This was lifted off an image in photoshop and all came out rather well even though you can't read them.

After a period of setting, the shell was dulllcoted which briefly threw a spanner in the works, as the Testors Dullcote lacquer spray melted the Tamiya acrylic silver on the left 5mm of one of the ends, which started to run over my Alpinist. This was fairly easily mopped up with a paintbrush and repainted, so no harm in the long run, although it was an unusual thing to see. Maybe I sprayed too much on in that spot... who knows.

BLS Re 485 Connecting Europe - 2

Crikey. To think that this morning I was staring at a stripped Hoyer shell....

This evening I managed to get my ALPS printer and attached XP desktop ("take a step back in time...") plugged together and working for the first time in four years. It's made two international trips since it was last used but printed out the 'connecting europe' decal reasonably well on the second go. Appropriately enough, I used the 'Raleway' typeface from 1001 Free Fonts website. The 'bls cargo' decals were done previously on a laser printer during the habbiins silver box wagons saga.

USB plug for scale...

Compared to the prototype, the white Raleway lettering is 'close enough' but not quite perfect. I made this worse myself and only figured out why after I'd applied them: its been such a long time since I used Microsoft Word that I misunderstood one of the 'font' formatting options and ended up making the letters wider rather than the taller I was trying for but didn't notice what I'd done at the time.  A few other placements and sizes are a little off too, but it's not too bad unless you happen to be looking at the comparison picture that I have foolishly provided below.. 

Incidentally, this is one of the few shots I took with one of these leading a train. I have a feeling these locos are really light grey rather than silver, but in sun vs clouds they look quite different, and when I used light grey the whole thing looked a little flat, so I'm glad I went with the silver.

The loco number '006' decal on the front that you can't really see on the model pic was borrowed from an N scale 'Santa Fe repaints' set from Microscale.

Latest Habbiinsings

I mentioned in an earlier episode on these Habbiins wagons that a silly Transwaggon decal might be added to the side of one at some stage. 

I've owned an ALPS decal printer for about 20 years that I have a love-hate relationship with.  It's expensive to run, temperamental (making it even more expensive to run) and only runs on Windows XP. I do have an XP computer lying around but don't really feel like finding it, unpacking it, plugging it in and seeing if it still talks to the ALPS at the moment. 

And while the ALPS is great for lettering and printing out the simple 'vector' images that I've drawn up using CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator, and similar programs, it really struggles with 'raster' bitmapped images from the likes of Photoshop, or images that you might borrow from the interweb. Mainly because its ancient drivers struggle to mix colours and produce an output that isn't all dotty and lo-res like a video game from the 1980s.

The solution is to use a laser printer for these raster images because they'll readily print at 300 or 600 dpi - plenty of resolution for a model. I don't happen to own one, but my local library and local print shop do. While I did find a colour .svg vector image for this logo online, spending 20 cents on a copy is better than an afternoon swearing at the ALPS, so off I went armed with my images in a word processing document, a sheet of plain clear decal paper (purchased from MicroMark in the US about 5 years ago) and a ruler. 

After a bit of iterative fiddling to get sizes correct, PDF-ing, transporting via a USB stick and so on, out it came. And on it went. I measured 23mm, and it printed out at 23mm, but it should be a tad bigger. I suppose I didn't take the ribs into account. And it should be a bit lower down the wagon side. But hey, close enough and proof that ye olde decal paper hasn't crumbled into dust.