It seems to me we all have different aspects of the hobby which fascinate us and I’m no different. In another life I was a graphics artist and railroad heralds have always fascinated me to the point where I collect them rather like Tom collects signs.
Also, in another life time I was a graphics artists and I get a big kick out of designing various heralds and graphics for my own model railroad, to the point where I’ll spend a few hours now and then creating new ones and refining old ones.
I would like to share these with all of you and see what you do and/or get feedback on mine.
The first image below shows some of my own heralds.
The second image is a sampling of some of what I have collected.
Would you be interested in one from the Valley Railroad, aka the Essex Steam Train here in CT? It looks like the New haven script logo (see my Avatar). If you can make it out, it’s also on the side of this caboose kit:
My layout is the Santa Vaca and Santa Fe. Holy Cow! The herald is on my signature at left, a combination of the Santa Fe cross in a circle, the Longhorn head from University of Texas, and a letter “O” turned sideways and stretched into a halo.
The often-told story of
The Legend of Santa Vaca
In one of the early Spanish missions established in Texas to convert the Indians, a priest was telling his congregation they should give to the church even though they didn’t have much to give. He said that God can use our gifts more than we know, and he told the story of the cow who gave up her feeding stall to make a place for the Baby Jesus to lay. He said the cow’s gift-- the manger-- became more a part of the Christmas scene than even the expensive gifts of the Wise Men.
But the Indians confused the cow in the priest’s Christmas story with a buffalo cow who was worshipped in their pre-Christian native religion and they began to bring back the cult of the Holy Cow. The Church tried to discourage the practice but could not stop it entirely. The village near the mission took on the name Santa Vaca, and it grew into a major city served by a subsidiary of the Santa Fe Railway.
Fantastic! Thank you for sharing all your hard work with us – it must have taken quite a chunk of time to have created all those. It makes me want to get off my duff and make a new herald for my Detroit Connecting.
I like the poster idea, but I’m thinking there are rights issues with the real railroads.
HOWEVER, all this makes me think maybe I could and would really enjoy putting together a collection of model railroad heralds and post a high enough resolution image of them that anyone who wanted to could print out there own posters.
I don’t know about the courtesy of respecting other people’s rights to their creations, not to mention the legalities, but I would think if you posted your herald here and said it was okay to make it part of a poster, that would suffice, wouldn’t it?
Mechanically, all I would need to make this happen is a posting like the three that are already here…meaning if it looks good on the screen, I can capture and/or download and make a graphic out of it.
Let me know what you think if you get a chance…a sort of community collection/poster of our model railroad heralds?
In this regard I have no problem with copyright as long as no one turned around and decided to make big bucks off of it… or use it for a real RR (like that’s going to happen).
Of interest, I took in a lithograph of a Glasgow Streetcar into Staples Business Depot a while back. The technician would not copy it for me as it had copyright on it but! When the manager looked at it and saw the date there was no problem. Supposedly copyright is only good for 50 years.
In all seriousness, I enjoyed making the HO&N herald, and am trying to decde what to do for CMPA, which is actualyl a real railroad and has one.
Here’s the Half-Moon Orion & Northern logo, created by placing a black circle over the end of the Daylight insignea (like an eclipse) in MS paint and then coloring it white. The whole thing was then saved and taken into Photoshop where I did the colors. Have at it, the HO&N is now on a back-burner.
