I have on preorder the undecorated Paragon 4 BLI E8 a/b units arriving next summer. I want to get them custom painted and decaled in the 50s/60s Illinois Central brown/orange scheme. I’ve been checking online for vendors who do this, and one in Arizona comes highly recommended. However several emails to him in the last 3 weeks have gone unreturned. So I wonder, despite the nice website and all, if he is still in business. I am in NorCal, can anyone recommend a reliable artisan to me? Thanks.
Ron
Ron
You could always try painting and decaling the locos yourself. Having custom painted a lot of my HO scale rolling stock, a friend asked me to paint a couple of locos in the red-white-blue Rail America livery for his N scale 4’x8’ layout of the Ventura County Railroad we are building. He has a Life-Like GP18 he is using as a pretty close stand-in for VCR 100 which is a GP7u. He also has a Kato-built Atlas GP30 that he wanted to use, even though the VCR never owned a GP30. I figure few people know much about the VCR and wouldn’t know it’s a Foobie so I numbered it VCR 300. At a recent open house for my HO scale layout, I also had the Atlas GP30 pulling a train on the N scale layout. Everyone seemed impressed with both the operating quality of the loco and the paint job!
I used inexpensive craft paints for the red-white-blue colors, custom decals designed on my computer and printed on Micro-Mark inkjet decal paper, and a mix of Mod Podge Matte and Gloss mediums to create a satin final clear coat. I had to strip the factory paint off the Life-Like shell but the Atlas loco was undecorated. I used a Harbor Freight Tools single action airbrush to spray the paint and yes you can indeed spray craft paints. I added the decals and the final clear coat, then reassembled the locos. They came out pretty nice if I do say so myself. I looked up the photos I took of these locos but discovered they are rather poor quality. I’ll shoot some better photos and post them later.
I looked up the three-color IC brown and orange (plus yellow) paint scheme applied to their E units. As lighter colors should be applied first, I would first shoot the entire shell with the yellow color and let it dry for 24 hours.
Here’s a few photos of the GP30 I painted and decaled.
I had fun with this project! I think your E units will come out fine as well.
I would look for a commercial decal vendor. For a few decals, the cost is small and you can have white decals where needed and appropriate heralds you could never make yourself. I have made my own decals at times, and have been very happy with them, but finding a few Milwaukee F7 decals made the whole project of upgrading that fleet worthwhile.