I am interested in acquiring a large number of custom painted pieces of rolling stock. Is there a source for this like Bev-Bel used to be? The items that I am looking for are not available through Accurail.
RicZ
As far as I can recall, Bev-Bel offered, mostly on Athearn Blue box rolling stock, paint and lettering schemes not offered by Athearn, but these were mass produced - not exactly custom painted.
If you’re looking for various prototype roadnames on commercially available models, you could try creating them yourself. The biggest problem with that is the paucity of appropriate lettering available as decals or dry transfers.
If, on the other hand, you’re looking to have rolling stock lettered for your freelanced road(s), you could have decals custom-made to your needs. Accurail offers most of their cars in undecorated form or painted and with only dimensional data. If you need cars not offered by them, you may be able to get undecorated kits from other manufacturers, or you could simply buy decorated models, strip the factory paint, then paint and letter them as required. Most of my rolling stock is custom painted and lettered, but I did much of that back when decals and dry transfers were more readily available.
It might help to garner more responses if you could tell us the car types and roadnames you require, and perhaps the era to which they’re appropriate, too.
Wayne
What I would like is an ATSF-style cupola caboose, aka a blue box caboose, or a bay window caboose similar to the Athearn blue box. The unit must be reasonably priced and custom painting, for our free-lanced road, is desired. These are to be for sale through our local club.
Although, Athearn can do such a unit, they require a purchase of at least 500 units, far more than we could ever sell. If Accurail had a caboose, they would be our preferred vendor, due to their unit price.
Detailing and decaling up to 150 cars is not a reasonable option for this effort either. Any ideas or sources?
RicZ
So, you have two challenges: finding 150 ATSF-style cupola cabeese, like the Athearn blue-box; and getting them painted/decalled.
I think finding the 150 units “at a reasonable price” would be the bigger challenge.
Bowser does custom runs. They do the penn state cars
Hi RicZ:
Does it absolutely have to be a caboose? Accurail has a lot of nice offerings. Just sayin’.
One option you might consider if you were to go with Accurail is to ask them to do a re-number decal set like they offer for many of their products. By doing that you might be able to get people to buy two or three cars instead of just one.
Good luck!
Dave