I had what I thought was an endless supply of the old Champion decals that I bought in the 1950’s if memory serves me. The decals covered all types of cars from many various roads and represented the ear I model; the time from 1920 to 1940. The boxcar fleet changed very little until the late 1920’s when all steel cars became available to the railroads, then in the 1930’s when the AAR cars began to be produced. Still, a lot of the cars in the era I model are wood with steel bracing; or all wood with steel frames. The problem I have is that my decals have become old and unusable; I threw most of them out without thinking and now I find there is not a source I can find to replace them.
My question is this; can anyone give me a listing of magazines; books; or other sources that will allow me to duplicate the markings on cars of the many railroads that were operating in my time era. This is the computer era; I can scan car markings into my computer and paper to print them is available, but I don’t know where to go to source the car markings from the era I’m working in.
To anyone that cares to respond; I give you my thanks.
Rather than creating your own data-base you might take the tack of researching individual markings as your projects need them. I’d start with the individual railroad historical societies resources.
Dear Sir: A good source for decals is greatdecals.com. You can save old decals by spraying a couple of coats of dullcoat on them. Care is still needed on the application.
You might want to join the New England Berkshire and Western rr society on the web that has a tremendous resource base for members regarding freight cars.
Check out Microscale’s website, they offer many different decals sets going well back into the steam era. Many people still model the era you do and manufacturers still make decals for that time. As far as what lettering schemes were used when, unfortunately there isn’t a “one stop” source to get all the information you need. To some extent you’ll need to look at each railroad individually, although some resources are available like the Clover House catalogue (which has diagrams and gives “circa” dates for when they would have been in use) and books showing the history of a particular railroad (usually with titles like “Color Guide to ABC Railroad Freight and Passenger Cars”. There have been a couple of books about reefers and billboard reefers that have a lot of info too.