Thanks much!
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Flintlock76 nice job, I don’t think I have ever seen a Susquehanna car.
Chuck
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Beautiful repaint! Like you, I succumbed to the availability and low-cost of the Milwaukee Road “Baby Madisons” for repaints. Huge bonus that the lettering was not heat stamped on them. At the time that I did most of my repaints, Walthers had a nice line of O Scale decals. No more, sadly.
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Thanks everyone for the welcome back to the forum! This is a great thread. BTW - I also have a 8272 MPC PRR EP-5 in a not-so-realistic, but still nice Tuscan and Gold paint scheme.
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Me neither! The closest I’ve seen to a Susquehanna passenger car was some RDC’s that MTH cataloged several years back, hence my making my own.
And thanks for the kind words!
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There’s an outfit called K4 Decals (k4decals.com) that I’ve heard good things about although I haven’t tried them yet myself. I made my own decals with some white decal stock and an ink-jet printer. Obviously printers don’t print white but on Google Docs you can select white as a primary and a black highlight and get the “white on black” result.
Micro-Scale and Champ used to make decals as well but they’re gone. Luckily K4’s stepped into the breach.
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Microscale doesn’t do decals anymore? Their website is still live, so I figured they were still doing business. Or are “Micro-Scale” and “Microscale” two different companies?
I have bought one set of decals from K4, but never got to apply them because my paint job didn’t work out and I haven’t finished stripping and re-doing it yet. I bought their O scale decal sheet for Boston & Maine switchers in the solid black, and the black with red stripes liveries. I felt like the quality of the red wasn’t optimal, but the white looked good. I was planning on doing my project in the solid black livery, so I didn’t need the red decals for that. But I was considering painting another model where they would be useful.
-El
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I have used K4 decals on this caboose repaint.
They went on well and gave no problems. The white covers the underlying dark color well. I have been pleased so far.
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You’re right Ellie and I was wrong, I looked up Microscale and they’re definitely still in business. I did a cursory check on the product line and they seem to be heavy on HO and N scale decals, not so much on O. In fact their O scale product line seems pretty sparse but as I said I didn’t go through all of it.
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I saved my best for last. 
The “baby” Chessie Steam Special! Ok, not an actual catalog set but just as fun as it’s big brother in my book! I’ve paired the oft overlooked #8008 DC Chessie System Atlantic with 3 cars from the passenger set.
The tender is equipped with the “mighty sound of rocks” sound wheel. It’s not as high tech as a speaker producing white noise, but less annoying than a vibrating metal plate a la the prewar “Chugger”. (Why Lionel never opted to exercise their ownership of Flyer’s smoke and choo choo sound system I’ll never understand.)
Notice anything odd here? Both the coach and the observation wear the same car number. I have no idea if this is how they came out of Mount Clemens but the 2 coaches from the set were numbered 9583 & 9584. 9585 is the correct number for the observation car. Of the 4 cars I don’t have, the 9586 diner is the only one I really want at this time. (Even 3 cars is pushing it on a tiny layout 
)
There’s no doubt that all 5 pieces have postwar roots. Even older if you consider the cars to be the offspring of the prewar bakelite “Madison” cars.
By the way 2100 just had a successful steam up here in Cleveland over the weekend and some of us would love to see her in Chessie colors after her American Freedom Train 250 duties are discharged and her next 1472 day overhaul is complete a few years from now .
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Your absolutely right Penny, you did save the best for last vary nice set you got I remember the old coal rattling sound in those tenders, it’s pretty cool that the numbers are the same on the coach and observation.
Chuck
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Maybe-possibly. With the 200th anniversary of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad coming up (2027) descendant company CSX (descended from Chessie as well) might just possibly want to do some commemorations.
B&O, Chessie System, it’d be fun to speculate. I don’t believe CSX is as hard-core anti-steam as they were 20 years ago but who knows?
Anyway, LOVE that Chessie System free-lance! And with that wacky-wheel tender as well! VERY well done!
YouTuber Shawn the Dakman has his childhood set with that wheel o’ BB’s tender and as he put it if you’re running the train fast it’s actually not that bad.
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I believe that the ‘baby Madison’ heavyweight cars actually have nothing in common with the pre and postwar cars that they somewhat resemble. I seem to recall reading somewhere that the tooling for those cars was destroyed at some point. The MPC cars would have to be completely new tooling, as a result.
A very brilliant move on Lionel’s part, the baby Madisons are imho one of the best ideas MPC Lionel had.
-El
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I have a soft spot in my heart for the Chessie livery, and you did a good job with it!
As for the car number, turning a coach into an observation and vice-versa is as easy as swapping the vestibule for the railing. May have been done after it left the factory, but it may be a factory error, too. Ya never know–not that it really changes anything.
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I don’t know where the boxes are at the moment but I do remember the mis-numbered coach came in a box for one of the two coaches. Originally or not is all but impossible to know at this point.
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Forgive the slow response but those EP-5’s are SO classy!
If the PRR never had a gold-and-tuscan EP they should have!
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Thanks! The EP-5’s were good looking engines and MPC came up with a winner with the tuscan and gold paint scheme. When Penn Central got the EP-5’s they painted them black, and if I find another EP-5 at a train show I just might try repainting it in black with the big PC logo on the side.
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I’m surprised Lionel didn’t do one themselves, considering they did do a Penn Central GG1.
-El
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But by the time Lionel did anything with PC markings PC was bankrupt 
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Interesting idea doing an EP-5 in PC black. Just remember what “Trains” magazine said concerning that paint scheme and what it really represented before you make the jump:
“Penn Central, a marriage made in Hell and the bride wore black!” 
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