I have several Lehigh Valley hoppers all numbered 25000. How easy would it be to renumber them? Should I plan on repainting and then renumbering?
depending,on what guage you are talking about,go to your local hobby or train store,ask if they have “DECAL’S” in stock by “woodland scenics”,or go to their web site at “www.woodlandscenics.com”,i dont think it would be to hard to cover,number’s with white number’s>>>>>>>…have fun…
I have had great sucess at painting over one or two of the old road numbers using a fine brush. Then I use woodlands scenic transfer numbers to cover where the old number was. If you weather the car after this you will have pretty good results.
Before changing the numbers, try to see what font they come in. You may ba able to match using dry transfers or decals. Your computer may have a font that is similar, then you can make your own!
Then you can go after the numbers with a rubber pencil, or paint over with a similar car color. Make a mask with an index card so you only have to repaint the car number.
Have fun model railroading!
One easy way out is to assume that the railroad renumbered the cars. Have you seen the cars that have been relettered as part of the split-up of Conrail? These brown cars have a black rectangle painted over the CR and NYC in white block letters over that. I actually relettered one of my two Lionel 9400 boxcars this way. I had to make myself do it a little bit sloppily, to look like the prototypes.
Lehigh Valley was taken over by Conrail in 1976. I don’t know what they did with the cars–they might just have left them with LV numbers until they wore out–but I can also imagine that they renumbered them for CR, in which case they would have changed both the LV reporting marks to CR and the numbers to ones not already used by Conrail, since there would certainly have been conflicts otherwise. They probably would have left the rest of the car alone, still saying “Lehigh Valley”.
You may be able to verify my scenario, or you might want to just go ahead and do it–you may never meet anyone who can contradict you!
I just thought to look in the “Official Railway Equipment Register”. Luckily, I have one for January, 1978. It shows only 12 LV coal hoppers belonging to CR, but thousands of CR hoppers, almost all renumbered since the previous edition. These must be the recently inherited LV hoppers. The new CR numbers are in the 400,000’s. (Six of the LV hoppers are in the 25,000’s–just like the Lionel models.) If you like, I can get you some actual car numbers.
Bob Nelson