Model Railroading on the Cheap

   Why does a gray haired-old man get excited about rebuilding a HO scale tank car?—I guess the answer to that would be: I was having fun and enjoying my hobby. – At a garage sale I found an old Varney plastic HO scale tank car that caught my eye. Original paint in good clean shape lettered TEXACO in large black lettering, with silver sides and black ends and dome top, black handrail around but no ladder or brake wheel. The car probably dates to the 1950s. To me I thought that the die work seemed crisp and sharp although all the footsteps were broken off and the brake details were gone. In later years Varney kept taking details and weight off their cars in an attempt to save a nickel? The trucks were original Varney one piece cast metal side frame and bolster with one piece plastic wheels and axels with razor sharp flanges. As I recall they were quite poor in performance. I replaced them with quality metal wheel sprung trucks. I thought the car was unusual because it had removable ends and dome top. The body looked to be in quite good condition.

   So I removed the lettering by scrubbing with a toothbrush after a couple hours soak in brake fluid. This did not harm the aluminum paint much, but I gave it a new coat with a spray can anyway. I inserted an automobile wheel weight into the tank body and secured it with Walthers Goo, bringing the car to about 3.5 ounces. I used bent carpet staples for foot stirrups secured under the plastic frame with epoxy glue and painted them black.  I made my own brake wheel support from a plastic flex track tie and used brass ladder stock to make what I thought would be a suitable ladder to the dome.

  The car runs fine on the railroad as it can deliver diesel fuel to the locomotive servicing facilities at both Yardley and Hillton. The car has homemade decals using my printing on a Testers’ decal kit.

  Another part of the fun with this project was learning about making my own decals drawn and printed with the home computer. This works because of black lettering on a light background. Home computers cannot print white lettering. I arranged my artwork to use just a part of a blank decal sheet tapped to a conventional sheet of paper for passing the small decal through the ink jet printer. That way one does not have to use a whole sheet of decal paper for such a small label.

   I was using a decal making kit by Testors. It comes with a few half sheets of blank decal paper, a spray can of sealer for after printing, and some software for the computer with some art work images more suited to the customized automobile kit hobby.

   This was my first attempt with the Testors kit and while it worked OK, I feel that I could have done better with my own art work as I think my lettering would look better with a heavier stroke. However, I tried bold lettering on a different project, which had several failures of the sealer spray on the decal paper to not dry, and gave up rather disappointed. I wondered if it was because of so much black ink causing the over spray to fail to dry?