The Layout..

[Dan85]

Well, the packages finally arrived today, both small packages, but a nice treat regardless! So I hunkered down with a season of The Office and a fresh pack of decals and an undecorated E&C Shoppes wood chip car. Now I can't find any prototypical photos of Conrail ever owning such cars, so these are proto-what-ifs. (I can't recall the more commonly used phrase) And I would certainly be hesitant to include 'proto' in these since I sincerely doubt my marking decals are correct. Anyways, I had two originals I did earlier in the year, but I ran out of decals.



So after finally ordering some, I began work on the third of seven cars.



I had seen another modeler use reflective tape on a few of their cars, so I figured I'd give it a try because it seemed to work.

I also made a patch for the car too - I purchased an entire sheet of "NYC Grey Trim" from microscale and cut a small piece to appear as though the car has a section of metal replaced.



Also I now use some sort of decal softener for every decal application. I had been using Walthers Solvaset, but I felt the decals were wrinkling a little too much. So I tried Micro Set on these decals. It seemed to work really well - it didn't soften the decal to the degree Solvaset does, so it seems much more appropriate to use on flat surface decals. For the Conrail Quality logo it failed to really soften the decal enough to make it fit into the recesses of the car, so afterwards I was going to trim the left 2/3 off of the decal. As I was cutting the bad area and I tried applying solvaset to it in hopes to salvage the decal. Much to my suprise, it worked really well!





Well, that's that for tonight! Time to head out and plow!

- Dan