Modeling MoPac "Eagle River" Pullman 6-6-4 (Part 5) - Thinking Out-of-the Box... Models

This project has certainly been an adventure, challenging yet fun and rewarding modeling experience over the last couple months.  Here we are in Part 5 already!  So with the painting finally (nearly) put to bed... I hope.  It's time to focus on the next steps.

Nearly completed "Eagle River".

This project has been on hold for the last month as I've waited for the new decals to be printed and shipped to me from Out-of-the-Box Models, and printed by V1 Models, I believe.

Now what am I going to do for the decals?  Champ?  Those at best are 30-40 years old at this point, and very thick...  Searching the web, I was able to find the following custom decal producer.

N-Scale Decals on H0-Scale Models... What?

OotBM's MoPac 6-6-4 artwork for their N-scale decals.

Out-of-the-Box-Models' MoPac 6-6-4 Decals (N-scale, but they offer to print mine in HO-scale)

After I communicated for a week or so with OotBM about this project, I've ordered OotBM decals. I also specially requested to be printed in HO-scale for my project.  As part of this conversation, I've  asked them to update their website so that the rest of the HO-modeling community can also order these if they want to build their own MoPac 6-6-4s.

Touching Up the Paint Work & Trim Painting

 I did decide not to use the stripe portion of the decals, as I'm modeling the lower trim molding, and trying to get the decal to stick to the raised feature I think could be problematic.  

Vestibule end of the car showing the stripe details.

Also the color of the decal strips was much too close to the 'Eagle Gray' of the lower carside, where as my Tru-Color 'Eagle Yellow' color paint that I ordered is much brighter.  The other change is that I think the black trim pinstripe is too fine on the stripe decal, so I'll be doing my own lower edge black stripe, same with the silver trim molding edges.

Blind-end of the car showing the details of the molding and stripe details.

For a while now I've been wondering if the prototype cars had a black stripe dividing the upper yellow stripe, based on the photos I had to look at.  However, now after painting the upper stripe, I've decided that the 'black stripe' was just the shadow being cast by the upper molding at the edge of the roof line casting a shadow on the yellow stripe itself.  So I'll not be doing anything more with that.  However, I may add a thin black trim line to cover the small amount of bleed from the edge of the yellow paint into the blue.

Left side with yellow trim paint and second coat of main colors applied.

Here's the overall view of the left side of the car before decaling.

Right side with yellow trim paint and second coat of main colors applied.

... and the right side of the car with the painting completed.  The MoPac Gray on the roof had a failure when I masked it instead of removing the roof... so I may have to remove the roof and reshoot that portion, and I may go slightly darker.

Decaling

I tried using the OotB decal artwork sample that they posted a few years ago compared to the windows, but this was not accurate.  The windows certainly do not match up with the decal lettering as shown in the diagram.

Out-of-the-Box artwork or lettering diagragm for their N-scale 6-6-4s.

Also I'm not modeling the "Gunnison River", but the "Eagle River", so any placement is going to have be recalculated for the center point of the name I'm using.  On the positive side, the decals are fairly good quality and easy to work with. 

I worked out the body length of 82'6" and offset my measurements by 3" to each side, thus centering the 41ft mark on my scale rule, as the center point of the car.  A mechanical pencil mark is placed on the roof and the skirt to note centerline of the car.

Centered decals applied to the letterboard and lower side sheet.

The upper lettering measured out about 16ft long, and the car name at about 7ft.  Thus I layed the ruler over the car side while I was positioning the decals to get them centered.  For "THE EAGLE" I ended up making offset marks on the roof to show the equalized ends of the space.  I think it ended up being more like 16.5ft long, so I had to balance the extra decal length beyond both offset marks about 3" in scale.

The right side of my MoPac "Eagle River".

So far so good.  Missing from the OotB decal set is the small "M.P." lettering that goes just inboard of both ends of the letterboard.  So I'll have to work out suitable lettering.  I'll probably use some from extra San Juan SP Steam Decal LD LMT and LT WT tender decals and cab-rear "SP" decals.

The left side of my MoPac "Eagle River".

But for now the car's looking pretty good.  I decided that silver Sharpie marker is pretty good to do the molding strips above and below the windows.  However, my marker's getting rather dry, so next time I'm in an office supply store, I need to pick up a couple of new ones.

I have to be REALLY careful not to slip and get a silver mark on the Eagle Blue or Eagle Gray portions of the sides.  So I may need to do a proper clear-coat to seal all the decals in before I finish the silver stripe work.

Continuing Research on MoPac's Grand Canyon Connection (Pullman car route 4506)

The Grand Canyon ran a through connecting Pullman sleeper from Richmond to New Orleans via Houston starting in 1947.  The car assignment shows up on the consist sheets as Pullman route 4506, while the Chicago-Richmond car is 4024.  Early on the 4506 route showed as "Richmond-Houston" on the Santa Fe consist sheets, but in various successive consist publications the Houston was scratched out and replaced with New Orleans in handwriting, eventually being written in as New Orleans officially.

The use of a MoPac car on 4506 was done away with in 1954 with the start of the new San Francisco Chief's dedicated all natural metal trainsets and a new thru sleeper to New Orleans.

Santa Fe System Map

Santa Fe System Map from wiki website.

Certainly the vast majority of the route miles were Santa Fe's.  So I'm not sure if the figure of 1 in 3 days the car was a MoPac car or not.  Also given that the MoPac only had 4 of these 6-6-4 type cars, that restricts how many they could have available at anytime.

The Grand Canyon connection to Houston off the Trans-con was made at Clovis, NM, right on the Texas boarder in the map above.

MoPac System Map

MoPac System Map from wiki website.

As we can see, the majority of this map shows how small the section of the route is that was covered by MoPac.

In Closing

As for the Grand Canyon consist research, I'll be diving into more detailed consist details in a separate blog post fairly soon.  

June 1947 Grand Canyon No.23N consist sheet.

The 1947 and 1954 consists are quite straight forward for the basic 'minimum consist'.  However, I'm still trying to get over the headache of dealing with all of Santa Fe's trains and their spotty 1949 Consist Sheets which would be a C-rate movie, due to the continuity errors baked into the plot!

Jason Hill

Related Articles:

MoPac's 6-6-4 "Eagle River" in The Eagle scheme
Modeling MoPac "Eagle River" Pullman 6-6-4 (Part 1) - Research and Fluting - Starting into my MoPac 6-6-4 project.

Modeling MoPac "Eagle River" Pullman 6-6-4 (Part 2) - Finish Molding & Masking - Getting the 'Eagle River' ready for paint! (shown with my 'shadowlined' Santa Fe "Surprise Valley" 6-6-4).

Modeling MoPac "Eagle River" Pullman 6-6-4 (Part 3) - Painting, Or Not? - Like with all good investigations, before the painting... It's best to color-sand the witness! Also I had to finish the lower trim molding before painting.

Modeling MoPac "Eagle River" Pullman 6-6-4 (Part 4) - The Blue and the Gray... (Again) - I didn't like my custom mixed colors and I found that Tru-Color makes the right MoPac colors that I was having the most trouble with mixing myself. So we try it again!