Part 2: Cabeese, MOW, and other equipment, OH MY!

 Since I was on a roll with decals for the two industrial railroads, another languishing project has been getting some GNW cabooses and other equipment painted and lettered. You may have noticed in the photos, the GWN has been using SP equipment and cabeese. This needs to change! 

Of note, the GNW has 2 paint schemes for their cabooses. One is a kind of orange, reminiscent of the D&RGW; the other is a classic "red caboose" theme. Both use the same lettering size, but one uses black lettering, and the other uses white. 

 

Neither had the GNW logo, so the new decals would take care of that deficiency!

I had previously worked with Circus City to make up GNW decals for engines. So I reached out to him for this rolling stock. I was mostly interested in packing in as many GNW logos and lettering as I could, since I could get things like equipment data decals fairly easily and at a much lower cost per sheet. So working with Matt over at Circus City, we came up with a sheet that included a number of sizes of logos and lettering. Then came the question of numbers. Numbers.

Well... In the past I would piece together numbers to make things the way I wanted them to. With custom decals that is no longer a problem. I can set up the "number jumbles" to make whatever number sets I want. But what numbers? In the past, frankly, I got lazy and often just picked a series of numbers that looked OK. That would never do now! So off to a spreadsheet to come up with the railroad's numbering scheme.

I pored through SP, GN, ATSF and even private car owner rosters to see what they had done. (Sorry UP, you are not on the list.) There really was not a whole lot of magic to things. Types of cars each had various series of numbers assigned to them. Nothing too magical, other than it was defined. A lot of the bigger RRs are using 6 character number sets. Since the GNW intends to be a scrappy bridge line, they would likely not have that much private equipment. And even the IPD box car craze did not necessarily require the creation of 6-character car numbers, even for the more well-known lessors. I also did not like the look of 4 or fewer numbers. That went too far the other way; to me at least. 

Over lunch, I pulled out an excel spreadsheet and mused together a conceptual equipment series index based on the major groupings and types of cars extant in the 1950's thru the 1980's. 

Why the gap to get to cabooses? Well, because I had lettered several of my cabooses with a "07" prefix and I did not want to redo them!

So off to put together groups of numbers that would give me plenty of caboose numbers, MOW numbers; and box car, tank car, flat and hopper car numbers. Sent off to Circus City and... wa-la... back they came with this:

 

Will print this in both black and white. This will give me plenty of options. A bit like a kid on Christmas Eve - cannot wait for these decals to get here!