-----Original Message-----
From: main@RealSTMFC.groups.io <main@RealSTMFC.groups.io> On Behalf Of Tim O'Connor
Sent: Saturday, April 04, 2020 9:23 AM
To: main@RealSTMFC.groups.io
Subject: Re: [RealSTMFC] New Run: Rapido HO Scale General American Meat Reefer


My favorite roof shots of Swift reefers.


On 4/3/2020 10:19 PM, Richard Townsend via groups.io wrote:

The Swift cars had BCR roofs, including the red cars. Obviously they
weathered to streaky gray and red. I’ll defer to others on the silver,
at least for the wood sided cars.

On Apr 3, 2020, at 5:30 PM, Todd Sullivan via groups.io
<sullivant41=yahoo.com@groups.io> wrote:

Brian,

Nice catch. My Rapido reefers are in storage in Syracuse, so I'd
better make a note to check the SRLX car when we are reunited. I'll
also check my Sunshine kit that is painted but not assembled. Hmmm,
maybe I should dig it out and finish it during this corona virus lull.

Fun story: Tony Koester had 26 of those red Atlas reefers, and Atlas
only produced about 6 numbers. As occasional yardmaster in
Frankfort's eastbound yard, I got awfully tired of seeing numbers
repeat in a cut of Swift reefers from Kansas City. So, I offered to
rework them a bit and renumber them, working in batches of 4-5 cars.
The next operating session, Tony presented me with a box with all 26
(!) along with some dry transfer numbers that were exactly right for
the Atlas lettering. The dry transfers didn't work very well, and I
decided it was easier to hand re-letter the cars. I found that any
of the numbers 0, 6 and 9, could be easily transformed into another
of those numbers, and the same for 3, 6 and 8, so that's how they got
renumbered. I tried using decals for the journal repack data, and
the first car took about 2.5 hours to get the decals settled into the
scribed siding on both sides. Nope, that wasn't going to work,
either, so I faked the RPKD data with tiny dabs of white paint. It
works with the 2 foot rule - no one has mentioned that it isn't
legible, and I still use the technique on my models!

Todd Sullivan

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*Tim O'Connor*
*Sterling, Massachusetts*