Bill Welch wrote:

I am in the process of decaling Sunshine's B&O's M27f and M15k and I
notice that near the handgrabs on the left end of each side there is is
a small rectangular stencil

This is not included in the decals of either. Does a decal exit for
this stencil somehwere in another set?

Bill,

I believe the answer is no, something for the B&OHS to consider. It is
a stencil with the painting information: such as the manufacturer use,
the date, etc. My understanding is that Chris Barkan did the masters
for Sunshine and in our prior discussions he was unaware of this stencil.

I possibly have the raw material to make decals as I have copied this
information from probably over 100 cars, mostly box cars, from my
field observations made in the 1960s. I have examples for cars last
painted in 1955 and 1956. I also have the sheet that explains the
information in the stencil. Unfortunately, many photographs have too
little resolution to resolve this small lettering.

Just last evening I was looking at some Xerox copies of M-55 boxcars
someone kindly sent me and it looks like there may be a start date
just after WWI when the B&O actually began to apply this stencil.

If there are well resolved photos may be Ted Culotta can perform his
magic and create decals from the photos. It would be a nice addition
for lettering B&O cars for the 1950s, unfortunately beyond the period
modeled by both Ted and Chris.

Always more question than answers ...

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Bob Witt

P.S. Remember the Class M-15K only ran until ~1955. After 1955 all
these wagon-top boxcars received new AAR style underframes and
received new sub-classes. This happened all at once so there is very
little overlap where both types of cars ran concurrently.