I have been studying under Bob Kutella at the IRM for about 10 years now and do most of IRM's more modern lettering jobs. I don’t have Bob’s steady hand or patience for so much fine brush work so vinyl has been my favorite. It fits well for cars and locomotives that used vinyl or spray masking from the 40s to the present.
Like CNW 411, we had little to go on as it was in Metra colors prior.

Here is a link to the work I did on CNW 411.
http://www.irm.org/gallery/Members_Weekend_2006/aaq
http://www.irm.org/gallery/cnw411paintproj/aer
http://www.irm.org/gallery/cnw411paintproj/aet
A similar herald was traced and along with historic photos dropped into to Adobe Illustrator. Once that’s done you scale to full size and trace as you would with a transparency. The decals are reflective white vinyl with a tinted film adhered over the red and black. The number boards were vinyl masking with black spray paint. Larger numbers were printed full scale and provided to the paint shop.

Similar work on CB&Q 9255 with a few twists.
http://www.irm.org/gallery/9255painting/aci
The herald was pretty much the same as CNW 411 but the reporting numbers below were originally hand painted imitation gold. I modeled vinyl low stick masks from photos and used a spray. Probably not a good choice for a steam engine where I have seen the brush strokes of the original artist.
The large script over the louvers had to be hand painted. A generous artist who made the decals for an HO “black widow” kit emailed me his work. The Way of the Zephyrs and Everywhere West was blown up from HO to full scale. Something that is no problem with the right files. With a little touch up a stencil was made from full scale prints and painted.

Putting the final touches on a big job is a thrill for me. The exterior vinyl I have tested outdoors is still holding up fine after 10 years. And the right type can be used as a spray mask as well. Computers have made it much easier to do the graphic work (I would much rather run Illustrator than AutoCAD). And for those of us operating part time with limited budgets it makes much more restoration possible.

We use some vinyl graphics and letters for interpretive and informational signage, and have used them on locomotives and rolling stock in a few applications, but two problems appear from them.

First, regardless of the claims, they simply do not last well when applied on paint outdoors. They will be sharp and clear for a year or three, and then the edges start to fray. The simple answer to that, of course, is to scrape them off and apply a new set. They are cheap enough to make that a viable option, but one still has the work involved in doing it.

Second, while vinyl lettering might (and I do say might) be acceptable on an otherwise modern piece of equipment, like the utility diesel locomotive used around the railroad, it is absolutely unacceptable in a museum situation for historic and heritage equipment. Restoration means just that, and any truly good and proper restoration requires the artifact be returned as closely as possible to its original state. Lettering a caboose built in 1913 with vinyl letters is not restoration, and many in the museum community would rightly see it as defacing, and in some ways even destroying, the artifact.

I agree vinyl letters have a place in this in some applications, but NOT for any historic and/or heritage equipment being restored by any museum worth its salt.

Vinyl self-adhesive letters are better than no lettering or vey crude painted lettering. Applying vinyl letters is much faster than hand painting them.

However they do tend to curl at the edges in the sun especially on dark color paint that can get very hot. They can cause problems where the original letters went across rivets, rough wood, or tongue and groove siding. You have to use stock vinyl colors which may not be correct. Most people have to use computer generated fonts that do not contain the modifications found on hand painted letters. If you know what to look for, vinyl letters or stencils really stand out (fortunately 99 +% of visitors don't notice).

In transit equipment most lettering done in the 1930's or before was hand painted. Decals came into common use in the 1940's. (Sacramento Northern started using them in the 1930's). Looking at late 1930's photos of Key System equipment, you can pick out the work of three different painters by the modifications they made in the letters.

SF Municipal Railway used silk screen to paint its logo on cars. Muni also used water release decals inside cars.

If you want to take pride that your restorations are as authentic as possible, hand letter them if that was what was used on the original.

Vinyl may well have a shorter life where it’s hot. The outdoor grade Gerber/3M we have been using at the IRM has an 8 year warranty if properly applied. It sticks best to freshly painted glossy surfaces. You are correct, no lumps, pimples or rivets will do. I apply it wet with a little window cleaner diluted 4 to 1 with distilled water. That gives you a couple chances to position and work the air bubbles out. Then press down again after it dries out when pulling the masking tape off.
It can last much longer but they de-rate it above 100 degrees or if applied horizontally as on a roof.
The reflective Scotchcal (same as fire trucks etc.) originally applied by UP to the turbine and DD-40 in 1960 although faded and cracked, is still stuck on well enough that it has to be chipped down to the primer to get rid of it.

The short answer is that it doesn’t look like period lettering.

The long answer is it doesn’t look like period lettering because…

The material is wrong. People may recognize it for what it is, and wonder if your whole paint and lettering scheme is bogus. Either that, or you’ve just instructed the public that yes, they really did have vinyl lettering during the Victorian era.

It doesn’t weather the same as the original lettering. I realize we don’t want our displays to weather, but they do. Peeling lettering that falls off the car side just doesn’t give the correct patina of age.

It is likely to be the wrong color. It doesn’t look much like paint, less like metallic decals, and nothing like gold or aluminum leaf.

If no one will take the time to learn the car painter’s skills, then it just hastens the very demise of those skills that this discussion is about.

That being said, there is a place for replica materials and techniques when the originals turn out to be made of unobtainium. Cut vinyl stencils just substitute for those cut from frisket, or oilboard, or lettering done freehand following pounce, and smoothly flowing edges are a better representation of the sign painter and leafer’s art than squiggly amateur work. The result will be paint, it can even have brush strokes applied if appropriate, and it will weather correctly. Vinyl stencils could even likely be used to apply the size for metallic leaf, not that I’ve ever had the opportunity to do so.

Vinyl stencils can also be used to replicate water slide decals, where the cost of only one or two decals would be prohibitive. My research on North Shore Line herald decals years ago showed the metallic gold to be a metal flake type of ink. This material doesn’t look like leaf; it also doesn’t look like vinyl. What it does look similar to is metallic automotive finishes, and that’s what we used, spraying directly on the car side through a frisket mask. The results were really sharp looking, and have stood the test of time well, since they were now done over thirty years ago. I wish I had an image to post, but don’t, and the IRM web site does not have any close-ups of the lettering on either CNS&M 714 or C&ME 354.

Water release decal paper is available in two dfferent types for inkjet or laser computer printers. You have to buy a 25 sheet package of 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper at a cost of a little under one dollar per sheet. That's a real quick way to create decals for interior lettering if black letters will do. Google decal paper for a vendor.

Interior lettering decals (also used for emblems on the exterior) for streetcars and the like were not at all like the decals used on models. The style that was used from the 1930s on did not have an adhesive film like the model stuff; they were varnish applied.

Also they this kind had a paper backing and a tissue front. The printed decal was floated off the backing paper along with the tissue and floated onto the final surface. Often a varnish had already been applied to the surface and was sticky. The tissue often had guide lines printed on it to help with the alignment. After the decal was in position the tissue was removed and a surface coat of varnish was applied to seal the decal in place.

These decals were made by the silkscreen process and sometime were made with two and three colors. Some of the Los Angeles Railway/ Los Angeles Transit Lines interior decals were made with a white panel background with black lettering. These have been replicated using two-ply vinyl lettering; one ply for the background panel and the other for the lettering.

We are aware of the home printer decal paper and it is very thin and fragile - designed for maybe 1/4 inch bits on a model. Try keeping one in one piece for a five inch tall number or letter!!

The other flaw in the process is that none of the home printers can reproduce metallic looking decals with gold or silver leaf backgrounds. The old ALPS printers could, but they are long gone and an ever diminishing hoard of print cartridges being used up or dried up.

Bob Kutella

I am sure it did, Jeff, but the example I gave was of a 1913 caboose, and that certainly did not use vinyl lettering.

The point here is restoration. If something like C&NW 411 used self-adhesive heralds, then using new duplicates of those is perfectly acceptable, but such things would not be appropriate or acceptable on some other equipment.

Vinyl lettering has its place, and we use it extensively for many applications from interpretive signage to some locomotives to cars constructed here for our own use. The material works well in the correct applications.

The original point of this thread was not to trash vinyl lettering, however. The point was some musing on the fact true sign painters, in the classic sense, are almost impossible to find these days, and one cannot do a proper museum-quality restoration on most historic and heritage equpiment without that dying art.

We've used vinyl lettering almost exclusively. Our guys with the golden kneepads have been adept at winning favorable prices or donations on these services, and the lettering looks fine for our purposes. It's a great timesaver.

Where we've wanted a better-than-usual quality job, we've used low-tack stickers as positive stencils, painting the carbody in the lettering color first and then spraying the finish color over it and removing the patterns. Of course, this means you have to get it right the first time, and assumes your contractor can spell, for example, "Ann Arbor."

Given proper application, the vinyl truck lettering has stayed attached at least as long as it takes the paint underneath to fade. Even the vinyl letters I cut out with a knife and stuck on our tool car when we needed reporting marks in a hurry in 1991 are still there, even though "NCCX 1701" doesn't mean anything on this planet.

There was a lot of graphic-arts knowledge associated with old railroad lettering that modern sign shops won't grasp unless you take pains to show them. If you don't fully understand the quirks of the old railroad typeface you're trying to emulate, the results will look funny even if you can't put your finger on the defect. Any artist you hire will probably never have worked with extended typefaces, which are necessary for passenger-car work.

On the few occasions when I've tried haltingly to hand-paint stuff, I've used the technique mentioned above of using a stripe of tape at the top and bottom of the letters. But this is for reference only: some parts of the serifs, and the capital "O's" and "C's" and some other characters must rise above this line or look too small.

And remember, "imitation gold" is really yellowish tan.

when I lettered 1522, I used a real Rube Goldberg system.
We had tracings of the numbers and the Frisco on the cab sides which we ran through a print machine where I worked and transferred them to Mylar media, which is a heavy plastic.
Using double faced tape, I taped the sheets up on the tender, then cut out the nubers with an Xacto knife, in effect having a stencil in place.
Mixed up Bronze Gold two part paint and sprayed.
A real sign painter would laugh me out of the shop, but it worked.

My father and I started our 2 ft gauge backyard railroad in 1989. Our original piece of equipment was a trolley that we purchased. When we repainted it in 1990, it had no lettering. By 1993, when we built our locomotive, we knew that it needed lettering. So, I just started painting. I've tried just about every method that has been mentioned in this thread. On our locomotive, I painted the lettering color first, applied cheap decals and then painted the body. Once the paint was dry, I peeled away the decal. I found that it was very difficult to get each individual decal aligned and space properly.

On other projects, I've made stencils and then sprayed in the letters - I didn't like the bleed through.

Our depot sign has vinyl lettering that a sign shop made for me.

So on and so forth. I have finally settled on making a stencil, then trace the stencil onto the car body or sign, then free hand paint the letters using the trace marks as guides. I keep all of my stencils so that they can be re-used when I do a repaint.

Making a stencil allows me to make sure everything is aligned and spaced correctly plus once I cut it, I can use it over and over again particularly, since paint never touches it.

Just thought that I'd chime in for what works for me.

One more thing, nothing makes me prouder than for someone to compliment all of our signs, etc. I always brag and tell them that I'm the sign painter!

Matt