As part of my ongoing preparation for my layout I have been experimenting with the livery for my rolling stock and Locomotives. I had planned to get the decals made from my own graphics file. As with a lot of first tries at good ideas there were a few gotchas. I thought I would share.

the design I settled on was magenta lettering on royal blue. 

This fitted well with the railroad back story and was a little different. I went ahead and composed the sheet using a free vector drawing package (I use Inkscape) and exported the drawings to PDF format files.

I looked into online sources for printing my decals and found only one local supplier. Unfortunately I was unable to contact them and as I wanted to keep the costs down until I was sure where I was going I bought laser decal paper instead. Those alps printers are over rated anyway, right?

The decal sheets were printed out on my friends colour laser printer. Remember to follow the instructions you get with the paper (if any) and remove the protective film from the decal paper before giving it up to th printer. Luckily no damage done.

There are many good decal videos out there and I watched a quite a few. The trainmasters tv one is good. By the way the gloss finish for the decals to go onto is important.

The decals went on easily enough but the final results were underwhelming.

It seems the density of ink from the laser printer while it looks great on white paper was not good enough to show up against a dark background. I’d be interested to hear if there is a way around this using a normal printer. I have seen Alps printers mentioned as being a block of colour so that would probably work.

i decided to work with what I had and changed my livery to lighter colours. I have tried yellow, light blue and tan so far and it looks ok. I am planning on using grey as the main colour for the Locomotives.