The reason Champ decals are no longer made is that He & his wife have both passed on, and no one stepped up to fill the void. I'm not positive but I think the equipment has been sold off as well, by now. I don't recall his wife's name, But she ran the business for a short while after his passing. Until her own health made her quit at which point she only sold what was in stock until her passing.

Charlie

Champ decals had I thought one of the nicest catalogs for road names and data sets around. As I recall they had data sets for freight cars in various fonts and colors and road names were available separately. This might not have been as accurate as some of the things available today but when many folks were free lancing road names or trying to reletter the more generic rolling stock of the 60s and 70s it was rather nice.

I was sad to see them go.

Rob, I keep the old Champ Freight Car Lettering Plan Book accessible for when my son calls from a Chicagoland train show and has found some Champ decals.  You can quickly determine whether a set is usable or not.  I've heard people complain about the Champ decal film being too thick but I think they were not following the instructions which specified that you soak the decals in water until they floated free and then applied them to the model.  I think Champ used more adhesive on their decal paper.  I decaled many Athearn boxcars with Champ decals in the 1970's when we knew so little about freight cars and that was about all we had for boxcars.

My son bought every LS&I ore car set Champ had available at the end.

Robert

I too have one of the old Champ decal catalogs along with an old Harold King catalog in my book collection. Although Harold King is back in business thanks to Midwest Trains, I just hate to throw either one away. They were very handy and my go to source when I was modeling in HO scale. Does that make me a pack rat??

No rich it does not and the news of harold king back in business is news to me, thanks for that!

Rich, do you have a link to the web site that sells harold king decals?

https://heraldkingdecals.com/

No affiliation on my part...

Neal

Neil thanks for the link! and the first page it opens to is hopper cars now how about that!

After closer inspection everything they have is too new for me to use. I was thinking i might find another source for some older Virginian, W&LE, B&O, P&WV, AC&Y and Pennsyand then the real prize would have been some Wheeling Terminal Railway, and Ohio River Railroad. But it is not to be.

Good to hear about the Herald King decals coming back. They have some road names I thought nobody made decals for.