As my current layout nears completion, I'm thinking of my next project. Tne Northern Pacific Project (NPP) has been my first serious attempt at a scale model railroad and I've really enjoyed it. There have been the usual miscues and false starts, but the accumulated knowledge in magazines and online has been tremendously helpful. Coming up on three years active in the hobby and building the layout, I've found that I prefer prototype modeling and on the hobby side operations and scratch-building are what I look forward to. 

I would like to start decaling some of my data only cars sometime soon.   I have not been able to find pictures of freight cars (the rr I want to model was bought out in about 1901) and I probably will want to revise it's history to show it still existing in either the 1920's or 1950's.   So I will need to create my own lettering patterns - which has been fun.  Microscale shows 2 predominant alpha/number fonts -  "Railroad Roman" and "Gothic".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goKnQ66VpWg