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NPC Tender Logo

There it is, what I consider to be one of the most attractive logos to grace the side of a tender.  The NPC adopted it some time in the 1890s and it carried through to about the time the North Shore took over just after the turn of the Century.  But where to find one in prototype colors was my challenge.  All the photos from the era show it in black and white.  This photo of NPC No 13 is an example.

Creating the Images

I contacted Boone Morrison, a NPC fan who has written a long series of articles in Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette.  Boone pointed me in the direction of Clover House who offers a 1:24 version of the logo.  I ordered the logo.  It arrived.

Imagine my dismay when these beautiful dry transfer decals arrived,  They were designed to be placed on the side of a boxcar.  Aside from the fact the logo never appeared on a NPC boxcar, they were way too big.

The upside is I had two decals with the correct colors and letter overlay, which you can tell from the logo at the top of the page is fairly complicated.  So I took one of the two logos and attempted to transfer the three separate transfers (one each for red, yellow, and green) onto white paper so they could be scanned.  The first transfer went on pretty well, especially for a klutz with no dry transfer experience.  When I attempted to remove the paper after rubbing on the second dry transfer, parts of the first transfer came up.  It was a disaster.  Time to regroup.  Only one precious logo to go.

My wife Janet is a talented computer graphics artist.  After leveling me with her scorn for my inadequate skills, she grabbed the logo from my desk and fired up Photoshop and her scanner.  She scanned one color at a time directly from the transfers.  She placed them in three different layers in Photoshop and started working on aligning and ordering the colors.  When she finished, it looked something like this.

Not too bad.  But notice the white around the colors where the meet.  And the yellow is supposed to border the red and green all the way around.  you can just barely see it in a few places.  As far as she was concerned it was good enough for a logo I was going to reduce to about 1 inch square.

But I wasn't satisfied.  After all, this is the Holy Grail for Pete's sake.  So when she wasn't looking, I converted her Photoshop file to a JPEG and imported it into Paint.  "You lost half your resolution when you converted the file and now you're working on my Photoshop file with PAINT !!!!????

She walked away, muttering something about Mars and Venus under her breath.  

I worked on that puppy for about 10 hours blown way up modifying it pixel by pixel.    My results are at the top of the page.  Here are the vertical dimensions in inches based on photo and model takeoffs.

In addition to creating the image, I also wanted to produce numbers for the side of the cab and for the number board.  The most common font used in those days is referred to as Railroad Roman.  That font can be downloaded through the Ozark Miniatures Web site.  It is shareware so you are asked to pay the author for the font.  Once the font is downloaded, you can install it on your machine so it shows up on any application that allows you to change fonts.  On Windows machines you need to open the Control Panel, go to the Fonts folder and follow the instructions.

From the photos it appears the NPC used two of the above logo colors in creating shadowed numbers for its cab sides.  I played with color combinations and the combination that makes the most sense to me on a black engine is yellow numbers with green shadows.  The numbers I created in Photoshop (without asking Janet for help this time) are on my office machine,  I'll post some examples when I get the chance.  Numbers should be 0.2 inches high to fit properly in the beveled area on the cab.

Creating Decals

Once you have an image, you can resize it to your heart's content.  I had an logo image all ready to go that's 1 inch high, the height that appears to be correct for the side of the Bachmann tender.  I also had shadowed numbers for the entire set of engines in the NPC roster that carried this logo.

I shipped a JPG file containing multiple copies of the logo as well as the shadowed engine numbers off to Stan Cedarleaf to produce decal sheets on his Alps printer.  Here's a scan of a portion of the decal sheet Stan produced.

Applying Decals

Decals were applied to the side of the tender.  Then it was reassembled.

(c) 2007 Iron Horse 1:29