Somehow I am amassing a string of LGB East Broad Top hopper cars. Well, narrow gauge is narrow gauge, right?

When I see a string of cars, all with the same road number, that just looks wrong to me, so I have been changing the road numbers on my hopper cars. They all came numbered 880, so I needed to change the numbers on all but one of them.

Changing the number on a car isn’t as difficult as many might think. The numbers are a simple stencil font, so I printed out the numbers approximately to the proper size in a stencil font.

Then I decided what number I wanted to change the 0 to. On one car I changed it to a 9. On this example I changed it to a 6. First I determined what parts of the 0 I don’t need, and carefully scraped off those parts with a sharp Xacto knife. Being careful to not gouge the side of the car, I slowly and carefully just scraped off what I didn’t want.

Once that was done, I took some white paint and carefully painted in the rest of the 6 freehand, using the printed numbers as a guide. Any mistakes I made, I scraped off when the paint was dry and then went back and touched up the number again. My hands aren’t as steady as they once were, so it usually takes me about 3 passes of painting and scraping to get a good letter or number.

The other thing I needed to change on the LGB hoppers were the side frames on the trucks. Since the EBT operated much later into the 20^th century then many narrow gauge railroads, they used Vulcan trucks under their cars, instead of the Arch-bar trucks the LGB cars come with. The Bachmann narrow gauge hopper cars come with Vulcan trucks, and I have a stash of them I purchased cheep for another project. But I cant just put Bachmann trucks under an LGB car. The Bachmann truck bolster has notches in the bolster that line up with the bolter bearing blocks on the LGB cars. So I took the side frames off a set of Bachmann trucks and put them on the LGB truck bolsters. But, there was too much side play in the wheels using the mismatched bolster and side-frame combination, so I had to put #4 nylon washers on the wheel axle ends to reduce the side-play.

I just have one more car to renumber. But that will be a project for another day. This summer I will also need to make coal loads for my 2 new to me hopper cars.

Yes, I know. After I took these pictures I realized the the hopper door on the one car is open. LGB hopper doors tend to pop open on me, I plan on fixing that “feature” with a little double sided tape.

I like what your up to David, Those look real nice. You can even take 'em out for a test run given our current weather!

The Friends of the EBT sells dry transfer lettering sets for the EBT hoppers from all 3 “eras” of hopper lettering. They’re 1:20.3, but will work well for the LGB and Bachmann 3-bay hoppers as well. To match the font used on the LGB hopper car’s numbers, you’d actually want the “1920s era” hopper lettering. The EBT switched to a sans-serif font for the numbers in the 30s, and stayed with that font for the numbers when they went to the “acorn” herald.

BTW, David, what font is that for the numbers? I looked and looked for one that came close to what the EBT used, but ended up drawing my own.

Later,

K

Thanks Randy.

Kevin, I could buy transfers to get it right, but I am not spending the money to change just one digit.

In Microsoft Word I used the stencil font to print out numbers for reference.