Neal TRAINZ Steam for Frisco

Gold Stripes

Frisco passenger steam locomotives had a gold stripe pattern on the tender and under the cab windows. Old hands will have to give the exact beginning and end dates. The beginning was around the mid-1920's when the 1500 - class 4-8-2 Mountains were delivered. Mike Condren's collection of 4-6-2 Pacific photos (see the link in post #16) has the gold striping on more than half of the locomotives. I am not sure whether the striping continued to the end of steam use on passenger trains.

Nichols Heart Plate

When the locomotive was fitted with a Nichols Thermic Siphon, they put a heart-shaped plate on the smoke box in front of the locomotive under the stack near the builder's plate. Follow the link to the picture of 1505 (http://www.frisco.org/vb/attachment.php?attachmentid=12430&d=1293495730)
and look under the stack just above the running boards right behind the headlight. There is a round disc plate. That is the Baldwin Builder's plate. Above that are two rectangular plates and the Nichols plate is above those. I incorrectly referred to it as "Nicholson," but it should be "Nichols," and I will edit post #16 to fix that.

Go ahead and put stripes on both 4-8-2's. They were the pride of the roundhouse (and still are), so "when ya got it, flaunt it!"

George

 

During the time of tender and cab striping, the numbers and FRISCO were in gold on the passenger steam locomotives.

 

Thanks again for the info George. If I understand correctly then freight locos didn't have the stripes. I'd like to skin one of each if it's historically accurate for 1506 and 1508. I found a pic of 1506 and it sure doesn't look like it had stripes. I'm close to posting some pics here with the stripes.

Edit:

Here a couple of pics. What does everyone think? It's getting closer...

 

By golly, I think you've got it!

The numbers look good and the shade looks right, too.

Did you use a type face for the numbers? Which one?
What type face did you use for "FRISCO" by the cab?
Some of the previous Frisco skinnings used a bold type face for the numbers that ended up somewhat "gloppy." Yours looks just right.

I guess you have to mess around with shades to get the right shade and luminosity of the gold color, too. Do you do that in Windows Paint? The shade of gold looks very good.

George

 

I used Engravers MT for the numbers. It's not perfect but it's pretty close. I've been using that font for all my reksins. For the "FRISCO" I used Arial Rounded MT Bold.

I'm using Photoshop 5. I had to play around with the luminosity, shading, contrast, hue, etc. a lot more than a normal reskin. Ben Neal has applied the numbers and logos to all his locos / tenders in a unique way using alpha channels. This has some pros and cons. The pros, he uses the same file for all his numbering. Once you have your colors satisfactory you can simply change a few digits in the psd file, convert it back to a tga file and away you go. The same file can be used on all his work with some minor changes. The cons, I'm not good yet working with alpha channels so it was a lot of trial and error for me. Someone that knew what they were doing could have knocked it out in a fraction of the time.

I'm going to leave 1506 in the basic white lettering. I need something for freight.

I can send you what I've done so far if you like. I might approach davesnow from the Trainz forums about creating a couple of meshes to add to the existing one. Like headlight shade and such. I'm assuming it can be done with PEV's tools.

I think I'll try skinning some of the smaller steamers now you suggested. I like anything Frisco but I really want to have some steamers in my collection that could have commonly been seen on the High Line.

 

Experience indicates PEV's Attach tools can be used to attach small stuff as needed.

Ben Neal set out building this series of locomotives to be the kind used on a secondary line, so his intent was to give you what you need for the High Line. He got extremely close on some of them, unfortunately others are frustratingly far from Frisco.

You have the Mike for freight. Think about 1508 and 1509 gold striping and all slamming past each other on double track at a combined 80 per...!

Thanks for the type face and color adjustment information. It might be possible to do the same thing in Paint or The Gimp.

George

 

What is the Mike?

I think MS Paint is pretty limited but I've heard from several reliable sources that GIMP has all the features of Photoshop. I had photoshop and just started to learn by trial and error so that's what I use.

 

The "Mike" is the 2-8-2 USRA Light Mikado, your 4009, 4015 or 4026.
Gimp has been hard to use for direct editing in my meager attempts at re-skinning. Something about the settings (which I cannot figure out how to change) saves targas that TRAINZ does not like. I have had to open as bitmaps, then save as targas using Irfanview.

George

 

What do you think? I tried to make the font look a little grimy.

 

Jim James is right. Both re-skins look very nice with good textures.

He also is right that the bell ahead of the stack looks odd on the re-skin of Ben Neal's Baldwin Missouri & North Arkansas 4-6-0M as a Frisco 4-6-0 in the high 600/low 700 number range.

Steam is devilishly hard to re-skin because appliances can be put in so many places. Railroads moved things around within classes, too. For instance, Mike Condren's website shows fifteen different 4-6-0's in the 600-799 number range. Three have the bell just ahead of the cab while eight have their bell behind the stack. Four had the bell between the sandbox and steam dome. Examination of the 4-6-0 photos on this website will show similar variation.

A re-skin is a digital re-paint so the final product depends on the starting model. Neal's models created a dilemma. One model had the headlight centered on the smoke box but had the bell in the wrong place, the other had the bell between the sandbox and steam dome, but had a high-mounted headlight. The choice appeared to be to re-skin the model with the centered headlight because that looked more like Frisco.

Condren's website gives a way out, however. Notice photos of 634 and 668 have a high-mounted headlight with the bell between the sandbox and the steam dome. Neal's Atlanta, Birmingham and Coast 4-6-0H has that configuration, so it could be re-skinned into either one of those. It may be possible to find photos of other locomotives in this class with that configuration on this website or in books.

 

4-4-0 Americans

Neal built two 4-4-0 Americans for TRAINZ: "Baldwin modern 4-4-0" kuid:96914:4890 and "Baldwin heavy 4-4-0" kuid:96914:4892.

The modern 4-4-0 has 60 inch drivers, 16 x 24 inch cylinders and burns coal. The heavy 4-4-0 has 63 inch drivers, 18 x 24 inch cylinders and is an oil burner. Screenshots of each one are attached and should be compared to 187 at http://www.frisco.org/vb/attachment.php?attachmentid=2748&d=1142738750 .

The comparison shows the usual complaints: headlights in the wrong place, the bell is in the wrong place for the heavy 4-4-0 and the general proportions suffer because the wheels are not quite tall enough. In addition, the whistle is on the dome on the modern locomotive rather than ahead of the cab.

Discovering all this made me sad after downloading these because I really wanted to re-skin one (probably the "heavy" oil-burner) as a member of the 1928 rebuilt class. These had 69 inch drivers 17 x 26 inch cylinders and were oil burners. For reasons above, I am afraid a re-skin just will not work, however. One of these could stand in for an earlier locomotive of that wheel arrangement, but Collias mentions in Frisco Power that most of the others were gone by 1932. The rebuilds, on the other hand remained on the roster until the end of steam. Some research in this website may find a 4-4-0 with compatible dimensions that would yield a better candidate for re-skin.

 

These look great. I would love to have more Frisco stuff in Trainz for sure!