Another Train

I've been very busy, the past four days, working on another toy train for my grandson's upcoming birthday. What has that got to do with dolls, you ask??  Absolutely nothing!  Except that it's kept me away from my doll work and posting photos here.

So, just in case someone might want to try creating a customized train set for some favourite child, I'll share how we did it. 

Our grandson is nuts about trains, so every Saturday his Dad takes him for rides on either the GO train, the LRT, the subways, and sometimes the UP Express. We created a GO train set for him two Christmases ago....

This time we were asked to make a version of the UP Express, which is the train that goes directly from Union Station in downtown Toronto, to Pearson International Airport. I had no idea what it looked like, so went to the Internet to find some photos...and printed them out....

Then Jan removed the tops off six old Brio wooden train cars.  he made new train cars out of wood, shaping them to represent the UP Express cars. However, they had to be a lot shorter that the actual train cars, so they could still go around a curve on the wooden train tracks.

​The new train cars and engines were painted solid white, and it took a while before I figured out how to paint them. I hadn't been very happy with the irregular windows on the GO train. I can't do straight lines very well, and I didn't find painter's tape very helpful last time. And forget about painting all those tiny details!! So I needed another way. I thought maybe I could use the computer and print out the details, but I don't know how to do art on the computer. But I can scan, and make things bigger and smaller,, so came up with an idea.

I photographed the train car sides and ends straight on, then enlarged them to make much larger 'templates',  to trace onto good quality drawing paper....

I drew on all the window and door details, coloured them in with markers, and cut them out so i could scan them. I only needed the windows and doors, since the train cars would get painted in their distinctive coloured stripes, and have the printed windows and door glued on overtop...

After scanning and cropping around each train face, I added words and numbers in Photoshop, then dragged them all onto IPages, and shrank them to the correct size...

After printing them out, I had to cut out all the wagon faces and glue them on...

I had forgotten to put 'UP' on all the end doors, as well as printing end doors on the engines, so had to go print those out and glue the logos on each door individually....

I was quite impressed with how they turned out. Although I did make one 'blooper'.
I thought it would be fun to have a kid waving in one of the train windows - representing my grandson - but didn't clue in that I'd be duplicating it and gluing it on every end of all four passenger cars, and both engines.  So there's a LOT of kids waving now. 

Now they need several coats of varnish, to help protect the printouts.
​And I can get back to my doll work...