Rib redux and “the battle of the ampersands”

Readers may recall the account of the rib installation. Omscaler is delighted to report a more innovative method was used to make side ribs. Faster to do and seems to appear more realistic (perhaps?). Glad the ribs are done. What happened the following Thursday was a tale to be told. The following account is from a post omscaler did on a popular forum. It is presented here “in the vernacular”.

Wow! Am impressed again! So much going on. I finished the rib application phase for the open top hoppers. Thursday was "the battle of the ampersand". First a little background. A while ago I ran short of letter size printer paper. When I went to the office supply store, somehow, I got into a conversation with the lady in the print shop department. She said the print shop now used 24# paper as the 20# paper used too much ink. I explained that I used the paper for the model railroad. The upshot of this was that she just gave me a number of sheets of the 24# paper as a free sample! Happy, happy, joy, joy! Next, the ampersand. The GM&O ampersand is not the standard ampersand. It was apparently designed by a drunken Bulgarian (my apologies to drunken Bulgarians). It looks like a Cyrillic "yeh", a backwards three, with a little inverted "T" tail on the right bottom. I could not find it on the interweb, even to purchase. So, what we did was scan it in as black on white (I need white letters on black). Two tries on the scan (needed jpeg, not pdf). Pulled it up in Paint 3D. Got the colors reversed. Manipulated it with a snip and cut app as well. Imported it to the spreadsheet where reside the reporting marks and Etc. And voila' we got a good test print. Fyi, this had to be reduced from a font size seven at a thirty percent reduction. So, you see, I have been having fun! This is the 'mostest words I ever put on here. Sorry it is so long. Be well, safe and fun to be with! 

 As readers can see, we won the battle. Omscaler is optimistic we can indeed apply the road name and reporting marks with the original ampersand. Omscaler strives for realism as much as possible on The Very Small Railroad. We continue to labor, omscaler