Kitbashing Grand Trunk 719 - Part 3

The work continue on GTR 719.

Among many things, the firebox was slighlty enlarged with putty to make it sloped just like the prototype. A new ashpan was build from styrene sheet to conform to the real prototype. I still need to file the plastic shell that exceed the ashpan.

Magic Sculpt putty was used to fill boiler slots. Since the running board will be lowered, I need the boiler to be extended down. I used paper strips to keep putty in place until it dried hard. If the loco was painted black, that shouldn't be a big problem, but a Russian iron boiler won't forget such details.

The domes were reattached to the body using screws. Since the domes are black and the boiler in Russian iron, I prefer to paint them separatly and attach them later.

The only exception was the steam turret which is permanently attached to the boiler.

Correct cab windows were also added. I feel the frame are a little bit large even if I carefully measured them on scaled pictures. I'm afraid one painted bright read, they will look odd. Maybe redoing it could be a very good idea.

You will see I cut then reattached the cab roof overhang. At some point, I got sidetracked while measuring the cab for modification. I was convinced I had to lower the roof and proceeded to remove it... until I found out the Bachmann cab, while not a 100% perfect match, was far better than I thought... Fortunately, I didn't butcher the overhang... unfortunately, I made my life harder and the roof is now much more brittle than anticipated. I'll cover it with a .25mm styrene sheet, hoping it it be enough to hide the problem and strenghten the parts together.

There's still a lot of prep work to do, but just adding the boiler straps is a good indication I'm in the more rewarding part of the work.

By the way, I've redrawn Grand Trunk lettering in AutoCAD using several pictures. The process was tedious as I had to draw each letter and each number individually to make sure they matched the prototype. Each character was reverse engineered to fit out the geometric rules used by the typograph to make them.

I was just not interested in using an "almost similar" commercial font, I want the real thing. While doing this, I found out GT had at least two variations on this classic paint scheme: one with bold numbers and stripes and one, more common, with regular numbers and thin stripes. I've drawn both.

Now I'm looking forward to recreate at least two CNoR paint scheme commonly seen in the early 20th century.

It should be noted I discovered Grand Trunk, Intercolonial and Canadian Northern shared the same number font on several locomotives. Also, the regular cab font was also the same for the three railroad. Temiscouata seems also to have used a  variation of the same font and I have photographic evidence QRL&PCo jumped in the bandwagon too. Well, it seems Canadian railways lacked imagination or hired the same designers or just copied available fonts from graphic standard books. The good thing is that reproducing many paint scheme shouldn't be too hard.