“I Can Never Unsee That…”

I will say straight off that, in general, I’m not a rivet counter. Yes, I want to be accurate, but so long as a car is pretty close to a prototype, I’m happy. I have more than a couple of cars whose paint scheme never appeared on that type of car. Like the ScaleTrains Evans 5100 Double Plug Door Boxcar. Chessie never had them, so far as I can tell. But it looks decent, it gives me another “home” road car, and no one in my operating group besides me is going to know the difference. After my post about my last Chessie sighting, I was chatting with someone about Chessie 2-bay hoppers  and he couldn’t get past some details of the Intermountain models of this car type that don’t bother me at all.

This willingness to overlook errors seems to stop at the car itself, however.*

I have an unusual talent. I have a keen eye for typefaces and differences between them. What does this mean? Take a look at the image to the right. Can you see which letters are in a different typeface (what most people would call a “font”)? If you can’t I’ll help you out. The letters “ine” in the second instance of “fine” is in Times New Roman. The rest is in Palatino. If that was in a document, I could pick it out. At 11 or 12 point. I might not be able to tell you the font families just by looking, but there’s a reasonable chance I could if they were fairly common. Crazy, huh? (Useless, huh?)

This “talent” can be a blessing and a curse. When I worked in Technical Writing, it was a blessing. One of my responsibilities was to make sure everything we published conformed to our standards. Something like the above would drive me nuts if I left it alone. The other writers would think I was crazy if I marked up their doc with “‘ine’ isn’t in Palatino.” Until they looked. And sure enough…

So what does this have to do with modeling, you ask? Well, that’s where the curse part comes in.

I recently acquired an Athearn Genesis GP9 in Chessie paint. Number 6006 to be exact. I was pretty excited about getting it. Here it is, out of the box.

The vermilion stripes might be a tad too dark, but that’s what weathering is for. Otherwise, looks pretty sharp, right? Except…

Literally the first thing I noticed when I opened the box was the numbers. They were just… wrong. The “C&O” letters were close enough to Chessie’s unique marking style, but the numbers are off. Way off. The sixes aren’t awful, but those zeroes are not even close. (Compare my photo to the photo at the top of this post if you don’t believe me.)

Hardcore Chessie fans would likely notice this pretty quickly. But then, I would call this one a pretty blatant example. To be fair, most serious modelers of any particular railroad will notice these types of inconsistencies within their road(s) of choice. But I seem to have a wide range of “noticing”. So, because of my eye for this particular thing, there are cars and locos that I can’t deal with because the logo or numbering or lettering isn’t right. (Yes, this sickness of mine extends to logos. Shape. Thickness. Color.) This was great for The (now-defunct) Pixel Depot, (anyone want a turnkey business?) but isn’t necessarily great for my overall sanity. Or yours, if you know me personally.

As a result I spend a lot of time saying “Ugh, how could they not notice that?” I guess, in the end, this is good for the look of my layout, but sometimes I wish I could just overlook the issues. In these cases, if I really want something I need to start the project of stripping and re-decaling to make it right. And find time to do it.

Assuming, of course, the decals are even correct. It’s a vicious circle.