JJ & C RailRoad
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The rebirth of the Michigan Coffee Company The Michigan Coffee Company was a real business owned and operated by a relative many many years ago in the Detroit, MI area. It exists now only in my memories... Or does it? A while back my cousin and I were talking about his dad's old coffee company. He expressed his life long desire to make a "mini" fleet of delivery vans and maybe even boxcars in memory of what his father had accomplished decades ago. Well, long story short, my cousin had a hand painted picture of a early 1970's Ford delivery van from the business. It had the colors we needed for matching. He also had a rather large scrap of material cut from a really really old bowling league shirt. On it was a silk screened Michigan Coffee Company logo. In fact, it was a complete logo set. To my knowledge, the only remaining piece of artwork left in existence. It was carefully transported home and a high resolution scan was made. With the original returned to it's rightful owner I began a 2 day process of cleaning and recreating sections of the artwork. When I was done we had everything needed to bring the company back to life visually. So it begins... The donor car, a 2002 Aristo Craft FEC show car.
The first color applied to the car was Polly Scale F414131 Aged White - water base paint.
In one of my sons N scale magazines they had an interesting article about over spraying the roof on box cars. The idea is to duplicate the way cars are repainted in the shops. The sides are prepped and painted while the roof is left alone to catch all the over spray from the work done while the car is in the shop. I thought I'd give it a try on the coffee car to see if I like the effect. Here's what it looks like now but it may be better after the roof gets a bit of weathering done later.
The second color of the new paint job is Polly Scale F414242 E/L Maroon - water base paint. I did a quick tape job and loosely covered the top of the car with newspaper and shot the second color onto the car. I decided to paint the ends a solid color instead of making it a two tone like the sides. I think it gives a more prototypical style to it.
I'm not too worried about over spray along the taped edge's, bars and ladders. Most likely they will get rusted and weathered so you'll never see them anyway.
One of the last things to be done was to make a full set of decals appropriate for a 53 foot Evans double door boxcar. I actually mulled over the color of decals for weeks but finally decided to keep it simple and printed them using black on clear decal stock.
The exception to the all black decals were a few of the reporting marks. They were black printed on white decal stock to get the appropriate white borders.
And finally, the finished car. Well, finished but not weathered yet. That will be next...
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