The STC Equipment Roster (Custom Models)

Here's a look at the custom-painted equipment in STC livery. After developing the concepts for colors, logos, and schemes, I began painting a fleet in earnest starting around 2004, averaging a handful of cars per year. I am very fortunate to have access to a rare and expensive ALPS printer, which is the only reason I can do the white graphics. Unfortunately ALPS no longer supports these and they have a finite lifespan... so with contingencies being necessary, I'm planning on some alternate schemes using darker logos, etc.

This was the very first one, back in 1991. I used a green paint marker to color out the crappy Tyco BN logos, then tried to come up with a new carrier reporting mark. I already knew I liked "Saint Canard Midland" as a name... but quickly realized that the abbreviation "SCM" was, um, a bit too "scummy" for comfort! Would make sense for MOW cars though.

This boxcar became a test bed for other weathering experiments. Most of it washes off that Tyco supergloss....

The next one was a test of coming up with an image. I expanded on this one a few years back, by adding the "Tree-Track" logo, although it had been lettered long before.

This is still representative of many concepts I continue to use, and will be used as a "transition car". The herald font is from the old STC before the new image of the late 60's. The red & white (while adopted from an Old Spice car on the cheap) represents the STC adopting a bit more color and variety, akin to what the DT&I became famous for.

My very first 100% custom paint job, which left lots to be desired. Still, you need to learn how to mix paint, and what colors work well. I also discovered that trying to fit solid text between and over ribs is a royal pain, so I began designing decals to fit.

This car is supposed to be a more sparsely-decorated modern car, using the typical STC colors of blue and/or green.

The next custom-paint went much better! Unfortunately I got excited and decaled before I used glosscoat - oops - so you can see the film. That's an almost inevitable learning mistake that all modelers make, but once I put some weathering on the car it will hardly be noticeable.

On this car I began to come up with service branding and PR gimmiks - "Detroit CARgo!" - a la the Chessie System's labeling of specialized cars, and Santa Fe's "Shock Control", among hundreds of other prototype examples....

#1485 - "One for 85" - is a tribute to the 85 Chicago Bears Superbowl team: a huge car in appropriate colors for the best there was! Blue and Orange is the designated scheme for Auto Parts cars.

And now onto some of my favorite class of cars: CenterFlow hoppers!

The first center flow test scheme, now using the official "STC Blue". This is an old Front Range kit I picked up used; I stripped all paintwork but the data. The blue is only on part of the car sides as a test: partly to see how it would look, but mostly because I did not have data decals designed yet so I needed to reuse the factory-applied data.

By way of evolution, the next car shopped was almost all-blue, except for the sill. The real reason for this again was lack of data decals, but it makes for an interesting story and variant! Besides, there's a prototype precedent the Chessie System inconsistently applied contrasting sills to its own centerflows in real life.

The fully-realized scheme is seen here on these Athearn 2970 2-bay undecs. I finally made my own decals for all the typical data, making these much easier, cheaper, and more realistic to make. There is data on the car ends as well!

A third car, #3209, is currently in interchange on Tony Cook's layout in Kansas City.

The same "stripe-side" experiment was done on 3-day cars (which, being primarily assigned to Ag service, mostly use Green instead of Blue). The 3302, an Accurail 5400 ACF, was painted at the same time as the 3201. I scavenged data decals from a single-car Microscale set - an expensive and wasteful proposition which led me to develop my own decals for subsequent cars.

The full-green scheme is shown here on these Intermountain undec ACF3650 kits...

...as well as these Atlas Trainman undec 3650's. I love the unusual "open cages" on the ends of the car (they do not touch the top of the hopper body). A third car from this series is on interchange in New Hope, PA.

Another personal favorite of mine are cylindrical hopper cars, which most commonly carry grain. For these, I introduced another branded service: the "Harvest Hauler". STC 3800 is an Atlas 3-bay undec with an aftermarket Plano etched-metal roofwalk.

This Atlas 6-bay #3865 keeps its original plastic roofwalk, but is the first STC car I bothered to weather... just a light touch on this one.

These quirkily odd covered "clamshell" coil gondolas have ALWAYS been a favorite of mine! While they were very rare and quickly became obsolete, I still had to add some to the STC roster.

I made a complete decal kit to perfectly match and recreate the factory data, as can be seen next to the somewhat scarce AHM/ Life-like Illinois Central offering:

Invert the colors on the car and covers, and you get a more typical STC coil service scheme, see on this Evans cushioned coil car by Walthers.

The STC owns some trailer-train racks, and was an early adopter of the auto-rack concept. STC road panels are applied in a variety of colors at the whim of the paint shop, with blue preferred for yellow cars (as seen on this heavily-weathered bi-level)...

...while purple was chosen to give a subtle touch of color to an otherwise drab brown tri-level.

The STC saw the writing on the wall for the impending intermodal revolution, and not only adopted the concept, but co-branded a separate subsidiary.

A caboose still brought up the rear in those days of course. This one was customized to commemorate the birth of STC's "little live mascot".

Finally, a look at an alternative revenue producer! The STC sub-leases cars to certain cars in captive client service, as billboards. By keeping these in captive service, the ICC ban on "general billboards" is null. A true win-win as the client receives additional publicity and exposure, keeping demand and traffic revenues up while the STC charges for the paint job and other incentives for the rolling billboard.

(heh heh, I always thought a cool thing about painting your own stuff, is putting it back in the box and pretending it's actually "real" or something).

And finally, a service vehicle. This Trident Ford F250 is a tad too modern, but it's all I could find and I like how it turned out. I do need to dirty the hubs a bit though.

Currently in development, is this scheme for a batch of new special-service insulated mechanical refrigerator cars. Owing to their unorthodox design, the STC is custom-branding them as "Arcti-Cars". Pubic Relations is an important part of the STC Railroading philosophy.