The Tridaily Doorstop -- Bob's Mexicano Electric

[R.K. Maroon]

Almost ten years ago, I started a thread here called "Doorstop of the Week". It was well received. I kept up with it about a year before giving it up. It later got lost in a stack purge -- a lesson to maintain your threads if you care about keeping them alive.

I have acquired a good number of additional models in the time that has since passed. Many are projects and not in photo-ready condition, but enough are ready to run or close enough to it to where I can give it another go. I have a lot of photos "in the can", so I can post them more frequently, at least for a while. I am going to start with the models from the original thread. As before, I will keep a list here in this first post, which I will update as new models are posted.

By the way, "tridaily" is a real word. It has two meanings. I use it as "once every three days" instead of "three times a day"
Jim

Models posted to date:

001 -- Lobaugh MKT Auto Car
002 -- Lobaugh UP Auto Car
003 -- Alexander L&N Boxcar
004 -- Walthers PRR Boxcar
005 -- Scale-Craft MP Stock Car
006 -- Alexander PRR Tank Car
007 -- Lobaugh Milwaukee Road Boxcar
008 -- Rail Craft MP Gondola
009 -- Alexander NYC 4-4-0
010 -- Scale-Craft SFRD (Santa Fe) Reefer
011 -- Walthers C&NW Fishbelly Flatcar
012 -- Scale Model Railways T&P Boxcar
013 -- Lobaugh SP Chair Car
014 -- Lionel B&O Hopper
015 -- Scale Model Railways NYC Caboose
016 -- Alexander New Haven EY-3 Boxcab Electric
017 -- Walthers Great Northern Express Reefer
018 -- Alexander Drop-Center Flatcar
019 -- Walthers 3571 Steel Gondola
020 -- Alexander 70-ton 3-Bay Hopper
021 -- Scale Model Railways PFE Reefer
022 -- Lobaugh ATSF Stock Car
023 -- Varney/GMC/AN 4-6-0
024 -- Mi-Loco UTLX Tank Car
025 -- Lobaugh SP Wood Caboose
026 -- Icken CN GE-IR Oil-Electric
027 -- Icken PRR O-1 Electric
028 -- Scale-Craft Offset-Side Twin Hopper
Summer Break: Bob's Mexicano Electric

[R.K. Maroon]

# 1 -- Lobaugh MKT Automobile Box Car

Note that this car is hand-lettered and all-original:

[sarge]

Hardly a doorstop; slightly dogeared perhaps, but a nice old car that someone obviously put some time in back in the day.

How about calling this "Tri-weekly Vintage"? Some of this stuff is far too nicely built, built from good kits or scratchbuilds, plenty of finesse, good models of prototypes, just deserving of more respect than the "doorstop" moniker. Grin!

[E7]

That car is better detailed than a lot of modern stuff. Maybe you should put a minimum weight to qualify!

Cheers,
Rich

[bob turner]

Learn a new word - great way to start a week.
In aviation we had a "biennial review" - folks mis-pronounced and misspelled it universally, so they dropped the adjective completely.
The term "doorstop" originally had to do with sand cast brass models, but I think it has been expanded to cover most domestic metal or wood production, as opposed to plastic or brass imports.
In short - I vote for leaving the title as-is.
Happy to contribute with photos - delighted that there will be continuing MTJ activity in the near future.

[robert.]

When you say "hand lettered" Does that imply that someone used a paint brush to apply those letters?

[De Bruin]

Impressive car, not your typical old 50' double door either. The lettering and all that underbody detail sets this way apart from the donation pile stuff I'm currently sifting through.

[ScaleCraft]

I've got a couple of low baw freight cars stashed away. My "doorstop" boxcar is literally built on a chunk of something...oak? Heavy! Looks like milled in roof angles, ends and sides glued on. You can literally beat someone to death with it.
Doors permanently closed.
Keeps the truck springs compressed.

[R.K. Maroon]

The hand-lettering is really impressive (and, "yes" to Robert's question -- a brush was used to letter this model):



The car is marked (in the lower right of both sides -- and in the lower right of the photo above) "Lobaugh SF". That identifies it as a factory-built car. That would make the lettering the fine work of resident draftsmen Frederick Shaw. Hats off to him and to a time when penmanship mattered and was taught.

Sarge makes the argument that the term "doorstop" is seen as a pejorative term by some. He suggested "vintage", which is more neutral, and by using it perhaps others will tune in instead of tune out. I think there is some validity in this -- I even considered "vintage" myself before starting the thread. For the record, I use "doorstop" close to the way Bob suggests, "most domestic metal or wood production, as opposed to plastic or brass imports". The only difference is I would include scratch-built and kit-bashed models too -- not just production. Note by this definition that a doorstop doesn't have to be vintage -- a lot of modelers won't have any of those Walthers, Athearn, or All Nation kit cars (too crude compared to the rivet detail you get in Chinese plastic these days). Along those lines, a more accurate title might be "US O". As it is, however, none of these titles are completely inclusive. What really interests me, and what I mostly have on my roster, are craftsman models -- models built from kits or scratch, mostly by modelers. This includes a lot of newer models, some of which are even plastic or etched brass.

So, I don't know -- no title is perfectly accurate, and "The Tridaily Doorstop" is short and has a nice sound to it. I will probably stick with it after all.

Jim

[Dennis Holler]

You made me look, I have CNW double door 50 footer like that one, and darn it, it has the same Lobaugh SF in the same spot. Too bad the ladder and corner step partially obscure it but it is there. I'll post it over in my hand lettered thread over in the other forum since I can't attach a photo here lol... Bring that MKT over there too please!

[Rufus T. Firefly]

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[Rufus T. Firefly]

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[Dennis Holler]

LOL, Thank you sir,Yeah, that should have been obvious must have been thinking about dinner or something lmao.

So what is the deal on the tinly Lobaugh SF letters int he corner? some of my litho R40-10 PFE reefers have that and some don't as well but they are litho?

[R.K. Maroon]

Dennis, there are three things at work here:

First, all Lobaugh lithographed car sides will say Lobaugh SF. It doesn't matter if the car was factory-built or sold as a kit. The mark is printed on the side as part of the lithograph.

Second, most pre-war Lobaugh auto cars, box cars, and reefers were never offered with lithographed sides. Any such car that was factory-built car came with hand-lettering and the Lobaugh mark. Such a car sold as a kit either had no decals (mid-to-late 1930s) or were sold with decals (just before the war). The few non-factory hand-lettered Lobaugh cars I have seen did not have the Lobaugh mark (and did not have Lobaugh-quality lettering). I guess a modeler building a later kit could throw out the decals and hand letter it, and could could add the Lobaugh SF mark as well, but it's a good bet that never happened.

Third, a lithographed Lobaugh-like reefer is probably a Faber model, not Lobaugh. Merle Faber provided all the stamped metal parts for Lobaugh, at least up to the war. He also had his own line of products and kits sold under his own name. One thing to look for: The rivet patterns are not the same between the Lobaughs and the Fabers. There are some other differences too. I wrote a whole article about this for the magazine, OST #90 – Mar/Apr 2017.

Nice C&NW version, by the way -- very impressive.

Here for fun is the catalog listing for the MKT version, as found in the 1941 catalog:




Jim

[sarge]

There might be an assumption here that decalcomania were mainstream before the late thirties. I'm not sure that's true; I really don't know though your old catalogues will bear out when they might have become available let alone commonplace. Its an interesting question.

Certainly transfers as they are known in the UK didn't take hold mid-century like they did here, let alone to the point of ubiquity. I learned hand-lining and hand lettering (not brilliantly but perhaps adequately) from them and I'm not dead yet. There is a really good technique book published in the 2008 in the UK on the subject done by Ian Rathbone, a famous builder in the 7mm world, germane there as handlettering was still very much mainstream in 7mm at least. Find this book and get it if you want to take a crack at it:



My perspective is perhaps tainted by experience here as well. As a boy, I was a member of a club in upstate NY populated largely by the prewar generation of modellers the age of my grandfather (several were Great War vets). They were the ones who introduced me to the gentle art of scratchbuilding in brass at an early age because thats what they did. My first loco I built was a Lima 1000hp switcher and I lettered it with decals. The review of that choice was, "Real railroads use paint." They all handlettered as a matter of course.

I can sort of do it, but not consistently enough for an entire model and never mastered the tiny stuff, just enough to think its easier to grab a brush set and some enamel (rather than to crack out all the decalling stuff) to change a couple numbers on a freightcar and not get caught out for being lazy.

This all might be experiences so non-mainstream that my perspective is skewed, but it raises in my warped brain the historical question of when decals actually became available and when they became widely acceptable. In America there might be an assumption they always were, but I can't help thinking hand-lettering before the war was a helluva lot more mainstream than we think it was.

Meanwhile, a graphic artist spending all day lettering cars for Rolin Lobaugh and doing them so beautifully and consistently; I greatly admire those cars just for that!