To answer the ?'s on the Green and Red trains I painted up; The engine is a MTH NYC Hudson Railking, used - picked up at a meet cheap, the electronics were gone on it; so wired it straight DC motor to the track pickups as the train runs on the Christmas layout at our Railway Museum just looping around for hours a day, runs about 8 volts at 3/4 amp. The Headlight Green was from Evans Designs the ones they have good for variable voltage. On the engine and cars used I picked up at our train club meets, I sanded down the old lettering with fine 600 grit sandpaper and used Tamiya spray paint for plastics, Silver leaf base coat for the 2 tone cars, masked off where needed and Metallic Green or Mica Red over top. The decorations mainly came from the peel and stick decals at the $1 store, including the shiny sparkly silver letters. The thicker Candy Cane, Ginger Bread more 3D decals I found at the Michaels craft store before Christmas. I do not clear coat over the decals that will not work well as they are shiny. I use a blunt tip Chrome paint pen from a hobby or craft store to do the silver highlighting of hand rails or ladders or any raised part of the body work on the freight cars. If you carefully hold the blunt tip wide to the raised item you are painting you can get a good clean highlighted image without paint going on the body. It is a lot of fun creating your own themed cars and cheap as well.
I run 4 Christmas layouts the largest at the Railway Museum 5 weekends North Pole Express event 32 feet x 16 feet with 10 trains running so use lots of Christmas theme trains that I enjoy creating and painting myself. Though I do have many factory Christmas freight cars from MTH Lionel etc. Will try to post pics of the other layouts when time.
