Legacy Rio Grande GP9 Conversion to New Haven

I’ve had this 2015 Lionel Legacy #5911 Rio Grande GP9 since I got back into the hobby about 7 years ago as part of introducing my grandkids to model railroading. It was the first Legacy locomotive I ever bought and has performed extremely well over the years.

Unfortunately, I never picked up any Rio Grande rolling stock to go with it and it’s been an orphan on my layout, especially since I’ve begun concentrating on acquiring mostly New England road names in the last few years. Over that period of time, I’ve picked up a number of pieces of New Haven rolling stock, but no locomotive to pull them. Rather than trying to acquire a command control New Haven freight engine or convert a basic one using ERR, I decided to re-paint the Rio Grande GP9 in New Haven colors.

After removing the shell from the chassis, I dis-assembled all the body pieces (including windows, railings, number boards, lights, grab bars, pilots, horn, etc.) and set them aside for painting. One of the hardest parts was removing the existing Rio Grande lettering so that no “shadow” would show through the new paint job. I believe Lionel uses a multi-step printing process which raises the lettering slightly above the surrounding surface and makes removal difficult.

Removing the paint color was easy, but I could not easily get the raised portion of the lettering off the shell. I tried long soaking periods in Superclean, Easy-Off, Testor’s ELO and Dot 3 brake fluid without success. I finally had to sand all of the raised lettering off by hand, very carefully, so as not to remove any of the detailing on the Legacy shell. Not a fun process.

I used Krylon all-in-one black satin for the base and Krylon all-in-one Gloss Popsicle Orange for the orange (seemed to be the closest color I could get in a rattle can). Once the body and hood were black, I masked them off with a combination of painter’s and striping tape in order to paint the contrasting orange side stripe and hood. I first sprayed Krylon grey primer for the parts that would be painted orange. I hand painted the pilots and frame ends by spraying the orange paint into a small paint cup and then applying it with a model paint brush - then went back and hand painted the hoses with Testor’s gloss black.

The New Haven decals are by K4 and I used the tried and true - gloss, decal, Micro-Sol, gloss sequence. Since I was retaining the existing number boards, I made the black “5911” numbers for the cab using waterslide laser printer paper sealed with gloss clear. Obviously, the overall paint scheme is a fantasy scheme, but certainly one that might have been done.

After everything was dry, I sprayed on matte clear as a finishing coat and re-assembled all the pieces. I now have something to pull my New Haven consist.