Wow those cars look great. Like the silver window trim very well done, great painter. Look forward to seeing your whole fleet. Nice smooth finish. Are the yellow stripes VIA water slide decals or painted? Are those MTH coaches? And who did the body of the rear Theater seating car? or is it custom made?
After waiting many years for some VIA blue cars I also painted up a fleet several years back. For reference I was able to get many photos of the blue cars at the VIA station many years ago, the local CN yards and a couple of the older coaches were on BC Rail many years back before being repainted and a F9 was donated to our railway museum in the original blue VIA paint scheme for a bit of time before it was repainted so I was able to get many good photos of the blue cars and engine many years back.
Many many years back I picked up several ICC scale length passenger car kits intending to paint them VIA blue but never got to it, hard to mask and paint those kits, still sitting in the boxes.
I had a project where I made a bunch of Rocky Mountaineer Dome cars many years back and used the seats and bottom ends, under body details bottoms and trucks off of several clearance sale MTH passenger cars to build the Rocky Mountaineer fleet. I was left with 8 MTH passenger bodies only. I ordered some MTH passenger trucks; screwed these on to wood bottoms with N scale containers for under body detail, I cut plastic right angle strips to make seats and double sided taped these to the floors, glued on some passenger's added LED light strips for the lighting. I painted the bodies with Testors spray cans blue, yellow and black colors. I had checked with paint chips from un-faded hidden corners of the actual VIA F unit at our railway museum for reference. The testors paint colors were pretty close and what I had available when I painted these. Today there are some nice Rapido paints in VIA colors on the market.
I used the same 3M yellow vinyl material peel and stick ? I think as I recall it was called sunflower yellow? that VIA uses for its real passenger fleet. I had a vinyl cutter shop cut the correct width of the stripes and VIA symbols and stuck these on the painted bodies. So they do not conform as well over the body detail as would water slide decals. The rear VIA logo is a Tomar lighted drumhead kit. The white car names were from an old Microscale decal sheet. If you are looking for current VIA decals in O scale Ozark has the old CDS decals and if out of the dry transfer is now printing them on waterslide decal sheets, contact them for details. Here is a link http://www.ozarkminiatures.com....asp?idCategory=1753
For the engine I used an old 1970's Atlas F9 and removed the motors added a bright LED headlight it has the original 2 rail wheels. For the B unit I used a Williams dummy F unit and swapped in 2 Williams motors, with reverse unit, bell and horn. Some day I was hoping to paint up a set off Weaver 2 rail FA set ABB engines I have. I also have a 10 car VIA rail set of Silver Budd cars that were custom extruded aluminum in the 1960's with 2 rail trucks to run with the FA set when I get it done.
Would be interested if MTH ever made a nice set of detailed Premier F7/9 engines in VIA blue. Might get to those ICC passenger cars kits if I had some great engines.
Here are photos of my set on the shelf. Hoping to get my VIA set out to run on the club garden railway soon will post some photos of the whole train in action. Click on photo for a larger view.
