Back in the good old days, when HO was king, you could get "word assortment" decals from Champ (I think it was) to build you own railroad name. I have not found that any such thing exists for N Scale. It's not too tough to do railroad initials and locomotive numbers one letter/number at a time, but what do you do for the rolling stock - especially passenger cars? Having custom printed decals can't be inexpensive (or are they?) Do I buy decal paper and try printing my own? Or am I finally going to have to sell out to the Southern Pacific? :startled:
I'm not positive I'm thinking of the same thing you are, but MicroScale produces a number of sets of data. These come in a couple different fonts, in black, white and yellow (at least) and include sets of "lube plates" and ACI tags. An example from their website:
Yah, it was "Champ" had them. Individual words you could build your own road name out of. I bought a bunch of "abc" sets from them once when I was short of lettering. I recall their film was very heavy... Nothing I've seen since or in N like those name decals though.
Some art supply stores have sets of dry transfers that can be used or you might find them on-line. I think a lot of people have gone to using their computers to design their own art work. You can then use something like Testor's decal film and a ink jet printer to make your own. A few examples; The reefer has ink jet decals for the road name and picture. The data is what was originally on the car. The box car has a ink jet decal on the left and dry transfer lettering on the right for the "Royal Gorge Western". The logo and name are both decals if I remember correctly.
It is very hard to do white (the most common colour in RR lettering) on an inkjet printer, the best printers for decals were the out of prduction ALPS printers, I'll be lost when mine finally gives up the ghost. When doing any colour other than black on an inkjet you need to print on white decal paper and carefully cut around the design, not the easiest of solutions.
