The Game
It's called Find the Billboard. Since the days of his first Gorre & Daphetid layout, John Allen had a billboard advertising the railroad. This little detail eventually became part of what might seem to be a game, as the billboard showed up at different locations in countless images, from the earliest shots of Version I all the way through the last color photos of Version III. And it traveled far and wide, having been spotted in Gorre, Daphetid, Cross Junction and Great Divide, among other locales.
I've decided I'm going to include this billboard on my Z Scale rendition of the G&D. I've even chosen the location for the billboard: the right front corner of the layout, to the right of the branchline switch, in one of those little spaces that John Allen never finished.
My problem is this: despite having several hundred photographs of the G&D, over a dozen of which feature the billboard, not one of the billboard images is large enough to use for art as-is; nor is one of them clear enough to even see what the billboard says, so that I might render the artwork myself. Thus I'm making a request to all readers: does anyone either have a large, clear image of the billboard, or at least know what it says?
Postscript: D'oh! I should have thought to check my copy of Model
Railroading with John Allen by Linn Westcott. Be that as it may, at least there was something online that saved me the trouble of
scanning the image. Only one small problem... take a good look at the color photos of the billboard, above, and compare them to the artwork
that's in the book and online:
Being an artist, John Allen was a bit more creative in his rendering. The text is black on a cream background, with the GD logo being white
against black; then, the locomotive is posterized (rendered as a high-contrast image) in shades of brown, with a white headlight. No problem;
a few minutes in the digital darkroom, and I generated this version:
With the artwork complete, I had the billboard kit assembled in short order. A few mods: base omitted; frame members rearranged closer together; frame added around the outside; bent pin lights added. The billboard image was printed in high resolution on photo paper, and sealed with matte fixative. Amazingly, everything is readable.
Thanks, everyone, for steering me in the right direction. Nice to know I've got so many regular readers—and so early on a Saturday morning, no less!
Original Gorre & Daphetid images courtesy of Peter T. Prunka.