Illinois Division -- a NS Model Railroad: NS Locomotives

With Norfolk Southern selected as my railroad of choice for this model, it became time to review what locomotives I currently own vs what I need to own. I currently own nearly 30 modern Union Pacific locomotives of which I will need none. I have decided to keep a few of them though because I have the entire UP Heritage Series locos, and I can use them as visiting locomotive on NS lines.

When I began looking for modern NS locos, I quickly realized that there would be a need to decorate my own. NSDash9 website is a awesome source for past and current roster of locomotive used by Norfolk Southern. With the help of this site, I quickly established a list of currently available undecorated locomotives and decals from ShellScale that would enable me to start building my modern fleet.

This is my first batch of undecorated locos to make the transformation to NS locomotives for my future layout.

I removed all of the windows and headlight plastic from the four locomotive that I had selected to work with in this batch. Once the locomotives were dismantled They were all given a nice bath with a toothbrush, while wearing gloves to remove any oils that may be on the plastic and the gloves to keep them oil free until after they have been painted.

I failed to take any pictures as the process really progressed but once they were all clean and had been given time to dry, they received two coats of engine black to all the parts. One thing I can say for NS engines, they are not difficult to paint. I let the black paint sit over night and applied a coat of clear gloss in the morning to provide the best surface for the decals to adhere to.

The Shell Scale decals are very similar to the Microscale decals, just come on a much smaller sheet. I based all of the decal locations on images from rrpicturearchive.net. Because this is a very early attempt at working with undecorated locomotives and decals I worked with the numbers that were provided with the Shell Scale set, ignoring the prototype road numbers for that model of locomotive. Of the four that I painted, I had time to apply decals to two of them before having to start traveling again for work.