N Gauge Model Railway - Episode 4 - All aboard for Upper Carrom

Documenting my journey into model railways.

It's high time that this layout got a name and it seems appropriate to call it Upper Carrom as it is quite literally above the Carrom Table.

Of course it wouldn't be a real railway station if it didn't have a railway station sign.  There are plenty of places you can download but I wanted to model one myself and the technique I used to make my badges and the famous Okey Dokey sign is a great fit for what is a very simple design. 

Use The GIMP

I have been a GIMP user for many years ever since Photoshop 5 and it is an awesome free alternative.  Yes it has it's quirks but once you get used to them it's pretty much plain sailing and has everything I need in a bitmap image manipulator / Photo editor.

On a transparent layer floating above the white background layer, I added the station name using the text tool making sure that this was 100% black.

The basic name plaque lozenge shape is easy to create using the circle and rectangular select tools to create shapes on seperate layers filled with 100% opacity black.  These were then merged together to create a single "half" which could be duplicated and flipped and then merged to create the whole lozenge.

The middle lozenge was just a repeat of the steps above.  Do not merge the full width lozenges together at this stage.  You shouls have 4 layers (from top down) Text, text lozenge, middle lozenge and finally the white background.  Hide the text layer temporarily.

For each of the lozenges, select the black area and use the select > shrink command to reduce the selection to an appropriate size then fill this with white.  Merge Down the sign lozenge onto the middle lozenge to create a single lozenge layer 

Unhide the text layer.  You should now have a black and white railway sign.  Export this for Tinkercad as a png no larger than 1000px wide.

Finally select in the lozenge layer select everything outside the lozenge using the fuzzy select tool, invert the selection and create a new layer above the white background fill this with black.  Turn off the layers above and export to png.

In Convertio

Convertio.co is a fantastic free web based converter tool.  Just upload the two png files and convert these to SVG.

In Tinkercad

Import each of SVG files you have just created as "Art".  Modify the height of the text layer so that the text and the border of the sign protrude protrudes out of the background.

Export your model as an STL for 3D Printing.  Import this into your slicer (it will be big) and scale to your needs. 

Obligatory Running Video

The first running of the newest addition to the ready-to-run rolling stock collection, a cheap aliexpress Canadian Government grain wagon... it's on loan okay.