Turning my attention away from that whole conundrum for a minute, I wanted to share with y'all some work I've done on making a logo for my freelanced shortline railroad: the Ouachita & Mississippi Valley. This is a shortline railroad in southeast Arkansas that connects the Cotton Belt to the Columbus & Greenville. For a more complete "revisionist history" of the line, check out my webpage. The "Delta Route" slogan is one that the C&G used over the years, but the real C&G was never able to obtain a western connection to turn this into a profitable through freight route. Since the Ouachita & Mississippi Valley provides the "western connection that never was," I'm going to use the "Delta Route" slogan for the O&MV as well. Kind of like the way the Mississippi Central and Louisiana Midland shared the slogan "The Natchez Route."
I came up with 10 different variations of the C&G triangle logo. Some of these are very close to the original, while others were modified with the O&MV railroad name. Misssissippi Central used the same herald shape with "Mississippi Central" in one type of herald and "Natchez Route" in the other, so why can't I? Here are the triangle logos that I came up with:
I've run these past a few friends and several of them commented that the logo looks a little too much like the C&G logo. Some also felt that a logo with just the slogan in it could really pass for an official company logo, so I decided to revamp things a bit. Here's an intermediate version that I came up with:
While this logo is different enough, I still thought it was too close to the Columbus & Greenville logo. So for the next revision, I borrowed from the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway's logo design. I figured that "the Louie" had a similar flavor to my freelanced line (albeit, the M&StL was much larger) and that it was sufficiently far-removed from Arkansas to prevent any confusion over the logos. So here's my effort at creating a bit fancier logo for the O&MV:
I really like that last one (the difference is the sans-serif fonts) and will likely use this as the "new" logo for diesels and newer boxcars. The older wooden boxcars and wooden cabeese will likely carry one of the triangle heralds just to give the railroad a bit more flavor.
I've used two programs to make these logos: Inkscape and Gimp. Both are open-source programs and are available for FREE. Just the right price for a college student! While neither one are as slick as their for-pay counterparts, they're extremely useful and there's a whole bunch of online support in the form of discussion boards. For the model railroader on a budget, though, this is the cheapest way to start making your own decal artwork. Inkscape can be found here, while Gimp can be found here.
Happy railroading!!
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