It seems no one has changed their destination blinds on their Bachy DMUs! -(see last posting)

There are of course two problems:-

(A) - removal of Bachy's destination,

(B) - production of the replacements

My unit will run between Manchester London Road and Hayfield. There were at least two routes used and I wanted that which stopped at Guidebridge. My research suggested that these read "Manchester via Hyde" and "Hayfield via Hyde" and in both cases the "via" sat above the "Hyde".

Measuring with a digital calliper gave me Bachy's dimensions so off to the computer and CorelDraw. Arial proved a reasonable likeness to the font used by Bachy and white lettering on a black background with a brown border was drawn at about 100 magnification. All dead easy and looking good.

Print it with inkjet; ooh! horrible. The text was totally illegible.

Back to the drawing board; (well CAD program!). Increase font size, juggle with font line thickness; try dropping "via Hyde" & use even larger font: swear; I tried all sorts.

Eventually, with a selection of attempts, all looking good in the drawing program, I decide that the normal inkjet paper was having ink spread. Try printing on gloss, photo-paper at best print quality you fool.

At last, very tolerable results, but the version I really wanted - "via Hyde"- was not readable to the normal, unassisted eye, so I settled on the plain "Manchester" and "Hayfield".

Only now did I try to remove Bachy's lovely work. I found that about 10-20 minutes with a pool of meths on the paint was good enough to allow slow and careful scraping away by the end of a cocktail stick. I aimed at removing only the black background and then, after a second soak, the white lettering. As much as I was able I left the brown border untouched.

I intended using Kleer to stick my effort in place but first tried some on a part of window moulding which did not show - no problem. Brushed my inkjet part with Kleer and it very successfully caused the ink to flow again,- that blind ruined.

Not serious; I had duplicated each attempt several times prior to printing, but how to stop that ink flow? Spray with gloss varnish, and while the varnish tin's open, stick it with gloss varnish too. Actually I was too lazy to set up one of the air brushes and didn't fancy the clean up after so little work, so I sable brushed it.

Job's a good-un!

Dave