Model Railroad Signs Construction

One way to spice up your model railroad is to include lots of "pop art" or signs that you would typically see in every day life. In fact, even if you are working within a specific era such as the 1950s or 60s this can work very well too!

But how do you get the images for your billboards, road signs, movie advertisement posters and in-store signs? Simple, you Google it!

Let's say that you want to include retro movie posters to a store front. There are many vintage movie sites that feature the original movie posters on their pages. Typically these images are high quality and quite large, which is really what you want to look for. You ideally want to find pictures that have great resolution and are very big when you click on them with your magnifier tool in your web browser.

You can save these images to your desktop, and then pull up your printing software. This program should allow you to re-scale them, or you can do so in Microsoft Paint and then save the picture with the new size.

If you need help with printing sizes and what types of photo paper to use, don't be afraid to take a CD-R with your images to a local photo print service. They really know their stuff, and if you explain to them what you are trying to achieve it will probably help them picture how to give you the best result, plus -- who knows? one of them might be a fellow railroad enthusiast too!

Now, I've known to do this for a while now, but I learned a trick to printing on window glazing from a Gateway NMRA article that you should check out!