Taurus/Eurosprinter liveries.

[Gumboots]

Ok, this is pretty amazing stuff. I was just looking around for detail shots of the OBB (Austrian Railways) Railjet. This is because Gumboots has changed his mind on cargo cars (again, I know, bear with me on this ) and decided to go back to the Railjet cars for the 21st century.

The short explanation is that that are lower poly than ICE cars, they look clean and modern and well-proportioned, they are in more widespread use (Siemens Viaggio units, in service in a range of places) and I already knew the standard Austrian and Czech liveries were quite nice, and I just like the things. Anyway...

What I didn't know was that the Austrians and Germans will just randomly decide to repaint half their rolling stock whenever they feel like celebrating something. Not only that, but the designers and painters are extremely skilled and imaginative. The result has been some of the most amazing liveries ever. These are all the real thing. No fakes.

The wildest paint jobs seem to be saved for locomotives, presumably because repainting a loco is a lot quicker and easier than doing entire trainsets, although the Austrians have done some trainsets too. The Europsrinter/Taurus locomotive seems to be the unit that gets the treatment most often. This one was painted up like an Adler, for the 175th anniversary of German rail:




And this was for the 140th anniversary of a particular line:



You ain't seen nothing yet. How about the 175th anniversary of something to do with some princess? Both shots are the same unit, but the two sides are have different liveries.





Then they decided Richard Wagner's birthday was worth a paint job, so they did this:



That was the Germans. The Austrians decided that was far too restrained, and they should celebrate Wagner and Verdi together. Which led to some pretty spectacular results.





The Germans decided to celebrate welcoming a stack of refugees, so came up with this...



And then, among other things, used it to haul some tank cars around the tracks. Yes, it's the same locomotive.



Last but not least, the Austrians decided that if the Germans could paint a Taurus up like an old steamer for their 175th railway anniversary, then Austria wasn't going to be outdone.





The locomotive they used as inspiration for the paint job was the old Class 310 2-6-4, which among other things hauled the Orient Express back in the early 20th century. Needless to say, I very much approve of painting up boring electric locomotives to look like real choofers.

These are only a handful of the things that have been done with these units. There are stacks of other liveries online.

[RulerofRails]

Very nice. I hadn't seen these, thanks for sharing.

My first thought is: could they be vinyl wraps? And if so, how long do they typically last? I know that wrapping sportscars has become a craze of late.

[Gumboots]

I have no idea how they did them. Shouldn't be hard to find out. Pretty impressive stuff anyway, regardless of which method they used.

This is one of the things that got me keener on the Railjet cars than the ICE cars. ICE cars are all just white with a red stripe, which is pretty boring. With the Railjet cars you can pretty much put any livery you like on them, however wild that might be, on the theory that if they haven't done it already they'll probably do it next week.

[Blackhawk]

I would guess they are wrapped rather than actually painted. It's been common place in stock car auto racing to wrap a car rather than paint it for probably 10-15 years now.

I came across this article and it suggests the wraps last around 5 years.... Just in time for that 140 anniversary to now be the 145th anniversary and a new paint scheme.
http://www.signindustry.com/installatio ... _Wrap.php3

[Gumboots]

Makes sense. After 5 years they'd be wanting to do something different anyway.

[Gumboots]

Hey I had a thought about the Taurus. It occurred to me while I was working on the Railjet pax cars. The game doesn't care which models you assign to which functions. If you wanted Howl's Moving Castle as a locomotive and an elephant on roller skates as a caboose, RT3 would let you have it. No problem.

So the Railjet (OBB and CD versions) usually runs with a Taurus as motive power, and operates in either pull or push mode. So you could, if you wanted to, set things up so that the unpowered control car was the locomotive for game purposes and the Taurus was sitting at the tail end as the "dining car" or caboose. It would work the same in terms of gameplay, but could add some good eye candy variations.

Obviously this sort of trick can be done with any units. For example, you could have a steam loco at the tail end of a mining train if you set the steam loco model as the caboose model. This sort of thing wouldn't work well all the time in all scenarios, but could be fun sometimes.

Edit: Oh yeah, another minor eye candy idea that I had about the same time. Concrete sleepers. The default PopTop track graphics have ratty wooden sleepers that look like they were cut by someone who couldn't use a sawmill and laid a by a crew of drunks. It works pretty well for pioneering days in the 19th century, but look stupid in the 21st. It wouldn't be hard to make a drop-in Infrastructure.dds, to give 21st century track that actually looks like it belongs.