So it has been six months since I finished straightening out the bent cab roof and stripping the Santa Fe markings from this MTH RailKing Mohawk. The plan always was to dress this engine in proper New York Central livery. I found a wonderful article on the Late Mohawks on the NYCHS web site. This RailKing engine is creditable representation of an L3A Mohawk, however the size of the tender is closer to those pulled by the L2Ds. I got some NYC steam decals and began planning the transformation. The set of decals had a 3056 number in series. This was an actual Mohawk road number, however it was an L3C, but I wasn't about to start piecing together a number for an L3A. As I started looking through photos for proper placement and size of lettering it became apparent the decal set was for O scale engines and the selective compression employed by MTH to make a good looking engine in less than scale dimensions started giving me problems. The engine numbers appear larger than those on actual Mohawks. The tender lettering came in two sizes, I guess one for road engines with longer tenders and one for short tenders or switch engines. The available number for the back of the tender appears small than actual. Pictures I've sen have that number the same size as the numbers on the cab. Actual L2D tenders had a 28 ton coal capacity, the closest I could come is 21 tons. But she's finally in the right livery and can finally be put into revenue service. Further details added are a water scoop, an engineer and fireman on some homemade seats, painted the valve handles red, should have used a brighter shade, paint the gauge faces and built a fire in the fire box to get it under steam.
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