That's "tears" that rhymes with "beers", not "bears", BTW -

I quickly gave up on trying to tweak Coifman's Railroad Roman numeral '2' into some semblance of a number that might have appeared on a D&RG loco back in the day, and copied the '2' from the photo of #424, enlarged it to 12" tall at 200 dpi to facilitate precise work, and did the best I could to clean up all the ragged edges that result from way over-enlarging a low-res photo before doubling it to 24" tall at 200 dpi.  The result is quite different from CR BT Dispr's beautiful example above, but as he pointed out the numbering was likely done by hand in the early days and there was a lot of variation.  And like Dave Taylor's '2' and '5' there is a tear present — what typographer Richard Bringhurst refers to as a 'Lachrymal Terminal':  the upper arm of the '2' ends with a proper tear-shaped oval rather than a squished circle that resulted from narrowing the earlier numbers.  Anyway, here's the '2' posted full size for Dave to upload if he wants it – 4096 pixels wide × 5460 tall – which the NGDF will display for you at a more reasonable 1024 pixels:


As before, here's a lower-res copy so everyone can see the whole enchilada without scrolling:


And finally, here's a quick-and-dirty substitution of the new '2' along with the new '4', and a glimpse of the future candidate five:


- El Abuelo Histœrico, Greengo y Curmudgeoño de los Locomoturas Viejos y Verdes,
aka Der Grossväterlich DünkelOlivGrünDampfKesselMantelLiebHabender



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 07/17/2021 12:49PM by Russo Loco.