Railroad Personnel Sign

I doubt very much that too many people (perhaps none) have been curious or stupid enough to walk or ride along the tracks to investigate this western border of the plant. If they had, they would have discovered this very unique sign and certainly someone would have scooped it up long ago. But to the winner goes the spoils!

The sign was in very bad shape. The letters had curled and hardened and were barely adhered to the sign. I considered leaving it behind but then came upon a unique solution. If I could clean off the rest of the letters, I might do a custom paint job and remake the sign from scratch. This would only be possible because UV damage hard marked the sign where the letters were long ago, before they shriveled up to nothing.

I parked at Indian Ridge Marsh and made the quick ride over. I brought with an adjustable wrench, Vice Grips and a set of SAE sockets. I did not want to bring the whole set due to the weight so I left the deep sockets behind and just brought the standard depth and the handle. I wasn’t sure if it would fit in my bag but figured I’d approach that when necessary – first I had to wrestle the thing off the fence.

The hardware consisted of a short piece (~3″) threaded rod (not a bolt) with nuts and washers on both sides and a rectangular bracket squeezing it to the chain link. The threaded rod stuck out too far on either side so I could not use the socket (turned out to be 1/2″) and of course I needed the deep well version which I had jettisoned due to excess weight. So I used the wrench and pliers and removed the first bracket. The others I only needed to loosen so I could bend the bracket through the fence.

As I figured it was too wide to fit into my bag in either orientation. So I would have to carry it for the two block ride back to Indian Ridge. Not shockingly, I fell AGAIN on 116th Street but did an impromptu version of the splits (as far as I can capable) so keep from crashing to the concrete. Somehow I made it back to my truck and headed home.

The first order of business was to remove the rest of these threaded rods. After that I took a belt sander to the back of the sign which showed a thick, scaly layer of rust. I didn’t need it to be down to bare metal but needed to get it under control so I could touch the thing without turning my hands orange. I also bent the corners back with a couple 2×4 and a bench vice. I probably bent them a bit but I do believe someone else gave a half hearted attempt to rend it from the fence by hand at some point.

Now the real fun could begin. I used a needle nose pliers and my finger nails to remove all the letters, which took longer than I predicted.

Initially my plan was to use enamel paint and a fine tip paint brush. I have zero experience with this but it seemed to be the best/only option. But on a whim, I used a black Sharpie and colored in a few letters. It looked really good! So I went to Office Max and got more black Sharpies (I elected to get some of an ‘industrial’ version that claimed to mark on anything) as well as some paint Sharpies. They individuals and 2-packs were all sold out. They have 5-packs for $15 and I got two of them, as I wasn’t sure if one marker would be enough. I wanted to use blue for the ‘NOTICE’ section at the top and knew that would need a hell of a lot of paint.

Turned out these ‘Industrial’ Sharpies were worthless, they barely marked at all, felt like I was using an old one that had been banging around somebody’s desk without a cap for a few months. The tip on the paint marker was actually fine enough to get things done!

When it came to the NOTICE header, I decided to use negative space. I left the letters ‘blank’ (white) and colored the box around them blue. The last NOTICE sign I recovered uses this style and it does seem to be pretty universal. It is really hard to tell how this sign was originally, the weather did well to totally clean this off and left zero evidence to steer me in either direction. I was surprised to see the BOLD font for “Acme Steel Co”. When I was doing those letters I felt they were the same as the others but clearly they were not. It’s hard to believe I did this without really knowing it.

This was not easy, I am not a person who has spent any amount of time doing this kind of art, drawing, etc. So this was outside my wheelhouse. But I think it looks pretty good.

I began to plan to mount it on plywood and cover with acrylic like I had with the others. Then I just went all out and mounted it to my bedroom door. The door is hollow so anchors won’t work very well, so I just drilled all the way through and used 1/4″ x 3″ panhead machine screws. That won’t be coming down anytime soon!