I wanted to make my own waterslide decals for quite some time. The difficulty of producing the decals at home is that household printers don’t do white at all, so you are either printing without white, replace some other ink with white, buy an expensive 5 color printer, or find someone who can print it for you. For once, I decided not to bother with full-DIY approach and around New Year found a small local company that does CMYK+W printing on decal paper.[1]

Naturally, I drew some decals for 1/87 ISO containers and freight wagons and made an order.

This is a topic where one picture is better than thousands of words, so without much delay, here are pictures:

Decals showcase

Process

Tools

https://photopea.com - my go-to raster editor these days, which is a decent alternative to Photoshop. Works from browser, is free (but AD-driven), supports PSDs natively.

Tried to use InkScape, because the job seemed more suited for a vector editor, but the whole experience was awful. Inkscape crashes a lot, does not properly render its font list, does not properly render text with font I was using, has weird UX for doing trivial things (e.g. resizing a block of text), so I went back to PhotoPea, and it worked quite well.

Fonts

Fonts showcase

The real ISO containers use Univers Ultra Condensed font a lot, that’s what I’ve was looking for online. "Univers LT 59 Ultra Condensed" was found, and it seems good enough.

Further reading:

For wagons decals, RailwayCargoRus2022 and RailwayCargoRus fonts are available online. They differ in shapes of digits, but are otherwise identical. They are available here: https://pikabu.ru/story/zheleznodorozhnyiy_shrift_9517772, https://dzen.ru/a/XM2awOsorACupLw2.

A discussion about founts can be found here (in russian): http://forum.modelldepo.ru/showthread.php?t=16914. It also includes links to standards describing fonts on actual wagons.

I also used some stencil-based fonts, namely Aero Matics Stencil, Depot Trapharet, and Trafaret Kit.

Impressions

  • While the process is not difficult, it takes a really long time to properly fill an A4 page, unless you want a dozen identical decal sets. I managed to make a dense layout for freight wagons, but container decals could be fit into half the space. It took 3 months, though I can’t say I tried to make it fast.

  • While the white print is very good, black ink is not quite that crisp. Here is a comparison with decals I bought in ~2020. Another company to try is https://cadeausenkaarten.nl/, but haven’t given me any response so far.

Crisp print from 2022 (right) and blurry one from 2025 (center)

  • For containers, the font size can be made ~20% smaller. Weight net/gross label (put on the door) must be made ~50% smaller.

1. The printing company is https://www.printmetwit.nl.