Updated checklist of my non-sports custom cards

Until now, there has been no place where all of my custom cards could be found in checklist form.  It is my intention to update this posting as new cards are created. Similar checklists for my baseball and football custom cards will also be posted.

Custom card availability. Unless noted, all of my custom cards are available to collectors for $12.50 each, postpaid for one or two cards; $9.95 each for three or more (mix/match). To order, email me at scbcguy@yahoo.com for directions on paying via check/money order, or to my PayPal account.

Civil War News
89   Grays Wiped Out
90   Victory Parade
91   Death at 1,000 Yard
(NOTE: My Civil War News cards are
note available for sale.)

Flags of the World
81   Islamic State
82   Iran
83   Scotland
84   Wales
85   England
86   Northern Ireland
87   Alaska
88   Hawaii
89   Vatican

Hit Stars
89   Johnny Cash

Rails & Sails
201   Chicago & Northwestern Diesel
202   Queen Anne's Revenge
203   U.S.S. Monitor
204   C.S.S. Virginia
205   Orange Blossom Special
206   City of New Orleans
207   City of Miami
208   Bamboo Grove Lounge Car
209   Hiawatha Skytop Lounge Car
210   R.M.S. Titanic (sailing right)
210   R.M.S. Titanic (sailing left)
210   R.M.S. Titanic (night)
211   Alton Railroad Abraham Lincoln
212   Gulf Coast Rebel (GMO RR)
213   U.S.S.Indianapolis

Spins and Needles
81   The Quarreymen
82   Marty Robbins
83   Roy Orbison

TV Westerns
72   Maverick -- James Garner
74   Maverick -- Gentleman Gambler
75   Maverick -- Well-Dressed Strangers
77   Rawhide -- Clint Eastwood
78   Rawhide -- Strategy Session
83   Rifleman -- Lucas' Rifle
86   Wyatt Earp -- Hugh O'Brian
87   Wyatt Earp -- A Legend is Born
88   Wyatt Earp -- Buntline Special
91   Wyatt Earp -- Taming Tombstone
92   Bat Masterson -- Gene Barry
93   Bat Masterson -- County Sheriff Bat
97   Cheyenne -- Clint Walker
98   Cheyenne -- Lonely Man, Cheyenne

World on Wheels
181   Buick Centurian (front view)
181   Buick Centurian (back view)
182   Dodge La Femme
183   Volkswagen Microbus
184   London Black Taxi
185   Schwinn Whizzer
186   Vincent Black Shadow
187   Minerva Town Car
188   Airstream Wanderer
189  Chrysler Town and Country
190  American Moto-Scoot

New Rails & Sails custom: "Abraham Lincoln"

I've just completed another custom card in the 1955 Topps Rails and Sails format. It depicts the 1930s Chicago-St. Louis inter-city passenger train "Abraham Lincoln."

Production of this distinctively different outfit was subsidized by the U.S. Public Works Administration during the Depression.

The back of my card is really just a 1950s snapshot of the train's origins. Tracing its history all over the internet is a convoluted route. The "Abe" was reconfigured a number of times between 1935 and the 1960s, especially after the Alton Railroad was sold to the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio in 1947.

Still, I enjoy losing myself for an afternoon researching the great old streamliners of my youth.

There will be more along these lines as the winter wears on.

Titanic card is my latest Rails & Sails custom

Most of the "Sails" in the 1955 Topps Rails & Sails bubblegum set were paintings of generic historic and contemporary boats and ships.

There were, however, a number of named ships among the 70 "Sails" cards in the 200-card set.

My latest custom non-sports card adds one more, the famed R.M.S. Titanic. The luxury liner was so designated because it was a Royal Mail Service vessel. Among those on board were five postal clerks, two British and three American. While I find it hard to believe, it is said that on her ill-fated maiden voyage the Titanic was carrying seven million pieces of mail. None was ever recovered.

There are, of course, many paintings of the Titanic that are suitable for use on a Topps-style Rails & Sails card. There are at least two dramatic pieces that show the ship amid icebergs. These are night scenes, presumably meant to capture the scene at 11:40 p.m. (ship's time) on April 14, 1912, when the ship sideswiped a 3,000-year-old piece of glacier in the North Atlantic.

I was unaware that the fact that the sky was clear and the seas calm contributed to the disaster. Apparently such conditions don't provide a good look at where the iceberg and ocean meet.

If I was still printing cards, I would have decided against one of these night scenes because -- and this is the first time I've ever revealed this -- it is a personal peccadillo of mine that pictures of ships in storms or rough seas send a shiver down my spine. I sometimes think this lends credence to the theory of reincarnation; maybe in some past life I was lost in a shipwreck.

Since I've decided not to print my custom cards for sale to other collectors, and perhaps will not even print one for my own archives, it makes it much easier to produce alternative versions of many series.

This is especially true of Rails & Sails card fronts of the "Sails" subset, because the format is just a borderless picture with some superimposed type. 

There is no shortage of material in print and on the internet concerning the Titanic and her fate. A few things you may not have known, however, that piqued my interest are . . .

• at 883' long, 94' abeam and 175' tall, displacing 52,310 tons fully laden, the ship was the largest man-made movable object on earth.
• the most expensive First Class ticket on the Northampton to New York route was $4,350. That's about $105,000 in today's dollars. It's not too much of a stretch to assume that accommodation was booked by John Jacob Astor, one of the world's richest men at time time, who went down with the ship.
• despite the "women and children first" law of the sea, three dogs, a Pekinese and two Pomeranians, made it into the lifeboats and survived. There was a dozen dogs confirmed to have been on board.
• lastly, I am among the minority in this country that has never seen a minute of the 1987 James Cameron movie Titanic.

It's winter; time for non-sports customs

Over the years my custom card creation efforts seem to have become somewhat seasonal.

I tend t make baseball cards in the spring and summer and football cards in the autumn.

Last winter it seems as if I spent most of my card-making time on non-sports issues. That trend may continue this winter.

I've just completed another card in my extension of the 1954 Topps Rails & Sails issue.

The new card features the Skytop parlor-lounge car that was a feature of the Milwaukee Road's Twin Cities Hiawatha streamliners from 1948 through early 1971.

With World War II shortages and restrictions largely gone by the wayside in 1948, the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Rail Road undertook a major overhaul of its rolling stock.

One of the features of the project was the creation of the Skytop parlor-lounge cars that brought up the rear of the Twin Cities Hiawathas that ran twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon between Chicago and Minneapolis.

This is Brooks Stevens' original rendering of the concept of
the Skytop parlor lounge cars for the Twin Cities Hiawathas.

The Skytop cars were designed by Brooks Stevens, a Milwaukee industrial designer who created everything from custom cars, motorcycles and household appliances to the Miller Brewing Company's red "soft cross" logo still being used today. (I crossed paths with Stevens a time or two at car shows in 1978-79 when I was editor of Old Cars Weekly newspaper.)

The Skytop lounge cars were built in the Milwaukee Road's own shops. A total of four were produced. They were named the Cedar Rapids, Coon Rapids, Dell Rapids and Priest Rapids. The first three named cars still exist in various states of preservation while the Priest Rapids was scrapped in 1970.

This is a contemporary photo of the Skytop parlor-lounge car.

A companion line of Skytop sleeper lounges was built in 1948-49 by Pullman-Standard. There were a total of six built for use on the Milwaukee Road's Olympian Hiawatha runs between Chicago and Tacoma, Wash. That route was discontinued in 1961 and all six of the sleepers were sold to the Canadian National Railway. Three of those remain extant, the others having been scrapped.

My newest Rails/Sails custom reflects my personal interest in mid-century railroading. I have 10-12 images of great locomotives from the 1930s through the 1960s that may make their way onto custom cards in the future.

As I stated in my blog post of Dec. 13, I am unable to offer examples of my new card to collectors; physical limitations of my hands have made the actual printing and cutting of my cards too difficult an undertaking.

"New" Rails and Sails: City of Miami

As I mentioned in my blog back on Jan. 29, recently my custom card creating has been concentrated on making train cards in the 1955 Topps Rails and Sails format.

This pair of "City of Miami" cards will likely be my last train cards for a while. As much as I enjoy researching the trains of the streamliner era of the 1940s-1960s, there are some other things I want to move on to. 

The back of my card #207 gives a pretty good capsule history of the early days of the Illinois Central Railroad's City of Miami.

The luxury streamliner originally ran from Chicago to Miami every third day into 1957, then every other day until service was discontinued in 1971.

It started out with a seven-car consist (that's a railroad term I learned in my research), the GM diesel pulling the cars that had been designed and built by Pullman-Standard.

There were four named coaches -- the Poinsettia, Hibiscus, Japonica and Camellia -- each seating 60 passengers, except the Camellia, which was a women-and-children-only coach and featured an on-board nurse-stewardess. The Bougainvillea was a combination baggage and dormitory car, with berths for 12 crewmen. That coach, until 1958, also contained the train's "Jim Crow" seating, 22 seats for black passengers.

The 48-seat dining car was named Palm Garden and there was a tavern-lounge-observation car called the Bamboo Grove, with 32 seats in the bar area and 22 in the observation area. Both were initially unavailable for use by blacks.

My card shows the original paint scheme of the City of Miami, in tropical orange and green, with scarlet trim. All of the cars' interiors were decorated in a tropical theme. After World War II, the train was repainted to conform to the IC's chocolate brown and orange decor.

In 1949 sleeping coaches were added to the City of Miami.

Collectors of 1955 Topps Rails and Sails cards will notice that my "Bamboo Grove Car" card is a departure from the original set, which featured only exterior views of the trains and ships.

Song-inspired Rails & Sails train customs

Two of the most famous trains of the last half of the 20th Century achieved their renown based on popular recordings.

The song Orange Blossom Special was written by Floridian Ervin T. Rouse in 1938 and recorded the next year with his brother. Since then it has been covered by every male country performer of note.

My favorite version is Johnny Cash's, recorded in 1965, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 Country Music Charts. While OBS has been called the "fiddle players' national anthem," The Man in Black took it in a different direction, substituting two harmonicas and a saxophone for the fiddle parts.

The 1955 Rails and Sails-style custom card I created is based on circa 1940s linen postcards, of which there are several types. Such cards were sold on the train itself and at every station stop along the route. I did a little cutting and pasting to get the final image for my card.

I don't remember when I've had as much fun doing the research for a card back. I lost myself for most of a day googling the internet and exploring the many tangents. I'd forgotten how much I love mid-century trains. (See my blog post of Oct. 29 for my first R&S train card and background of my personal interest in 1950s streamliners.)

My follow-up R&S train custom card was inspired by the 1972 Arlo Guthrie folk song City of New Orleans. The song went to No. 18 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Charts.

It has been reported that Guthrie first heard the song when he was approached by its writer, Steve Goodman, in a Chicago bar in 1971. Guthrie said he'd listen if Goodman would buy him a beer. He agreed to record it on the spot.

After the release of Willie Nelson's version in 1984, Goodman was posthumously awarded the 1985 Grammy for Best Country Song. 

I've been an Arlo Guthrie fan since my college days, based on his 1967 hit ballad Alice's Restaurant Massacree. (The 1969 movie . . . not so much.)

Again, a gloomy winter Sunday spent researching the City of New Orleans (the train and the song) was a high point in the creation process.

As long as I am on a train "kick," I've got a couple more Rails and Sails additions in the works. Watch this blog for the revelation in a week or two.

Monitor, Virginia added to Rails and Sails customs

Last time I gave you the background of my childhood fascination with the Civil War that has, half a century later, spurred my desire to create a couple of cards for my custom additions to the venerable 1955 Topps Rails and Sails bubblegum card issue. 

Today I show you those results and offer a few notes about the creation process.

Unlike some subjects I've tackled in my sports and non-sports custom card work, there was no shortage of pictures among which to choose images for my cards of the U.S.S. Monitor and the C.S.S. Virginia. I had plenty to work with in choosing art that would fit my interpretation of what the Topps artists might have done in 1955.

For my Monitor card, I used box art from a 1:144 plastic model kit by the French company Battle Axe. I'm unsure of the vintage, but believe it is rather recent. Model kit box art was also the source for my Virginia. In this  case, it was from a 1950s Pyro kit inaccurately labeled "The Monitor And The Merrimac". 

There have been plenty of paintings of both ships, separately and together, over the past 150 years, but I believe the model kit box art comes closest to the style set by Topps artists in the 1955 card set.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in creating these cards was trying to present the history of each ship in about 90 words on the cards' backs, while trying to stay true to the tone that Topps' writers achieved 60 years ago when writing for their youthful target audience.

While I am in a Civil War "mood," one of my next non-sports custom card creations will be an addition to the iconic 1962 Topps Civil War News issue. It may not be the very next card I make, but it will be featured in this blog soon enough. 

Rails & Sails customs feature Civil War ironclads

The Civil War Centennial was right in my wheelhouse when I was a kid. I was 10 years old when the centennial began in 1961. Like most 10-year-old boys in that era, I was enthralled with the idea of war, at least in the abstract.

On the block where I lived there was a large -- about 6' x 4' x 1.5' -- red granite monument marking the area as Camp Hamilton, where Union troops gathered before being marched southwest to Madison to join the war. 

Nearby, the alley behind Mrs. Thompson's house, there was another piece of granite, roughly hewn and unmarked, that looked very much like a double headstone. It was rumored among us kids that it was, indeed, a gravestone, marking the final resting place for two Yankee soldiers who never made it out of Camp Hamilton.

I was very much into the Civil War. Of course I collected the 1962 Topps Civil War News bubblegum cards. I had the 1961 Milton Bradley Civil War board game Battle-Cry.

For Christmas one year I received the large Blue and Gray playset from Marx. I had a color-by-number set of Civil War pictures (I tried unsuccessfully recently to find one on eBay). For a couple of summers our games of Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers were changed to Yanks vs. Rebs. 

One year for my birthday my Aunt Corrine bought me the huge American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War. I wore that book out. And while my oldest brother wound up with it when my parents sold their home, I was able to pick up another copy a few years ago at Goodwill.

Like any juvenile Civil War buff of the day, I was fascinated by the alliteratively appealing but inaccurately named battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack.

When I recently began working on creating custom cards for some of my favorite childhood non-sports card sets, I discovered that the original 1955 Topps Rails and Sails set had no entry in its checklist for these Civil War ironclads.

So I recently made it my business to make those historic warships a latter-day addition to the R&S set.


In doing my research for the ships' histories on my card backs I was surprised at how little I really knew about that historic naval battle. You can go into as great a depth of that story as you like with a little google-searching, so I'll just present my version of cliff notes on the subject.

*   *   *

When the U.S. Navy abandoned the Norfolk Navy Yard to Virginia troops at the opening of the war, they scuttled the steam frigate U.S.S. Merrimack, burning it to the waterline.

The newly formed Confederate navy raised the hulk and, discovering that the hull and mechanics were still intact, refitted her as an ironclad ram. Up to 4" of iron armor was added, along with 10 cannons and a ram. 

By mid-February, 1862, renamed as the C.S.S. Virginia, she was commissioned to break the Yankee blockade of the Norfolk area.

Union spies had relayed details of the construction of the ironclad to Washington. The U.S. Navy rightly feared for the horrible vulnerability of its unarmored wooden vessels when facing a hostile ironclad. The Union press demanded immediate action, fearing that the rebels' ironclad warship would smash through the James River blockade, sweep the U.S. Navy from Chesapeake Bay and steam unchallenged up the Potomac into the heart of Washington, D.C. 

The navy plunged into construction of its own ironclad. In little more than 100 days, the U.S.S. Monitor left the Brooklyn Naval Yard on its way to Hampton Roads, Virginia. 

Due to perilous sea conditions, the Monitor was a day too late.

On April 8 the Virginia engaged the blockading U.S. fleet. She rammed and sank the sloop Cumberland, shelled the frigate Congress into submission and fired the Minnesota, which had run aground trying to evade the ironclad behemoth. Darkness prevented further decimation of the U.S. fleet. 

When the fog lifted the next morning, the Virginia set out to complete its mission. She was surprised when, from behind the still-burning Minnesota, the oddly configured Monitor steamed into view.

For four hours the ironclads threw shot and shell at each other, sometimes only a few yards between them. When the engagement broke off as the ships exhausted their supplies of ammunition, there was no structural damage to either ship and no fatalities among their crews. The Monitor had preserved the blockade and was hailed by the press as the "ship that saved the Union."

For several weeks the ships eyed each other warily, occasionally tossing desultory shots, but they engaged in no further significant action. The Monitor had taken refuge under the guns of the Union's Ft. Monroe. The Confederate ironclad had proven its invulnerability to the guns aboard U.S. Navy ships, but was unwilling to come under the fire of the larger shore batteries. The Virginia made repeated unsuccessful attempts to draw the Monitor into open water to effect a plan to capture the Yankee ironclad with a minimal boarding party.

When Confederate forces withdrew from the Norfolk area in early May, they scuttled the Virginia. The ironclad was too large to navigate the rivers and basically unfit to put out to sea. 

The Monitor did not survive the year, as well. She had remained in the Hampton Roads area to support Gen. George McClellan's Peninsula Campaign, then was ordered south in December to participate in the blockade of Charleston. In a storm at sea, the Monitor sank near Cape Hatteras, N.C.

*  *  *

Since this background has already run so long, I'll wait until next time to show you my Rails and Sails Monitor and Virginia custom creations.

Custom pirate ship added to Rails & Sails

In my Oct. 29 presentation, I explained that in nearly 60 years of collecting bubblegum cards as a kid and as an adult I had never owned a single card from the popular 1955 Topps Rails and Sails issue.

The Chicago and North Western diesel locomotive card I created in that format was a first for my custom card efforts.

Here's my second "addition" to that series.

As wide-ranging as the ships were in the "Sails" allocation of that 200-card set, Topps couldn't cover everything, and thus left me some room to work nearly 60 years later. Surprisingly, for a card set that was designed to appeal to re-teen boys, there was no pirate ship in the original Rails and Sails series.

In my studies of the original R+S I learned a great deal about the set that helped me in my custom card making.

I learned how truly scarce the high numbers -- 151-200 -- among the ship cards really are. 
At any given time there are some 800-900 singles and lots of R+S cards up for sale on eBay. My best guess after scouring those listings for a couple of weeks is that fewer than 10% of them comprise high-numbers.

I was delighted to discover that about half of the 70 original Sails cards featured on back a line art drawing of an American lighthouse.

This allowed me to bring a hometown element to my first ship card. 

The Fond du Lac lighthouse was built in 1933 on the south end of Lake Winnebago, at a promontory at the city's Lakeside Park. The octagonal Cape Cod style structure is 40 feet tall.

Probably since its early days, the lighthouse has been a beacon not only to craft on the lake, but also to local kids seeking a nearby safe place to park at night and "watch the submarine races." The popularity of the place as a lover's lane is attested to by the quantity of New Jersey white fish to be found there on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

The lighthouse is the most iconic symbol of the city. It's found on the city seal, police patches, informational signs, etc.

There was no dearth of good photos of the lighthouse available and I really enjoyed the time spent converting one of them to line art for the back of my card.

As you can see, the subject I chose for my first custom Sails card is the most famous pirate ship of the Golden Age (late-17th and early-18th centuries) of piracy in North America: Blackbeard's flagship, Queen Anne's Revenge.

The capsule history on my card back provides the bare bones, and you can easily find much more about her with a google-search.

Queen Anne's Revenge has reemerged in popular culture as a component in one of the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean action-fantasy movies, On Stranger Tides, released in 2011. 

Blackbeard and his ship also co-star in the video game Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, a 2013 release.

There is even a Lego kit of the Queen Anne's Revenge based on the Disney movie and also released in 2011. The Lego set is about 1,100 pieces and had a retail list price of $379.95. 

Too, the discovery of the wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge in the coastal waters off North Carolina in 1996, and subsequent salvage operations have brought new attention to the actual ship Queen Anne's Revenge.

Finding artwork for my card was easy, there are a number of modern paintings of the QAR to be found. Curiously, many of them share the dramatic theme of the ship cutting through the dark on a moonlit night.

While finding such art was easy, making it work in the context of a Rails and Sails formatted card took a good deal of effort. I stubbornly clung to the idea that I wanted the ship's pirate flag to be readily visible. This caused me to go through a number of permutations to fit the typographic elements to that end.

I actually completed seven different variations with ships sailing this way and that, and with black and white type arranged in all conformations. I studied them for a couple of days, gradually eliminating them until I came to the conclusion that the pictured card most exactly fits my vision.

There will be at least two-three more Sails cards forthcoming on different topics, though I don't have a timetable. I want to get out some more World on Wheels and TV Western customs in the near future, as well.