What to do with original lettering

So we're refurbishing our Queen Mary Brake van at the moment and we decided it would be nice to take off the metal cladding and plywood on the cabin sides and re-plank it as it would have originally been. To our surprise once we took that off we found that there was planking sandwiched between the two, and not only that, but it was quite clearly original 1936 timber:



The timber is in pretty good condition on the whole (plenty of the coach bolts were still held firm enough for me to undo the nuts without them spinning round in their holes) and we've decided we will keep the planks, some wood filler in the screwholes from the metal cladding should make it presentable enough. We were very pleased with our discovery, but what do we do now? Obviously it shall be traced, photographed and measured etc. but is there anything else we should consider? I've seen on carriages where it's just varnished wood the original remains of numbers/lettering have been cleaned up and varnished over, but that's not really an option here, we can't just varnish that and send it out! But is there an equivalent? What would you do?

 

For the sake of, what - 4 planks? I'd replace with new & keep the originals as an exhibit in their own right.

Pete S.

 

I found plenty of original lettering under layers of paint on B462772, right down to the actual build date on the solebar. No real choice but to paint over it so I simply photographed and traced it first.



In your case you have to wonder what prompted them to plate over the wood in the first place.


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After we had uncovered the original paintwork on our Cambridge horse tram body, the main panels were removed/conserved and now form a display in their own right adjacent to the restored vehicle in our main display hall. The woodwork was to far gone to be reused on the rebuilt tram anyway and form part of the visible history of the car, particularly when the original Bradford & Shelf Tramways crest (Bradford City coat of arms on the circular device in centre of the red panel) from its steam tram trailer days was discovered beneath the Cambridge paintwork...




The photo of the restored tram shows the other side to that shown in its unrestored state, which is why the bottom panel advert is completely different - Bolton Bros rather than Allin & Sons. We did save both of the original lower adverts.