Espeefan's Passenger Car Modeling

[DeaconKC]

All kinds of different things John. The interiors came in the GGD cars. In cars without, the most common source has been a big bag of Walthers interiors I got from a friend. I have acquired seats, sofas and such from estate collections that I've picked up over the years, the old Walthers wood or pot metal parts from the old days, and I have stuff from Precision Scale, the brass folks. In addition to the models, they also do detail parts and passenger car interior parts. There is also Red Cap lines. They are gone now, but their stuff turns up at swap meets or e-Bay sometimes. The model passenger car market has a long way to go until it catches up with the freight car and locomotive markets. It's happening, but it's slow going.

Regarding shorter cars, you are wise! I see many modelers struggling with 85 ft cars and 18" radii, and large six axle diesels or large steam locomotives on 18-22" radii. Now if that's what they enjoy, far be it from me to judge. It's their railroad! To me, equipment hanging over the rails all the way to Nebraska looks ridiculous. I have the good fortune to belong to a club with 48" minimum radius, so for some of my work here, don't try this at home if you're one of those guys! if I were doing 22-24" radii, I would be running 60 ft coaches (see the 60 ft cars a few pages up this thread) and four axle diesels or 4-6-0's, 4-6-2's, and 2-8-0's. There are also a few smaller Mikes that work on tighter curves and look OK. I once told my wife that if we moved away from the club, I'd probably have to have to liquidate a fair portion of the collection as I wouldn't have any place to run it! The Walthers Proto series car boxes state that a 24" minimum radius us recommended. With brass, you get to find out the hard way, but for most 6 axle equipment, not less than 30" minimum radius is required. 36" is more prudent.

Have you ever done a SP 4-4-2? That might also work on smaller radii.

 

[Espeefan]

Have you ever done a SP 4-4-2? That might also work on smaller radii.

The Atlantic? Yeah as a matter of fact. I have two of them, one in Daylight, and one plain black one. Atlantics were mostly gone by the time I model, so they don't see much run time. I'll pull out one and pull a couple of these coaches with it, and post a video in a week or two. They can get fussy over switches though!

 

[Espeefan]

In trying to paint the kitchen windows on my diners,, I had an interesting experience. The window design prevents you from getting a good coat of paint everywhere due to the beveled edges. Walthers windows are solid. These are not. In the photo it looks like you are looking at the outside. You are actually looking at the inside. I guess that saves some material, but it makes them a stinker to paint. While attempting to do that, I had a paint mishap where the Daylight shell got contaminated with Floquil Daylight Orange. It seems a little paint dripped down the bottle side, got on my fingers undetected, and was transferred to the diner shell. Murphy still in my back pocket and hard at work as usual! After the swear jar was filled to overflowing I got the offending paint off the shell. This was done by soaking a Q-tip in Xylene, blotting it off onto a paper towel, and gently scrubbing the orange off the shell, then blotting it dry. The factory paint survived thanks to discovering the problem right away. The windows however weren't so lucky, and enough were fogged to require total replacement. I used old faithful .010 styrene here and masked a piece for the kitchen windows. These windows were painted over in my era because the SP raised the backsplash up on the window side. Not the first time a kitchen remodel has stabbed someone in the back I'll bet! I primed that window section with gray, and painted with Orange to eliminate light transmission. Stuff that happens! I'll be doing my yellow and green diners, kitchen windows only. One dividend: You can see inside the kitchen now. I'm not sure what the factory used to glue those windows in with. That stuff was tough! Similar to canopy glue but much more tenacious. It took considerable work to get it off using a chisel blade and a sanding stick so the styrene replacements would lay flat.