Adding interiors to Williams passenger cars

Buy cars with the interiors already installed, it'll be a bunch cheaper and easier.

I've only seen one person do that, and it was a LOT of work, he upgraded the Weaver Reading Crusader cars, a LOT of work!  He used the K-Line interiors as I recall.

Rocky, I have built several Walthers passenger cars over the years and making chairs for passenger cars by bending cardstock to form the bottom and back and then gluing on ends which are basically just a profile of an arm rest and back with single pedestal leg rather than two distinct legs on the ends.  I cannot make a good photo of those in a car but will make one asap and post a photo. Once painted and inside the car they look as good or better than the seats in MTH and KLine cars.  I can make enough for one car in about an hour.  Before I came up with this I was using wood outside corner molding from Home Depot which I cut down to form an appropriate size seat and back. I did not make armrests, just glued them inside the car and then glued on the people.  Looking through the windows into the car they look great. Even simpler than this is to cut a wood or plexiglas strip 1/8" thick and about 3/4" wide and sand a slight bevel on the bottom edge, cut this into 1" long pieces  this forms a seat back, glue it bevel side down to give the seat a slight recline you only have a back no seat bottom then cut the legs off your people and glue them with their backs against the seat backs already glued down. Again once painted and looking through the small windows it looks great.   Also, before gluing seats in a passenger car it will speed up your work if you make spacers to keep all the seats evenly spaced.  The main reason I started making my own interior details, outside of cost, was the interior and bottom detals sold by Walthers were potmetal and by the time you were finished the cars weighed as much as a locomotive.

Wow JOHNACTION!  Looking forward to see you photo(s).  Some great ideas.

I actually have the Weaver Reading Crusader passenger cars with the interiors added in. And passengers and LED lighting. They run behind my Weaver Reading Crusader, which was converted to DCS.

Alex did the work on the passenger cars, and he did his usual fantastic job. I had gotten the interior benches from Gary at Weaver. I don't know of anyone who sells the seating for passenger cars these days. 

Gerry

Just my opinion, but I think the only realistic option is to pull finished interiors out of other passenger cars, and transplant them, doing whatever cutting, etc., that's necessary. I've taken Lionel 15" aluminum passenger cars with finished interiors, removed the shells, and put the shells from the set of cars I want onto the chassis' that had the finished interiors. The chassis and interiors are interchangable on Lionel's 15' aluminum cars, going back to the MPC days, on up to recent times. No cutting is necessary. 

Not cheap, because you have to buy another set of cars with finished interiors, but that's the only realistic way to do it, I think. I put the unused shells (with the silhouettes) and chassis' together and then sell them, so that helps recoup some of the cost. The hardest part of the procedure is removing the tinted clear windows from the shells of the finished interior set, without damaging them, as they are glued in. The silhouette strips just slide in and out. If I do this procedure again, I may try to find some tinted plastic sheets that I can just cut and slide in. 

Scale City, Grandt Line, and Northeastern Lumber all make passenger car seating. 

It's fairly easy and be can done as cheap or expensive as you want to go. You can easily make a passenger car interior for about $20.00/car. A little imagination and hopefully a picture or two of the interior you want to recreate will be helpful.

In theory, Lionel sells parts which includes passenger car interiors. They have outsourced this to a third party, and when I did a search, none seemed to be available. It would be nice if we could buy these, as I did from Weaver years ago, to make upgrading older cars easier. I have not searched the names that BRR gave.

Gerry

I plan on doing this to some williams 60' Madison cars.  I bought K-line interiors from Brasseur.

Years ago I build Walthers passenger cars and due to cost and weight I decided to try and make the chairs myself I go into this in an earlier post. I mentioned that I would make one of the chairs and make photos. This one took 7 minutes when I am cranked up and in the mass production mode I can fill a car in around an hour.  Cost materials free + one hour per car.

Forgot to mention,  I tape the back with a sliver of tape pulled to the bottom of the seat. then I glue the ends on with thin CA. It cures almost instantly on the cardstock.

I think I'd do the main body with wood as I could do long strips with a router and cut to size.  Then you could do the ends with Styrene as you show.  I'll bet painted those seats look just fine.

Great ideas for "make'em yourselfers" or sources for "buy'em now" folks.

Plenty to work with here...many thanks!!!

John,  I started off using wood outside corner molding and trimmed the back, then the seat with a band saw then sanded and rounded the back and seat edges. I tried as you suggest  styrene, masonite and card stock for the ends.  All made for a car heavier than I was happy with. Which led to the all card stock chair.  Since I could do 4' at a time the wood was faster than using card stock, however I used full sheets of poster board with lines drawn at the points where it would fold. I would press the pin hard into the board to encourage the board to bend at that point. Then I would make the bends on 20" of board at once, and cut 1" sections with a paper trimmer then glue the ends on.   My daughter was a big help, around 11 at the time I was building the Walthers cars and thought making the chairs was great fun.  An entirely different approach I would like to try is to make a chair floor out of styrene then make a latex rubber mold and  mount it in a Plexiglas box with a lid and a hole in the lid to shoot GreatStuff foam into the mold. That idea is way on the back burner                                                                                               WHEN YOU RUN OUT OF PROJECTS YOU DIE

Well, you can't argue with your results, they look pretty nice.

JOHNACTION...what type of card stock are you using?  Is it a particular weight/grade?

When I was making them in bulk I was using common poster board from Walmart/ Kmart I would draw the fold lines down one edge pressing the pen into the paper so it would naturally tend to bend where the line was and I would cut that edge off about 1.75" wide X 20" long and put  the bend lines on a sharp counter top edge and make the bends, after the bends were established I would flatten the strip and cut 1" long pieces on a paper trimmer to form a 4' seat and it's back, then re-bend on the lines. if you look at the first of my pix you can see how I fold the back over to make it thicker and tape it down under the seat portion.  Then I glue the sides on which are approximately 7/8" X 1/2". After the glue is dry I use small pointed scissors to cut the arms out and a little off the back of the legs.  I'm not too fussy about the thickness as long as I can make a clean wrinkle free bend, and it's rigid enough to handle without crumpling. I made the one in the photo from the white board under a Little Debbie cake. White file cards work OK. However if making car loads I prefer poster board just because I can make 20 at one time.   

brr posted:

Scale City, Grandt Line, and Northeastern Lumber all make passenger car seating. 

It's fairly easy and be can done as cheap or expensive as you want to go. You can easily make a passenger car interior for about $20.00/car. A little imagination and hopefully a picture or two of the interior you want to recreate will be helpful.

I saw some wood molding at Home Depot the last time there, working on a home project, and when I saw the moldings, I thought that they would make exceptional chairs and benches for modeling in "O" Gauge..........use cardboard or wire for arm rest end pieces......!