Building a Passenger Car

Heck yes! 👍

Any sort of "how I did it" always makes for a good read...and what you've done here looks terrific!

Mark in Oregon

Nice looking car. Looking forward to following along.

Purplepapa

Wow, Ken!  Very nice!

Awesome modeling! JohnA

Really Nice. Just looking at the pics. They have the look of a high end brass model.

Very nice results!   Your crafstmanship on the C&O is exceptional!

Excellent project; details please.

Beautiful job ! ❤️❤️❤️

@kanawha posted:

The last one I've built is a 5 double bedroom/buffet/lounge/blunt end observation using an old American Lightweight Car Company kit for the core model and car sides from Union Station Products.

This was a fairly involved project and isn't for everybody so I'm wondering if you scale guys are interested in how to build something like this. I have construction pictures I can post.

Absolutely interested in how you married the kit and car sides, and all the rest!

Very impressive! I've been modifying (more like tinkering with) a couple of Lionel heavyweight 18" PRR passenger cars, namely replacing the factory lighting with LEDs and upgrading the interiors, but your work is way beyond that. Your post is motivating!

This is B&O's " Wawasee," which was one of four ex-C&O cars used on the 1950's modernized Capitol Limited.  Two had tail end diaphragms and two others did not.  This model is a rebuild of a Bill Wolfer model with custom made brass sides by Dick Bregler from the 1990's.   Like the beautiful C&O model above, this B&O car interior detail and LED lighting. Wolfer had used kitchen table edging for the fluted siding which I replaced with styrene in 2015.

S. Islander

Kenawha, impressive work.  Looks production quality to me.  Your posts on how you did it would be good reading.

Thank you all for the compliments. I will have to get busy with the construction details.

S. Islander - That B&O car is gorgeous. The interior is way more detailed than mine. It's a hassle to remove the roof so I limited the detail to what could be easily seen through the windows. I especially like the sink/mirror units that are sunk into the walls between the bedrooms.

Ken

Thing about a project such as this is even if I had no interest in reproducing your car, there would still be plenty I could learn from your efforts.

Outstanding work.  I'd be interested in how you built them.

Beautiful work! I am curious to know where you sourced the interior details. I am in the midst of upgrading Lionel aluminum cars that had silouhettes in the windows.

Love your car. Please share your construction techniques.

Outstanding !  Would be a worthy article for O Gauge Railroading magazine.                                 j

Bruce G, I recently acquired seven older MTH PASSENGER cars, not realizing that they had the celluloid(?) window inserts rather than full interiors.  I’m contemplating converting them to full ieriors and LED lightings. Your thoughts on this potential project would really be welcome.

@RubinG posted:

Bruce G, I recently acquired seven older MTH PASSENGER cars, not realizing that they had the celluloid(?) window inserts rather than full interiors.  I’m contemplating converting them to full ieriors and LED lightings. Your thoughts on this potential project would really be welcome.

Rubin, I would check the MTH parts website first and see if they have any interiors available to fit your cars. If you can't find the MTH interiors you're going to have to scratchbuild them from styrene and buy the interior parts to furnish them. For lighting , I've been using Gun Runner John's passenger car lighting kits. They work great and I highly recommend them.

Ken

The ALW kits I believe are from the 80's and early 90's. American Standard Car Co started the line but the Pullman Standard lightweight kits were later sold and became American Lightweight Car Co. The kits are not all that rare as I see them popping up on ebay frequently. It makes me wonder what percentage of the kits made were actually built.

Here are some of the major parts that come in the kit:

From top to bottom:

• molded plastic roof which will have to be shortened
• car ends and vestibule doors
• floor
• sides with prototypical window sizes and placement (note that the sides do not include skirting)
• Evergreen Styrene car siding for the upper part of the fluted siding
• narrow grooved styrene strips for the lower fluted siding and skirts
• curved plastic strip to fabricate skirts from

The picture doesn't show everything that comes in the kit. There are numerous different size plastic strips to build up the inside of the car sides and reinforce the structure of the car. Also there are 2 rail plastic trucks and bolsters, silver looking wire for grab irons, and resin cast underbody detail parts.

The curved plastic strip to make the curved skirts is interesting as I've never seen this before and have no idea where it could be bought separately. It really helps with getting the skirts using the USP car sides to get the right curvature.

Ken

I don't know the history of Union Station Products, but they make prototypical car sides for most P-S and Budd cars made. Like most model railroading manufacturers the main emphasis is on HO, but the sides are milled to order so they are available in N, HO, S, and O. The kicker is what do you use for the core of the car in S and O? Scale HO passenger cars that can be used are plentiful and cheap. Not so plentiful in O and expensive to boot. They have core kits for S and O but you have to fabricate a roof from sheet styrene and the rest of the parts look kind of crude. The ALW kit seems like a better starting point.

Here's what you get:

From top to bottom:

• clear material for the window insert and reinforcing backing for the car sides
• cars sides which include the vestibule doors and fluted skirts. Note the rectangular holes in the skirts used as access points for the water tank fill and stationary power connections.
• fluted siding.
• various sizes of number and name boards.

Here's closeups of the sides:

The fluting is milled to match the flute spacings P-S used:

For my build I did not use this fluting as I had already built a couple of ALW cars using their fluting and needed all the cars to match. I also didn't use the clear backing for the sides. I thought the car would go together easier if I used ALW's method of building up the car insides.

Ken

beautiful work.  I want to see more photos of the construction

I don't have any photos of the car sides being built up, but this is how it goes:

• The USP and ALW car sides are almost identical (same thickness and height) so they are pretty much interchangeable. Carefully shorten the car sides so they are the same length as the ALW floor. Make sure the ends of both sides are square and they are exactly the same length.
• Scribe the inside of the skirts lengthwise with an Xacto knife. You need several parallel scribes along the entire length of the skirts. Roll the skirts inward by rolling them over the knife handle. This will begin making the skirt curve inward. It won't curve very much but this gets the curve started for a later step.
• Build up the inside of the sides following the ALW instructions and the various widths of styrene strips provided in the kit. Sand off any excess that hangs over the top and ends of the sides.
• Glue the fluting material in line with top of the skirts. Using the ALW fluting involves attaching the narrow scribed strip first and then the Evergreen car siding above that. The USP siding goes on as on piece if you chose to use it instead of the ALW method.

This is what the inside of the car side looks like when finished:

A word of caution about glue. If you use a hot styrene cement like Testor's Model Master liquid cement to glue all these strips to side you run the risk of having the sides distort over time. I personally like using a hot glue for this kind of construction. There's nothing worse than finishing a model and then have something significant fall off because of insufficient glue. However, the distortion potential is real as my first attempt to build this car resulted in the sides curving inward so badly that it prevented the roof from staying on.

The inside strips were glued on with a gel super glue that doesn't outgas over time. In this case I used Bob Smith Industries Super Gold+ gap filling glue. The fluting was glued on using the Testor's liquid cement because the fluting was going to be handled when picking up and moving the car and like I said I don't want anything significant to fall off. So far I haven't seen any distortion and its been two years since I built up the sides.

Ken

The cars sides and ends are attached to the floor as per the ALW instructions. In this car's case, I used the blunt observation end from the USP kit on one end and the ALW car end on the other. Also added small pieces of styrene around each end to reinforce the joints.

The pieces glued to the floor are spacers for the interior floor to sit on. These create a space to route the wiring from the trucks under the interior floor.

Years ago when K-Line was making their 21" aluminum cars, the two rail guys were buying three rail cars, converting them to two rail,  and selling the three rail trucks. I must have snagged about 10 pairs of trucks and they are perfect for the P-S passenger cars. These trucks are mounted on a post and held on with an E-clip.

A 1/16" thick strip of Plastruct ABS on the bottom of the car floor gave the correct ride height for the car. Getting the position of the truck from the end of the car was critical involving some trial and error, taking into account the thickness of the diaphragm, and making sure the car would go around O72 curves without a big gap between cars. I made an oblong hole in the floor so as to have room to slip the E-clip on, and mounted the ABS strip to the floor with screws.

Earlier I posted a picture of a curved piece of styrene for the skirt. This is glued (with hot styrene cement so that it stays secured) to the floor on the inside of the skirt. This will leave a gap between the skirt and the curved plastic. Reinforce the lower edge of the skirt with a small piece of square styrene. Let sit for a couple of days until thoroughly dry.

Flow cement in the gap between the skirt and the curved plastic and using small clothespins pull the skirt tight up against the curved plastic. The below pictures are staged on a car using an Indianapolis Car Company passenger car kit for the core car. The technique is the same.

Make sure no glue flows onto the outside of the fluting which could ruin the side. Let dry thoroughly before removing clothespins. Open up the rectangular holes in the skirting.

The blunt end is a little tricky. I had to scratch a mounting plate for the diaphragm and figure out how to wrap the fluting around the end. Bending the fluting around the end would just distort or break it so I glued pieces of the Evergreen car siding to the blunt end so they overlapped the siding on the car side. Then it was a mater of carving the flutes with an Xacto knife and sanding them to shape with a needle file and fine sandpaper. I think it worked pretty well.

The roof was fairly easy. Glued two .25 X .25 pieces of styrene to one end and sanded to shape for the blunt end. Once that was done the other end was shortened to match the length of the car.

Glued styrene under the blunt end of the roof to keep the roof from sliding off.

I used the ancient method of mounting the roof by running a threaded screw from the underside of the roof through the floor of the car. The screw runs between two walls in the interior so its not visible through the windows.

Finally a test fit of all the parts:

The roof vent castings are included in the ALW kit but can also be obtained from Scale City. The vent in the center was made from scratch and the little round vent near the front is a brass brad.

Ken

@kanawha posted:

Bending the fluting around the end would just distort or break it so I glued pieces of the Evergreen car siding to the blunt end so they overlapped the siding on the car side. Then it was a mater of carving the flutes with an Xacto knife and sanding them to shape with a needle file and fine sandpaper.

Thanks! Was wondering how you wrapped around the corners.

The underframe is made from a piece of .040 flat styrene with some channel and strip detail. The resin cast battery boxes, water tank, and air conditioning equipment come in the ALW kit as well as the metal castings for the air tanks and brake equipment. I added the generator and steam trap castings which I believe are now available from Scale City.

The underframe just mounts to the car floor with four small screws.

The interior is scratch built from .040" styrene flat sheets. The USP car sides come with paperwork about the car as well as the interior layout. With that and using the window positions for the locations of walls, building the interior is a matter of cutting the pieces to fit inside the car. I simplified the sink/mirror area as they should go into the space between the bedroom walls. The toilets are also in that space, but you wouldn't be able to see them without removing the roof so I left them out.

The sleeper end:

The lounge end:

The individual chairs and tables are from Precision Scale. The sofas are from Delta Models. There are also ashtray stands I added later from Scale City.

Most interiors that come with Lionel and MTH cars are under scale. You have to cut the feet off the passengers to get them to fit or you can't fit two passengers side by side. With this car everything is true O scale. All the passengers figures fit well.

Ken

Nice job!  I'd love to see a view looking in the windows at the detail you included!

Really nice!....streamliner passenger cars are, for me, much harder to build, certainly from the old kits, than heavyweights.  You well over-ride their deficiencies.

The USP sides have indentations locating where the grab irons go.  These are drilled out and then comes the tedious task of bending grab irons from the silver wire that comes in the ALW kit (it took many tries to bend the ones that wrap around the end of the car ). The grab irons then are put aside to be installed after painting.

One final assembly check after priming the car with Tamiya Primer:

Paint:

• Letterboard: Tamiya Chrome Yellow
• Window band, ends, roof, trucks, and underframe: Scalecoat II C&O Blue
• Fluting: Scalecoat II Silver

Lined the windows with a silver paint pen to represent the silver trim around the windows (another tedious task).

Decals:

• Road name and herald: Champ P-78
• Script car name and script Pullman: Custom made by a fellow that used to advertise making custom decals on the Forum a few years ago.

Final finish was a 50/50 mix of Glosecoat and Dullcoat.

Ken

Thanks for sharing

Charlie

Ken

The 2 pictures on your last post aren't showing... 🤔

Mark in Oregon

@Strummer posted:

Ken

The 2 pictures on your last post aren't showing... 🤔

Mark in Oregon

Fixed. They must have gotten lost in the server update.

Ken