Silver Lookout or Silver Planet?

The Q, absolutely;  far more flexibility.  In addition to early [ before repaint/re# ]  Amtrak, there was, post CZ but pre-Amtrak, that fantastic California Service thrice weekly to connect with the RGZ, and one of these trailed it -- a sleeper and three cars with domes, now that's a train to model.  See p. 112 of Frailey.

SZ

Thanks SZ.  Great input.  Do you have a link to the Frailey book?  Most of my CB&Q sources are historical society publications I picked up for various 3rd Rail locomotive projects.   

So maybe I’m a little naive here, but I’ll ask anyway:  if you chose Silver Planet, how will you modify the name plate to accommodate the shorter length of the new name?

Space out (forgive the pun) the word        ”planet “ (will look weird)

Cut the length of the name plate (will need to recenter it)

Create a large space (again!) between Silver and Planet

Any of these is possible (personally if I could I’d go with shortening and recentering the name plate)…

HOWEVER, Silver Lookout is only 2 letters shorter than Silver Penthouse, so I’d choose that one, least work with satisfactory results.

What say you????

Cheers,

Price

Price,

Interesting input and very valid.  On the Atlas cars, the nameplates for the car name and the road name are removable with plastic clips.  My unlettered ones have the plates separate.  However, I have also learned that it is not too hard to break the clips. 

The more I think about this, I'm leaning toward the Q car name.  I also have a GGD Burlington Slumbercoach that ran on the Denver Zephyr so Q cars make the most sense for the trains I am building.  There is a reason why the Q had the most cars in the CZ fleet.  They were the innovators and main driving force behind the original train.  While I am not a diehard Q modeler, having options to shorten or lengthen a train based on the service it was placed in makes a lot of sense.  My 3rd obs is CB&Q Silver Solarium.  It sounds like the matched set may be the way to go.

As it's been too long since I've done any decaling or painting, I'm patiently awaiting a bottle of Solvaset that won't get here until after the new year.  However, I have some time off between Christmas and New Years, so I have the time then to at least start the project.

As an aside, a nice plug for K4 decals who has a wonderful set for CZ cars in many of the car names Atlas did not produce.

Jon,

OK removable name plates makes things a lot better.  I don’t own any of those cars, so I wasn’t aware of that innovation.  Very nice!

Whichever way you decide, good hunting!

Cheers,

Price

Of all the passenger cars I have, I must say that these are my best plastic tooled cars in my collection.  The detail is phenomenal for a non-brass car.  When I got my 3rd Rail E5s I was just planning on doing a simple train with heavyweight GGD cars based loosely on the Exhibition Flyer.  However, I got one of these Atlas cars at a fair price and then I went down the rabbit hole after seeing how well executed these are.  They still need a little work.  The interior colors are monotone tan in color, and they lack figures, but those are fixable in time.  I'm almost embarrassed to say that I went from 5 cars between Amtrak and Alaska collected over the last 10 years to a little over 50 by the end of this year.  Granted some probably don't fit into my future plans, but I was finding them at favorable prices.  I went as far as to make a list of all the cars produced by Atlas to see what I have and what I don't have.  There are still plenty out there I do not have but finding them at this point is less important since my collection is a little larger than it needs to be. 

Twilight of the Great Trains  Fred W. Frailey, Indiana University Press.  I have the 2nd ed [ 2010 ], which is termed  "Expanded", but I don't know the details of what that entailed over the 1998 ed.

In my opinion Wayner's Car Names, Numbers, and Consists is the other indispensable book for modeling the streamline train era.

Best, SZ

Jonathan:

The Silver Lookout was built a few years after the 1949 inauguration of the CZ for extra capacity.

CB&Q would run it at times in the overnight Aksarben Zephyr between Chicago, Omaha, & Lincoln.  Accordingly, the drumhead on Silver Lookout was of the Aksarben Zephyr emblem .  The other 6 CZ vista dome observation cars had the CZ logo in neon on their drumheads.

You could certainly convert your Silver Penthouse to Silver Lookout & leave the current CZ drumhead as is.

However, if you wanted to convert it to the Aksarben Zephyr drumhead, you could easily create your own Aksarben logo decal with decal paper.

Rebel Rails has a 6” square metal sign of the Aksarben logo that could be photocopied & photo-shopped into the appropriate size for an O-scale drumhead decal.

An advantage of Silver Lookout is that you won’t have to modify the 4 CB&Q plates on the car ends to WP .  

With the RailFonts’ Zephyr Gothic fonts, You could also create your own custom unique fictional CB&Q car name like your favorite Silver Surfer.  

Please keep us informed of your decisions & progress.

CB&Q Bill

Thanks for the great info Bill!

Jonathan:

Is your “Ace metallic Mirrored Silver” pant from Ace Hardware ?

Is this paint in a rattle spray can ?

Thanks in advance !!!

CB&Q Bill

Bill,

Yes, it is the Ace brand and comes in a rattle can.  I'll post a photo of my sample next to the car when I am home tomorrow afternoon or perhaps on Christmas day.  It looked good in my home office, but nothing quite shows the color like sunlight.

Bill,

See these photos taken at about 3:30 pm local time.  The color temperature of the sun is a little warmer at this time of day here in the Phoenix metro area, but you get the idea.  I will say the sheen of the Ace paint is a little more reflective than the paint on the car, but it is very close to my eye.  For purposes of my project, it will do a great job, and I have some other projects for stainless cars that this paint will be better than the Amtrak Platinum Mist I've been using since my days of custom painting N, HO, and O over the last 30 years. My sample was a spray bottle that just happened to be the closest plastic object I could source.

@CBQ_Bill posted:

Jonathan:

The Silver Lookout was built a few years after the 1949 inauguration of the CZ for extra capacity.

CB&Q would run it at times in the overnight Aksarben Zephyr between Chicago, Omaha, & Lincoln.  Accordingly, the drumhead on Silver Lookout was of the Aksarben Zephyr emblem .  The other 6 CZ vista dome observation cars had the CZ logo in neon on their drumheads.

Bill, it's my understanding from Wayner, p. 221, that while the 'Lookout was built to permit this, all of the cars [ 6 + 1 ], inc the 3 non-Q ones, were in this pool, not just the Lookout -- whichever of the pooled cars [ ie including the transferred sleepers ] that came in that day eb.   Sample ASB consists confirm this.  So the Lookout can certainly retain its CZ drumhead if it's in CZ service.  This implies that any of the 7 obs would have an ASB tail sign when/if that was used on that train.

Of course my understanding could be wrong.

Best, SZ

@Steinzeit posted:

The Q, absolutely;  far more flexibility.  In addition to early [ before repaint/re# ]  Amtrak, there was, post CZ but pre-Amtrak, that fantastic California Service thrice weekly to connect with the RGZ, and one of these trailed it -- a sleeper and three cars with domes, now that's a train to model.  See p. 112 of Frailey.

SZ

Thinking through this a little more, it sounds like for this service I would need to add an E7, E8, or E9 to my motive power pool as the E5s were traded in on SD40s in 1967 after the shameful demotion to coal drags in Pueblo.    However a stainless sided E8 would be really nice looking with this consist.

Regarding your comment on the drumhead, I wonder if it would be possible to modify the car to permit multiple drumheads depending on the service.  Granted a larger project than I anticipated, but an interesting thought certainly.

Hi Steinzeit:

Thanks for your comments.

What is the full name of the title, author, & publisher of the Wayner book ?

Thanks in advance !!!

CB&Q Bill,