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.