Welcome to my adventure on building my own Super chief inspired passenger train. Every couple of years I do a big project and try to document the adventure here on the forum.
I always wanted a set of scale Santa Fe F3 War Bonnets and cars, but never saw them at a low enough entry price to commit to it. My train purchases in recent years have mostly been focused on older equipment. While I like the newer stuff, the older stuff is just fine with me assuming engines look good with the appropriate details and they have DCS or TMCC with cruise/odessy. My thinking on documenting this effort is others might like to see some of these ideas and they might start on similar adventure.
I live in the world of 18" cars because I like the way they look and operate on my modest layout that make 21” cars look huge . With that in mind, it all started two years ago at a Thanksgiving weekend train show here in Kansas City where I saw a set of early 2000’s, MTH 18" streamlined Santa Fe cars for a price I could not pass on.
These sets are some of the earliest plastic ones with generic grey interior and no people. Being able to get a great price on these helped me to justify customizing them to make them the way I wanted them to be, which was something special and unique that I created and not everyone has on their layout. I love having custom things you don't see everyday on other’s layouts. Before starting this project, I wanted to be sure I had a set of F units to run with them or this was pointless. The search continued for a while in needing a good priced set of scale F units. I had no idea there were so many different scale war bonnet F units. After some research, I settled on liking the Lionel F3 versions with the articulated diaphragms, the nice see through screens and the more detailed pilots. I was focused on finding a set of these. It turns out there are a lot of versions of these (16,17,18 and 19?).
This last March, I finally ended up with a decent deal on the #16 AA Santa Fe Scale F units from the early 2000s that had one of the earlier odyssey systems in it. Hard to believe these were released in 2002, over 20 years old!
While they looked awesome, the headlight/mars light were not ideal with cool (blue) white instead of warm white LEDs. The interior was all red with really super bright bulbs (and hot) on both the cab interior and the number boards. Hot enough that I was concerned they might melt plastic. I painted the interiors grey and seats black. I replaced the headlight and mars light with warm white LEDs. I then rewired the cab light and number boards to be in series instead of in parallel to reduce both their brightness and heat. All of these were huge improvements. There is a video below and picture references showing the differences in the updated A unit and the non updated A unit for comparison.
In working through this process I notice the two screws holding the chassis to the motor mounts were missing on a few of mine resulting in the unit being at uneven heights. The image below show the location of the screws with the grey pointer.
I then looked online at others with same model and you can quickly pick out the ones where one of the unit has lost the screws and look to be a different heights. This must be a common problem. I ended up ordering a bunch of these screws and adding a few washers between the chassis and motor mounts to lower the body a bit. The screws needed for this are M3 x 5mm x 0.5thd and can be ordered easily in bulk from amazon.
As I ran both A A units on the track, I realized that without a B unit, they didn't capture the pictures and videos I had seen of the Super Chief. Just before Spring 2023 York, I was able to pick up the powered B unit from the TCA x change. At first I thought the ABA was the perfect size, but watching any Super Chief Video, they always seem to be ABBA. I was on the fence for an additional B unit and then I saw an un-powered one a York for $50, it came home with me. I now had a scale ABBA Santa Fe engine sets where two units were powered for ~$550. I felt pretty good about this and lined them up on the layout. While they looked awesome individually, there was a huge gap between the engines because of their couplers that really bothered me.
Next task was to solve this gap issue. I originally tried locating some shorter Lionel couplers but I was not sure how to test them with our some trial and error for ordering random ones. A search on the forum here showed another post, (link below, thanks Norton!) which showed a truck mounted scale kadee coupler solution.
https://ogrforum.com/...ply=9173459985768159
Very cool idea, where he machined his own adapter plates and was able to eliminate the gap on the units and still allow them to operate on O-54 by mounting the couplers to the trucks themselves instead of the frame. I don't have these tools or skills to do this, so instead I adapted his idea to 1/8"x1/2" aluminum stock (from home depot) and some styrene plastic as shown below. I scratched line references for the holes into the aluminum and used the brass stock on the drill press to act as jig to help keep the holes the same distance from the edge of the aluminum as I slid it along. I probably have the crappiest drill press known to man as there is a lot of slop in it from side to side, but still, this approach worked decent. A small bit was used to get started and help align the placement of the two holes on one side and the single hole on the other. A small counter sunk 6/32 brass screw (from ACE Hardware) was used to hold the plate on the under side of the truck. I used a tap on the middle screw hole for the 6/32 screw to thread directly in to. I also used a tap on the smaller holes for 2-56 x 1/2" pan head screws (from Home Depot) used to attach the coupler to the plate. The 6/32 tap was from ACE and 2-56 tap was from Amazon, both shown in the pic below. I created some styrene shims to mount to the top of the plate. Now I had some thing very close to what Norton machined in his original post.
I used the 742 Kadees between the engines as the knuckle is shifted down from the shank to allow a higher attachment point. These 742 Kadee couplers only comes with plastic coupler boxes. I bought metal boxes from Kadee as well to upgrade/replace the plastic ones as I wanted them to be very solid. The corners of the coupler boxes needed to be ground off to allow them to be recessed more into the truck. I don't have any great pictures of this, but Norton's post has great images showing this. Additional, I added a small brass wire in the coupler box sitting loosely on the bottom of it towards the front of the coupler box but behind the coupler holding the coupler in more. This pulled the coupler in some and reduced its ability to stretch and cause a larger gap between engines when in tension.
I used the 740 Kadees on the front of the engine. I had to remove almost half of the rear of the coupler box so it wouldn't interfer with the truck, but removing this did not detract from its functionality. I used a tap on the pilot and cut screws shorter to prevent protruding above the pilot.
If you are not familiar with types of Kadees, the picture below shows the 740 and 742 couplers and how shank position shifts in respect to the knuckle.
Pictured below shows the truck removed with the plate attached. The styrene shim is not placed on at this point but one can see circular cavity requiring coupler box corners to rounded off (removed) to allow them to be more recessed.
Shown below is one of trial fits I did for my first attempt at the plates where coupler mount screws were too far out. Notice the styrene spacer is missing and the couple box will need to be rounded still to pull it farther back in.
Below is the final product with the shim and plate and coupler all painted.
I painted all of these part below before final assembly with Model Masters "1870 Steel" paint. Not super paint durable as I was hoping, but the ones in real life look scuffed as well. It seems to be a great match for the Lionel silver.
Below shows the pilot. I figured if my scale steamers use a scale coupler on the front, why not this set of F3s that I would probably never run backwards. I used the same aluminum stock for shim and mounted the couple to the pilot. These were in stock at Lionel still if you make a mistake
In the end, I thought all this came out nice. Pictures below. One thing not mentioned so far and no picture of is the B units have a detail piece that in real life touch the other B unit, kind of like a buffer. They are different for the A and B units. If two B units are close coupled like this, this part will need to be flexed a bit so they make it around the curves. This is discussed and shown in the operation video below.
I am very happy with these now and love the close coupling look. Below is a video of them on ~ O-54 curve
I did run into an issue with the older traction tires being swollen causing the engine to bob up and down. After being replaced, issue went away. Word of caution on replacing these, the original traction tires were not just round but I believe they were molded on the wheel as there are four holes that the tire also is molded into to that go through to the flange.
If this is not all removed, I expect the new tires to not sit flat.
The only item remaining I would have liked to change was adding chrome to the headlight bezel. The door with the headlight comes off easy enough where the lens can be removed as well to make the change. I tried a few different product and thought through some ideas of accomplishing this, but none of the products seemed very durable, where my fingers could rub the chrome effect off. In the end I lost confidence in modifying this and left it alone. If the part was still available for spare (which it is not from Lionel), I would have probably given it a try.
As I built these plates, I made two sets, one for my Santa Fe set and one for my Dad as well for his Lionel Western Pacific scale F3s from 2003. Upgrading the couplers and the cool white LEDs on his WP units made all the difference in the world, they look really good now.
Finally after the engine upgrades were complete, it was time to move on to the cars. I watch a bunch of videos on the Super Chief along with viewing online pictures. This link below has a great video on it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uXfKeJdBVkQ
A couple of things I learned from them was there were no coach cars on the train (where I have two in my set). The diner in my set has no kitchen, just seating available (not sure where the food comes from on my train, 
). The sleeper car in my set looks nothing like the real one. There was only one vista dome (the pleasure dome), which did match my set and I learned about the famous Turquoise room for private dining. My dome also was missing a large antenna on top based on the photos. The observation car looked close to one of the observation cars on the Super Chief, but there were several different styles and the name on my model didn't match the look of mine. With all of this being said, I live in the 18" passenger car world where most passenger sets are the same except for their paint schemes that differentiate them. Regardless I still wanted to do something special with them. I first started with the diner.
Dining Car
When going to York, one of neatest booths in the Orange Hall is Jack Pierce's. His booth shows off his fiber optic work, where he lights fire trucks and passenger cars with fiber optics. Usually several of his dining cars have fiber optic candles in them, they are so cool! I wanted to do this with my diner car as well and paint the interior something close to the online pictures. For the interior color scheme, I was going after something similar to the link below.
https://wildwesthistory.blogsp...ning-to-old.html?m=1
First I removed the interior and drilled a small hole at each table for the fiber optic to come up through and painted the entire thing white (to eventually be the table clothes). A word of caution here, the plastic on these cars from the early 2000's has become very brittle. Even scrubbing the interior in my not flat sink before painting them, I broke one in half and needed to glue. I suspect a lot of these cars are weak now. Even having them shipped by a carrier would have be nervous that the cast truck weight could crack the chassis and break free. I have seen several like this including the full length dome car I got with this set originally.
I masked the tables and eventually the chairs to try to accomplish the same look. A lot of my masking leaked, but I think that is hard to pick up on when looking through the windows.
I then added my candles, flowers, people and kitchen wear. I decided against silver wear as I wasn't sure how to glue it and not look over whelmed with glue. The glasses were beads from Hobby Lobby and the vases were clear shrink tubing.
The candles and the extra items on the tables were a full day effort including cutting the people to fit with some resemblance of legs along with flowers/salads. The chairs in the mth mold are tiny requiring more than just leg removal. I found I have little patience and little talent for cleaning up the golden gate little people (they are very rough looking). This was my first time in ever doing this. There must be a better pre-done seated person that has better details and doesn’t require the custom fit.
I did learn some lessons others might be interested in when using the fiber optics. For each LED (which I used 4), I lit 5 candles (5 fibers) . I did the car over twice, where the first time I glued the fiber optics with CA on the bottom of the car and also to the LED source to help control their location on reassembly . I found when I did this, that not all the candles came out with a consistent brightness (thinking that CA glue points may have robbed some light). After spending half of a day on the first attempt, the next day I decided I wasn’t happy and ripped it all out and started over. This time I used heat shrink tubing glued to the bottom of the car to route the fibers. I also change how the LEDs connected to the fiber, where I just roughed up the the LED lens so light was more evenly distributed, then put heat shrink around the led with 1/2” extending past the led for the individual fibers to be pushed into. This seemed to work good.
On the candle side, I played a bit to get the best light, but in the end, creating a point by shaving three different sides of the optic seems to work best. I just put SOME highlights of Tamiya clear orange to get a nice candle color glow. If dipped fully in Tamiya orange, it seemed to be just orange and not a candle lit color. I also had trouble getting all of this to sit flat and allow the car to be assembled again. I carefully cut a little more room on the underside where the 3mm LEDs were placed at.
To light these, I bought LED strips from Amazon and when reduced by a resistor, have a great warm white color. I went through a couple of different brands claiming to be warm white (and weren't), but ended on this model. I think one role was enough for 6 cars. For each car I used a single diode to half wave rectify the AC into a 12V DC regulator and then used a resistor in series to feed the light to reduce the brightness. I realize in using this approach that there is no capacitor for flicker free operation, but with two pick ups on each car, this doesn't really seem like an issue for me and in the end it wasn't. The single diode (half wave) was perceivable to your eye as flicker when compared to the full wave, but if I didn't tell you, I don't think you would pick up on it unless you were taking pictures and happen to capture the off cycle. To complete all the overhead LED lighting with this approach was about ~ $25 dollars total for all 6 cars. The wiring/electronic components are hard to see when looking in the windows. For the candles, I did use a similar approach but went with another smaller (voltage and size voltage regulator) in addition to the over head light circuit.
Pleasure Dome Car
I also had some visions of improvements here. With all of the hype on the Turquoise rooms, I decided I wanted that on my train as well and planned to couple it next to the dining car like in real life. To do this I started by painting the entire car interior and then added the candles for the dining area, printed a pattern for the wall background and of course added the signature Turquoise art work.
The pleasure dome didn't have a wall in bar area but more of waist level partition, so I cut my down. I also added the new brown bar.
For the dome area, I saw a lot of pictures of these colored seats with the white seat protectors, so I tried to do something similar.
For the lighting, I used a similar approach as described above, but broke the strip up. My goal in all of these cars is to have little to no visible wiring.
Turquoise room lit up with candles and glasses on the tables.
Here is the antenna I made out of brass, painted and mounted on the car
Link to image showing the real Pleasure Dome car antenna:
https://streamlinermemories.info/?p=1286
The Pleasure Dome is located next to the Diner car so Turquoise room can be serviced by waiters out of the Diner like the real life one was.
Coaches
Well, with no coaches on the Super Chief, improvising was necessary. I found interior images for coaches on the El Captain, so I tried to mimic that as shown below. I also added mirrors to the bathrooms. Funny, because until I took the cars apart to see the interiors, I would never have guessed there were bathrooms on these as it all just looks grey when you look in the windows with out it being painted.
I did the same seat protectors again with paper and held in place with light CA glue. The glue bled through in places, but again, not easy to see when looking through the windows.
Sleeper
As I learned more about the Sleeper cars on the Super Chief, I found out most of the train was made up of these. They were really nice with private rooms, unlike the sleeper car interior I was provided with this set where no private rooms were used and it was basically open like an airplane. Regardless, I found some color pictures of an interior that I copied, but definitely not from the Super Chief.
Observation
The observation car was painted as shown below. I tried to do the private rooms and create some interesting carpet for the rear of the car. I also improvised on the cigarette/drink holders as shown below.
I found an issue with the rear coupler conflicting with the body of the car. Because of this, the car would wobble around curves. I decided to grind the coupler down and paint it black. This made a big improvement.
Lastly were marker lamps in the back. Since I remove the bulbs from the cars, I wasn't sure how light would get to these. I also wanted the light to be more directional and pointed to the back rather than the whole thing being lit. I cut the marker light plastic flush with the inside of the car. I then drill a small hole on the underside of the marker light to place a small surface mount LED and point it to the rear and connected the lights up with motor winding wire. I also sanded the outside of the lens so there would be more light dispersion. This effort came out all right, but not great. It is brighter to the back than the front, but I am not sure I would do this again.
The drum head is the last piece and I have not completed it yet. I would like to sand the old one off the lens and print a decal to apply the yellow Super Chief. Its been a few months since I planned to do that and lost momentum. Maybe there will still be a new drum head in the future.
Here is the whole train. This took several months to complete all of this.
Thanks for following along. If you have other tips and tricks you would recommend regarding similar efforts above, please comment on them,
