Tourist Cars

Winter Works Project

This project was to build a model an open tourist car from the Kettle Valley Steam Railway. This photo shows two different car designs that are used in the excursion train in Summerland B.C. I decided to build 2 cars for my excursion train based on the car on the right. I had 2 new D & R G W LGB stock cars that I wanted to modify.

I started by removing the car roof and the roof walkways and filling all the exposed screw holes with a piece of 1/8 inch diameter styrene rod. The next step was to use a dremel cut-off blade to remove each side, the top half of the ends, and a center opening in the bottom half of each end. Now I was ready to start the reconstruction

My first attempt was based on the car on the left. I used styrene strips to build a version of each side of the prototype. I modified the braces to make it more uniform in appearance. I added the required foot-steps and hand rails using 1/16” brass rod and it was ready to be painted. Three coats of Floquil Tuscan [110025 ] were applied to the body of both cars and set aside to dry completely.

But when I looked at the result and saw the one colour side as opposed to the white-washed boards of the real cars I wasn’t too pleased with the end product. So guess what? I removed these sides and started to work on version three.

With this attempt I decided to use styrene for the bottom and top horizontal rails and all the braces but to use pine strips for the remaining horizontal strips. All the styrene parts were installed and then painted with the Tuscan colour. The pine strips had 4 coats of Saman No 116 whitewash water-based wood stain before they were cut to size add glued with ACC cement to the styrene. This stain is truly a wash coat, necessitating the four coats before I had a good base coat.As the car ages and the weather has a chance to do it thing the result should be very close to the real car in colour

The next step was to come up with the seating for each car. A couple of years ago InBuilt a RPO car and a fruit express car for my passenger train. To do this I modified two AML Denver and Rio Grande Western coaches. In the process I saved the seat out of both cars. With some small changes these seats could be reduced in size to fit the new tourist cars. I first cut one arm-rest off the bench; then reduced the height by 3/32 “ and the width by ¼”; and then glued the arm-rest back on. I needed 40 seats for both cars and painted them with 2 coats of Floquil’s Grimmy Black [110013].

Getting to the end. I had difficulty finding a silver grey paint to use for the exterior of the upper car frame and for the roof. I decided to use a rattle can of a medium silver bumper automotive paint. This required some tricky masking so the inside of the upper frame retained its Tuscan colour while the outside became the silver.

The final step was to fabricate the safety gates for each end opening. I used sections of the plastic screen used to cover these small boxes of Moroccan mandarins. I painted the plastic material with the grimy black, cut pieces of size and glued each one in place with ACC glue.

As my Kids used to say “Aaaa Done”