Modeling the Rock Island’s Quad City Rocket
CHRIS D’AMATO: OTTAWA, IL; OCT. 2, 1978
It wasn’t uncommon to find Rock Island E8A No. 655 leading the Quad City Rocketduring the 1970’s. In its final years, as the rail- road limped along to insolvency, the locomotive sported a rather unsightly bow wave of road dirt and grime along the sides and
wire insulation cut to size and dabbed in black paint. At the same time, the lo- cations for the K5HR24 air horn and antenna were drilled out according to prototype photos. Further detailing in- cluded gluing an m.u. receptacle cover on the nose and adding a front air hose bent from .012″ stainless steel wire with crushed
ends to simulate the glad
hands. Prior to painting I made sure that the sides and cab pieces fit correct- ly over the TCS decoder and the wires running to the lights in the nose. After painting and before weathering, Farr style etched metal grilles from Plano were added to match the prototype.
Coaches For passenger service, the Rock Is-
land had a variety of equipment, in- cluding 48-seat coaches originally de- livered for the Golden State in 1947, 68-seat coaches purchased in 1947 for general service and 56-seat coaches purchased secondhand from the Min- neapolis & St. Louis in 1957. Into the 1970’s many of the pre-war Budd coaches were retired but most of the later Golden State cars remained in service. By 1977, the diner which had traditionally been in the Quad City Rocket consist had already been dropped and replaced with sandwich
54 APRIL 2013
two cars were more than adequate to handle the passenger load. In contrast, in the early 1970’s the locomotive was kept relatively clean and the train was somewhat longer. Note the baggage car and the dome car on the head end in this 1973 photo (below).
service operating out of a coach. Both of the side kits from Union Sta- tion Products included very helpful floor plans and diagrams to model the interior seat spacing and partitions. The seat spacing in the Budd-built car could be used straight from a Palace Car Company casting with a simple
DAN TRACY: JOLIET, IL; FEB., 1973
staggered plan, but I had to cut and glue each row individually to fit the closely-spaced windows of the Pullman Standard car. I approximated the inte- rior partitions based on the provided floor plans, using .020″ plain sheet styrene as walls and dividers. The 48-seat leg rest coach was built
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