Side
Elevation The sides of the car were cut from Evergreen Sty- rene passenger car sid- ing with the windows cut into place with a sharp hobby knife.
came together, the resulting gap allowed a 0.060 quarter round to be fitted, leaving 0.020-inches standing away from the car side, which nicely mimicked the effect of the prototype trim. (Hopefully, the pictures will make these fea- tures evident.)
Be Careful of These Things
The car exhibited two sizes of
single-sash windows on the sides and a third narrower window on the ends. Thanks to the drawings, I could closely measure and de- termine that the larger windows were close enough to AM Models windows. The smaller windows could be simulated with some modification (mainly the remov- al of the vertical mullion) of ei- ther work car/caboose windows from Grandt Line or Tichy Train Group. The end windows had to be “kit-bashed” by cutting the work car windows down one side, removing some material, and glu- ing the now narrowed window back together. Easy enough, if a little tedious, and you can expect to break or lose some pieces in the process.
I built the side and end doors in place using strip and sheet sty- rene and glazed in the usual fash-
ion from the interior. I spent a lot of time building the cupola from the bottom up, formed around two styrene sheets cut to the pro- totype’s polygonal shape. All the openings and frames were assem- bled in place and carefully glazed with precisely fit plastic windows attached with Formula “560” Can- opy Glue.
When cutting window and door openings out of sheet styrene, especially thicker stuff, mark their locations with a pencil, drill through the corners, scoring the perimeter, and then cut diagonal- ly from corner to corner. Finally, push out the resulting triangles. Using this method, I can cut tiny window openings accurately with- out inflicting damage to the sur- rounding area. Micro saws are available for this work; some modelers may prefer using a cop- ing saw. It’s a good idea to paint and de- cal before adding the “glazing.” I used Tru-Color Santa Fe Passen- ger Car Green for this car and Micro-Scale Dulux Gold lettering. The “DYNAMOMETER” necessar- ily had to be assembled with in- dividual scale three-inch letters, which is a test of anyone’s patience and particularly my dyslexia. Since I was using single-hung
SCRATCHBUILDING MATERIALS LIST
Evergreen Sheet Styrene HO scale passenger car siding, shapes like quarter round on the corners and channel on the ends of the fl oor frames and, of course, strips and bits
Tichy Train Group phosphor bronze wire for grabs and railings
Grandt Line and modifi ed Grandt Line windows and NBWs
AM Models #201 windows
Details West electrical cable connectors
Kadee brake detailing set for passenger cars with steam line
Athearn 53308 express trucks
windows to simulate double- hung ones, I glazed the upper sashes from the outside with “glazing” carefully cut to fit from clear notebook divider film. I have discovered this notebook divider material is a marvelous- ly useful and inexpensive source of clear glazing. The ones I have found are resistant to crazing (a network of fine cracks on the
Detail The underframe of the model was based on draw- ing presented to me by Bob Walz. Various pas- senger brake components were used to create the model.
AUGUST 2015 75
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