Side Shot Saturday - starting 27 January
Jan 27, 2024 16:57:01 GMT
Country Joe, Adam, and 5 more like this
Post by harborbelt70 on Jan 27, 2024 16:57:01 GMT
How about cars mainly intended for passenger recreation? What’s a rail journey without it? (Answer: commuting to work, but not necessarily coming home from work.) What started me on this week’s tangent was coming across this old PRR poster while doing some research in Streamliner Memories:
It’s an interesting idea but I have never modelled anything of exactly this kind as opposed to conventional lounge and parlor cars. Also, one thing I don’t have is any open top excursion cars of the kind used on railroads catering to short tours. These do not fit with my interest in long distance streamliner cars and trains.
In that category I particularly like observation cars especially of the boat tail variety, of which Lionel and MTH have done very many - probably running into hundreds of car/road names. However, this first example is a GGD Daylight car:
The window shades partly obscure the interior details but the seating is forward-facing parlor armchairs. The window placements on both sides are prototypical for this car. On the other hand, this Lionel 18” aluminum car from their Shasta Daylight set is based on K-Line body tooling and the car window placements are generic:
This and the GGD car are the same Daylight car number 2954 and when the Lionel set was issued rivet-counters were thrilled that the model matched that car’s fluting whereas all the other cars in the Shasta Daylight consist were smooth-sided. Anyway, the other photos in this post are of cars on a powered track and illuminated but this car’s illumination days are temporarily finished because of a deadly attack of zinc pest in the truck sides:
A while back I read somewhere that these sets were prone to zinc pest, but I thought I had lucked out until I started noticing what appeared to be black crumbs on the display shelf where this car normally sits. On taking it off the shelf first a brake shoe and a pair of wheels fell off and on turning the car over I saw the full horror of what has happened to most of the truck sides. Lionel no longer has exact replacements, which is understandable if this particular batch of parts was shoddily made, so I am having to adapt some newer ones.
No such work is required on these GGD cars from their Seaboard Silver Meteor set, including the Hollywood Beach Sun Lounge car, which was a substitute for a dome car because Seaboard’s tunnel clearance did not allow for domes. The interior photo of the real thing is from the 1960s:
Nor is a truck replacement required in Lionel’s 21” aluminum Texas Special cars from some 15 years ago which I think are also from K-Line tooling. This “Bar Car” is one I have posted about before and true to the prototype’s Pullman-Standard blueprints I have installed a working Mars Light in the rear roof section:
Despite my efforts, nothing tops this car for sheer excellence even in its stock form, the GGD “Moon Glow” dome observation car:
Finally, I decided to get this car out of store despite the fact that lights apart it’s inoperable, the original TMCC Acela “Café Bistro” car:
Lionel issued numerous service bulletins for the original Acela sets including one that addressed a customer complaint that the Bistro car’s lights were very dim: “It’s a bar – bars are dark.” I think that must have come straight from Mike Reagan, who certainly knew a thing or two.
It’s an interesting idea but I have never modelled anything of exactly this kind as opposed to conventional lounge and parlor cars. Also, one thing I don’t have is any open top excursion cars of the kind used on railroads catering to short tours. These do not fit with my interest in long distance streamliner cars and trains.
In that category I particularly like observation cars especially of the boat tail variety, of which Lionel and MTH have done very many - probably running into hundreds of car/road names. However, this first example is a GGD Daylight car:
The window shades partly obscure the interior details but the seating is forward-facing parlor armchairs. The window placements on both sides are prototypical for this car. On the other hand, this Lionel 18” aluminum car from their Shasta Daylight set is based on K-Line body tooling and the car window placements are generic:
This and the GGD car are the same Daylight car number 2954 and when the Lionel set was issued rivet-counters were thrilled that the model matched that car’s fluting whereas all the other cars in the Shasta Daylight consist were smooth-sided. Anyway, the other photos in this post are of cars on a powered track and illuminated but this car’s illumination days are temporarily finished because of a deadly attack of zinc pest in the truck sides:
A while back I read somewhere that these sets were prone to zinc pest, but I thought I had lucked out until I started noticing what appeared to be black crumbs on the display shelf where this car normally sits. On taking it off the shelf first a brake shoe and a pair of wheels fell off and on turning the car over I saw the full horror of what has happened to most of the truck sides. Lionel no longer has exact replacements, which is understandable if this particular batch of parts was shoddily made, so I am having to adapt some newer ones.
No such work is required on these GGD cars from their Seaboard Silver Meteor set, including the Hollywood Beach Sun Lounge car, which was a substitute for a dome car because Seaboard’s tunnel clearance did not allow for domes. The interior photo of the real thing is from the 1960s:
Nor is a truck replacement required in Lionel’s 21” aluminum Texas Special cars from some 15 years ago which I think are also from K-Line tooling. This “Bar Car” is one I have posted about before and true to the prototype’s Pullman-Standard blueprints I have installed a working Mars Light in the rear roof section:
Despite my efforts, nothing tops this car for sheer excellence even in its stock form, the GGD “Moon Glow” dome observation car:
Finally, I decided to get this car out of store despite the fact that lights apart it’s inoperable, the original TMCC Acela “Café Bistro” car:
Lionel issued numerous service bulletins for the original Acela sets including one that addressed a customer complaint that the Bistro car’s lights were very dim: “It’s a bar – bars are dark.” I think that must have come straight from Mike Reagan, who certainly knew a thing or two.
