TROUBLEMAKING! A passenger car saga

Greetings all. Bear with me for a minute while I explain the subject line of this post and the content.

I last posted about this project (on another forum) nearly three years ago. It’s about the very nice Lionel 21” aluminum MKT Texas Special cars catalogued back in 2007/08. This car is the 6-25496 “Sam Houston” StationSounds dining car. It is shown below in its stock form, which is beautifully finished but as you can just about tell from the snapshots, not exactly outstanding/complimentary in terms of interior details:



Three years ago, I had got to the stage of fitting out the dining compartment in what I freely admit is an almost total fantasy scheme with a load of LED lighting, including individual table lamps:




This is 3-rail O gauge and so, as you will see, I don’t feel constrained by prototypical accuracy.

When I posted my earlier account of how I’d built this much of the car, someone whose views I respect commented that it looked like I was not going the extra mile of building out the kitchen section, where in these models all the TMCC StationSounds gear is located. TROUBLEMAKING! But an entirely fair and thought-provoking comment.

As it happens, I had already decided I had to gut the kitchen area because the TMCC sound system was faulty; I figured I probably needed to replace the motherboard and/or other components. I also knew that it is possible to move the whole sound system to an adjoining car. (I have plans for that I’ll explain when I eventually get to the next car in this project.)

I’d already done a lot of historical research on the train itself including how Pullman-Standard designed and constructed the interior fittings. This showed that the diner kitchen was really a sea of stainless steel dominated by an oil-fired range and a charcoal-fired broiler. At the end that adjoins the dining compartment, a pantry/serving area was placed, separated from the cooking area by floor-mounted and overhead stainless steel cabinets; see photos below. There’s no shortage of historical information on how Pullman-Standard built such units, in particular in this very car, and in researching this I also came across one very old image showing how the ice boxes were filled, which I guess inevitably resulted in some denting of the fine stainless steel car body:



So, around Christmas 2016, I decided to try to produce a facsimile of the kitchen. The plans of the car I found, including the detailed blueprints, showed various features I wanted to model, which are noted in the red text/boxes shown in the sketch plans below; the area shaded blue is the part of the kitchen interior I decided to try to build:



Why I limited the kitchen interior to this is partly to do with certain details not being visible through the car windows but more to do with one operating feature I tentatively had in mind. Read on.

The range, broiler and sinks were the first things done and were constructed out of black sheet plastic as the base coat for the painted Alclad II stainless steel finish has to be gloss black:



I’ll skip over all the intermediate steps but I decided to place certain interior features where they could be seen through the windows in this section of the car. At about the halfway point I had already crammed in as many O scale detail parts, especially in the pantry, as I could find:



As will be obvious, some of these parts are disproportionately large because they are old O scale detail items cast in white metal but as I said, I am not a purist. The final configuration includes the chefs and a number of strategically placed food items and kitchen implements:



Purists might note that I reversed the orientation of the kitchen so that it faces the slightly larger windows on one side of the car and things like the sinks, charcoal burner and indeed the turkey (for why see below) are directly in line with them. Neither Lionel’s window placements nor their relative sizes correspond to the real car but in this instance that was not a real disadvantage.

Prior to re-assembly, the whole interior with all the additional lighting powered on looked like this:




BTW, in the course of my research, I noted that the railroads on which Pullman-built cars of this kind were operated were all very keen to show just how huge a turkey could be cooked onboard:




Now, the reason that this project took so very long is not these details themselves. Apart from the fact that I had to rewire all the interior lighting when I discovered that I had left it ¼” too short to get the dining compartment into proper alignment with the windows - and I admit that at times I got so bogged down in this whole exercise that I did other projects - ultimately I succumbed to putting in some extra-elaborate features. Operating features, that is.

There are two that I’ll mention. First, the technical term for what you see here is, “My Contraption”:




The background to this is that I knew that once I’d removed the TMCC sound components, there’d be enough space at the end of this car for both (1) a compact, square, track-powered Lionel smoke unit and (2) a Mini-Commander ACC unit to provide remote control for powering it and some of the lighting. The latter was essential so I could control the features on the fly rather than by manual switches.

This smoke feature got more elaborate than I originally planned because of an accidental discovery. I have not tracked down even one single photo of the actual Sam Houston car that shows the roof detail. But I belatedly remembered that years ago, a brass HO importer sent me a flyer of the very fine version of this train that they were making. At a very late stage of this project, I looked this set up and, WHOA! Lookit all those smoke outlets on the diner roof!!




Actually, I do not know (and do not care) whether the four main exhaust vents on the prototype really belched out smoke in anything like the volume I have provided for. I like smoke features. Plus, after I saw the above, I remembered that some years back I laid in a stock of Keil Line O scale passenger car roof details, so I already had every last vent required. However, the Spartan/Viking war helmet-like vents had to be individually hollowed out for my purpose. The tubing and elbow/T-joint pieces connecting them to the smoke unit are heat and solvent-proof. It’s a complete Heath Robinson arrangement that connects them to the smoke unit using a Lionel FM Trainmaster funnel.

Not shown in the photos are the internal heat shields that separate the smoke unit from the rest of the kitchen interior and the body shell. Also, I haven’t incorporated every roof detail I could have installed but the end result is vastly different from the stock version of this car:




I had to make an extra opening in the top of the car to provide for refilling the smoke unit. I’d like to say that the rivetted panel on the roof that surrounds it as shown above is my homage to the rivets on the prototype that Lionel did not include in any of its aluminum models. But, truthfully, it’s not. Instead, it covers up a totally mindless application of my drill press when I was drilling out the roof for the various vents.

Overall the thing I am most satisfied with is the colorful three-dimensional effect inside the car that shows up best with the entire lighting system turned on:




That brings me to the second operating feature. A charcoal-fired burner to broil things on must be, essentially, a big BBQ with glowing coals, right? There’s no shortage of fire-effect LED lighting modules available but the first one I installed (admittedly made for HO/N scale applications) had an effect that was far too subtle for my liking. Consequently, I added Evan Designs fire effect LEDs above the grill, which really ramp up the light as seen through the windows. I should say that this photo was taken before I'd cleaned up the interior for re-assembly, so ignore any dust on anything - including the dishwater:




There finally came the dreaded day of fear, loathing and trepidation when I had to reassemble the car and see if everything still functioned, how many wires I could pinch, what was going to short out etc. etc. I had test fitted the interior assembly probably 50 times but that’s not the same thing as finally connecting up every last component. By what I can only account as a miracle, it took all of 15 minutes to put everything back together; the wheels tracked correctly, the smoke unit and tubing aligned perfectly and it passed what my electrical engineer brother calls the “smoke test” (as in nothing went up in it).

The video still below is a really joke at my own expense (I haven’t mastered posting videos yet.) The Mini-Commander ACC enables you to adjust the voltage to the smoke unit over a range of about 4-18 volts and in testing the car on the track on its own, it needed to be at 14 volts to get what I thought was sufficient volume. But with the engines of this set on the track too and running, the current draw must go up and the smoke output is copious and also lies along the car’s roof:




I had not reckoned on this in testing and I’ll lower the voltage setting so it comes out more like this:



I may also have to modify the roof vents slightly to direct the smoke up. But this is not a feature I plan to operate other than for very short periods and purely for the entertainment of my visitors. In the end, I built it mainly to prove to myself that I could and despite the fact it’s basically a gimmick or a novelty. You could say the same for much if not all of the rest that I have built into this car. But this is 3-rail O and I like it.