SP 60-C-5 (Part 3) - SP 1005 Interior & Lighting

In Part 1 of SP 60-C-5 series of blog posts I talked about SP 1005 and completed the body work, painting, truck installation and window treatment.  In this part I'll work on installing the lighting system, installing the chair seats and interior.

Lighting

SP 1005 with interior lighting, green transom windows, and window shades showing.

Since I left off in Part 1 showing the various lighting parts, and interior seats, I will walk through the process of installing the lighting.

First have a strip of 1/8 x 1/4" styrene strip stock cut to the length of the interior or lighting strip.  In the case of these Soho 60ft coaches, the LED strip is slightly too long to fit, so I bend down the last 1/8" or so of the LED strip to clear the end-sill wall of the car.

LED Strip mounted on styrene strip in SP 1005's roof.

Dropping resistors have been installed on the LED strip to keep the lighting effect low inside the car.  Several times I assembled the car, even with the seating strips resting inside to check how the lighting will look in low-lighting on a layout.  Once satisfied, I moved on with the assembly of the car and installation of the interior.

Loctite Fun-Tak - Mounting Putty

The interior's actually the last thing to install.  So I needed to button up the wiring with the blue Loctite Fun-Tak mounting putty.  The Fun-Tak also works well for semi-permanent mounting of wires inside engines for DCC and car lighting projects.  Fun-Tak is available at Wal-Mart.

LED lighting installed and wired to trucks.

At this point the car is now in its most fragile condition of the build, with the trucks wired in, but the body and floor not mounted together.

Interior & Seating

SP 1005 was converted back to a CHAIR car during WW2 using second hand chair seats from other HW chair cars which were upgraded to Deluxe Chair cars in 1937-1939.  The reseated SP 1005 continued for several years after the war with gas lighting.  As of the last photo of the car in Oakland in 1947 it still didn't have electric lighting as evidence by the lack of a battery box and extra gas tanks below the floor.  I'll be covering the detailing of the underframe at a later time.  I chose to dimly light the main seating area of the car, because of the gas lighting as opposed to the normal electric lighting on the cars after WW2.

I covered the basic seating assembly in both the first and second parts in this series, so I'll only touch on it quickly here.

Chair seating for SP 1005

The seating strips were made from 0.03" x 0.156" styrene strips with PSC chair car seats, which look more like the separate chair pairs used on the chair cars.  SP's Coaches used bench seats, which were simpler than the SP 1005 had.  The other coaches I'm working on use simpler bench seating.

End walls were glued to the bottom strips to divide off the wash rooms from the rest of the interior space.

Here's the first side of seating strip going in.

The seating strips were glued to the inside of the car both with the outer edges of the seats against the interior of the carside with Testors canopy cement (glue) and also on the inner feet of the PSC chairs to the top of the floor flange of the Soho car body.  This is a bit tricky and requires all the rest of the interior and wiring to be complete.

SP 1005 Completed & Lighted

Here's a nice side view of the SP 1005 with the lighting on and the shop lights off.

This is how the car looked under low room light conditions.  I'm pretty happy with how this car came out.

A high angle view shows off the seating and green transom window glass.

Closing Thoughts

I am still debating if I want to install corner marker lanterns on this car, as it will be modeled with gas lighting, so no electric power to run the tail-gate mounted Pyle Gyralite marker.  As yet I've not decided what to do about this... I might keep this car for excursion and rider car service.  The main layout I would operate this car on is the LMRC layout in San Diego, where it will see regular assignments in several rolls.

Among the assignments might be serving as 'Rider Car' on the Adv-NCP (Advance-North Coast Perishable) symbol which ran on Mondays with about 20-25 PFE reefers loaded with bananas.  This train used a division caboose for the train crew and a rider car that would run the entire trip until the last car was set out south of a point near Sacramento.  This rider agent's job was to regularly check the temperature of the loads and insure that the bananas weren't allowed to be either too warm or too cool during the trip, which could easily damage them.

The SP 1005 sits on the Caboose Service Track at Bakersfield waiting for its next express-rider assignment.

Another assignment could be a rider car for the train crew on special charter trips, basically acting as the 'caboose' for the conductor and brakemen while a the sleeping cars would have Pullman porters responsible for each car's passengers.

The other regular assignment might be express rider-caboose service on Holiday Mail & Express trains, Bakersfield Express Perishable trains running as sections of a 1st Class schedule, or the regular 2nd Class No.447/445 'Overnight' (Symbol VMW) train out of LA to Bakersfield and Fresno every weeknight.  The car would then work back to LA on the VME symbol, an unscheduled symbol which would come back to Bakersfield in the early evening and return to LA by the next morning to repeat the cycle.

This last assignment would suggest that I need markers installed.  It's something I'll have to think about in the future, but for the next step in finishing this car I'll be working on the underframe and mounting the gas storage tanks and checking over the other underbody details.

Jason Hill

Related Articles:
SP 60-C-5 Coaches (Part 1) - SP 1005

SP 60-C-5 Coaches (Part 2) - T&NO 777

SP 60-CC-1 Chair Car (Part 1) - SP 2701 - Model Power Conversion

SP 'Harriman Passenger Cars' from Golden Gate Depot - Prototype Preview

SP HW Passenger Car Index of Models