SP 10250-51-52 (Part 4) - Lounge Interior Comes Together

It's been almost 10 years since I posted the last time on this project to convert the articulated dining section of my SP 10250, which runs behind the articulated kitchen in the triple-unit 1939 set of Coffee-shop/Kitchen/Diner which was assigned to the San Joaquin Daylight in 1949, after the Noon Daylight was removed from the schedule.

Off-season of 1949 on the San Joaquin Daylight, when the Diner turned into a Diner-Lounge.

History of the Diner-Lounge Cars

In the 2nd Part of this series, I showed how I removed the stock diner interior and mounted the styrene Lounge floor with the single center screw, which will allow me to change out from full Diner to Diner-Lounge quickly.

During lower traffic levels of the off-seasons, winter time, and non-holiday weeks, 2/3s of the dining tables and chairs were removed and replaced by lounge chairs and couches, to convert the rear portion of the triple-unit into a lounge, thus replacing the need for the full Tavern car in the consist.  Normally the Tavern ran behind the Triple-unit after 1948 when traffic levels were high.  Also the regular Coffee Shop/Taverns 10310/10311 were swapped out over two years and converted to full Taverns, like the 1938 and 1941 cars.

Arranging the Chairs & Sofas

Early planning with green sofas from other Walthers cars

Originally, I layed out mostly single chairs, but looking deeper at the SPH&TS Passenger Cars, Vol .4 shows that the 10250 when converted to Diner-Lounge configuration had 6 four-seat tables and 35 Lounge seats, which was split as 18 and 17 seats per side.

I had a couple of these bench-seat sofa chairs which came from the drawing room of the Walthers HW Parlor and other cars which had large seats like this in their men's 'lounge' sections outside the bathrooms.

There were a pair of 2-seat sofas, a pair of 3-seat, and a larger 2-seat - which was probably more like 3 seat.  I have used the green lounge-chairs which came from the Walthers HW Parlor, which I've removed the interior seats from.  The brown-red Sofas are kitbashed from my Santa Fe 1524's original interior's seats.

The challenge here was getting the spacing of the seats right in the space available, but also splicing together the sofas to compliment and get everything to fit correctly.  The single seats were worked out to be 0.315", but in practice I had to tighten the spacing up to more like 0.275" or so to fit between the sofas.

Pencil marks to divide out the spaces for the seats.

I used my machinist 1-2-3 blocks to keep the sofas being positioned too wide, which would make the interior not fit when it comes time to assemble the car.

I'm roughing out the location of the seats and sofas, before gluing.

In this photo, I'm working out the positions.  The full sofas built from 2 full chair car seats (left and right, glued together) look like 4-seats, but in the floor plan drawing says that they are 3-seat sofas.  I've spliced the large 2-seat sofa together out of a pair of Santa Fe HW chair car seats.  

I'm not sure how 'attached' the partitions at the end of the dining table section were to the car vs. mobile and easily swapped out when the car was fitted with the lounge chairs.  The drawing doesn't say how high they are, they could be full-height up to the roof of the car, but as the book doesn't have a photo of the interior in this configuration, I'm guessing at some of this.

One of the things I noticed looking at the lounge plans is that the seats start aligned at the partitions, and then go in and out of phase as you work towards the end of the car.  The 18-seat side is the 'right side' or 'far side' in these photos.  The 17-seat side is in the foreground, or 'left side' of the car.  The 10250 totaled 59-seats between the dining and lounge sections.

The interesting part of this interior is the stacked staggering of the left seats to leave a small opening at the rear left corner of the car, resulting in one fewer seats in this car.  The 10253, the other diner-lounge conversion car, had only 34 seats in the lounge for a combined 58-seat.  I assume that it had the similar extra sofas resulting in the loss of one seat in the lounge.

In this view, we can see that the 'rear end' of the 1st left 2-seat sofa matches up with the rear of the 4th single seat on the right side.  The rear of the 6th right seat also matches with the rear of the 4th single seat on the left side.  The seat positions start staggering with the "large" 2-seat sofa on the right side, shifting about 1/2 a single seat.

Reverse view of the interior.

The right side has a group of 6 single chairs, then the 'large' 2-seat', another 4 singles, then single 2-seat sofa, and 3 more single chairs.  The left side is 2 singles, then a 2-seat sofa, then 6 singles, a 3-seat sofa (full pair of chair seats joined), then a single, and a second 3-sofa at the rear end of the room.

Reassembled

Here's what the lounge looks like installed in the car with the shell on. (Left side)

I'm not too bothered that the sofas and the lounge chairs don't really match up in height and I'll probably not even color-match them as a 'set' with the upholstery, as these sofas and lounge chairs came from the passenger car store rooms at LA General Shops or Sacrameto General Shops.  

Right side with the dining tables forward.

They probably were partial sets, but not fully a 'set', which results when a car's assigned second hand furniture when reconfigured.

Next Steps

I will probably paint the tables white and add some extra plastic to thicken the table to replicate the white table cloth that was used in the 'dining' configuration of these cars.

Pretty much finished up, I still need to paint the various parts of the interior, tables, chairs, lounge seats, floor, etc.

I'm guessing that they kept the 'dining' section ot the rear of the kitchen, which matches the letterboard car-type lettering.  As the San Joaquin Daylight by 1949 didn't have any Parlor passengers and certainly no 1st Class Pullman passengers, the passengers wanting to pay for full diner meals.  The entire forward 'Coffee Shop' car can seat 80 people per sitting, while the 'diner' section of 24-seats brings the total seating to 104.  The Daylight chair cars sat 44-48 passengers per car or articulated unit.  This means that one seating would take care of two cars or one full articulated set of chair cars.  The San Joaquin Daylight in off-season ran with 4 cars in the Oakland portion and 2 cars in the Sacramento section, so three seatings would get everyone fed.

Lighting Troubles?

Lights-on!   Left side with the car lit.

The trouble with MTH's stock cars is that the lighting is too bright, glowing right through the shell.  So I'll have to increase the resistance on the lighting circuit and or, repaint the interior of the car black, then reapply the interior colors, which is too bad that MTH didn't pay for the extra shot of paint or having the plastic shot in black to get the body opaque enough to prevent this. 

In Closing - Trackside View

Once I put the reporting marks back on the car, at least I have the large blank section of the interior filled up, the car could be run in the San Joaquin Daylight consist as the Diner-Lounge.  The original MTH car numbers were 10259-10261, the second of the 1941-built Triple-units which normally was on the Coast/Morning Daylight, unless one of the 1941 cars were in the shops.  Thus why I'm changing the number of this set to the first of the 1939 cars, which were assigned to the San Joaquin Daylight in 1949 regularly.

Left side of SP 10250, with Diner-Lounge interior.

The exterior view of the Diner with the kitchen unit and articulated joints assembled on the track.

Right side of SP 10250, with Diner-Lounge interior.

I may start working on the other parts of the 1949 San Joaquin Daylight kitbashes again soon.  I don't think there's much more to do on the SP 3300, 77-CB-1 combine.  The Kitchen unit (SP 10251) shouldn't be too hard to wrap up.  There's several other cars that I want to do, but I've held off on starting until I finished some of these other projects first.

Jason Hill

Related Articles:

SP 10250-51-52 (Part 1) - Triple Diner-Lounge 1949 - Planning and Modifications to the Kitchen Unit - SP 10251.

SP 10250-51-52 (Part 2) - Triple Diner-Lounge 1949 - A short planning post on how to convert Diner to Diner-Lounge, which this post (Part 4) basically replaces now.

SP 10250-51-52 (Part 3) - Cleaning Pads - how to convert the Kitchen Unit to being a track-cleaner, by replacing the water tank under the car.