I'm currently waiting for the various new OwlMtModels' GGD Upgrade Parts to arrive, so I'm going to start by working on what I can address on the GGD 77-D-3/4 Diner and Lounge car now, plus a couple comments on the 72-IC-1/2 orientation issue, which is simple to fix.
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| Stock GGD 77-D-3/4 |
Lighting Board Swapping Ends
One of the mysteries of the GGD car's designs is 'why did the put the pickup pin "po-go"s in the highly visible dining room end of the car? For whatever reason... they also decided to put these contacts in the lounge section of the 75-CS Lounge car, and the observation-lounge end of the 72-O-1. The 72-C-1 doesn't really matter, along with the 72-IC-1/2 'Subs', other than the 'Subs' are actually assembled backwards, but I'll deal with that shortly with some other pictures.
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| Two new holes need to be drilled in the floor of the kitchen. |
Unfortunately one of the holes ends up being right against the corner of the kitchen stoves. I marked the centerlines of where the hole will be with my calipers. But I also made a paper template to transfer the locations from one end to the other on the underside of the floor, which has also worked well.
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| Stock component positions in the GGD car's floor. |
Once the four screws are removed that hold down the interior to the underframe, the interior components are exposed. The two small weights will be replaced if you're planning to upgrade your car with OwlMtModels GGD Upgrade Weight. For my purposes here, I'll be keeping the stock weights as a place holder so the bronze power strips stay in the right place.
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| The position of the pickup strips and contact pads after flipping the components to pick up in the kitchen end. |
Remove the stock weights, then slipe the pickup strips along the underframe. This movement will need to go far enough that the strip will clear the pair of retaining slots molded into the floor. Then once one end is free, slide the strips the other way and remove it from the underframe. I usually start by moving the strips to free the pickup pads first. Some light flexing can be done to free the first end, but avoid any sharp bends or kinks to the thin metal strips.
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| The original guiding channels molded into the underframe of the dining car on the dining end of the car. |
The original end where the pads were located have guiding paths cast into the underframe. The underside of the floor and the top of the underframe do have subtle "F" in the "front end of the car. It seems that the car designers didn't give any historical preference for which end was "F"... so in most cases I've noticed it, the "F" end was usually operated at the "rear" end of the car in SP's consists.
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| The capacitor end of the GGD lighting strip. |
This is the configuration of the lighting strip after I've turned it around inside the diner's shell.
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| The "po-go" end of the GGD lighting strip. |
Note that the "Po-go"s are now at the kitchen end of the shell.
I should mention that I've added some chamfers on my new "po-go" holes and as I've not drilled them out to nearly 0.150" diameter, I have to be a bit careful that the "po-go" pins actually do go through the holes in the kitchen floor when I reassemble the car.
Lighting Mods to Lounge
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| Original position of "Pogo" pickups in the GGD 75-CS Lounge car. |
The "Po-go" pickups are visible from many angles, but this provided the best view of both pins. Let's see if we can do something about that.
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| New locations of the "Po-Go" pin holes in the interior of the Lounge. |
Like on the Diner, I also wanted to reverse the lighting on the 75-CS Lounge car because the "po-go"s came down in the very open end of the lounge's seating area.
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| Much less visible. |
Yes, this lounge car is having modification to the window sills, I get into that later in this blog post.
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| I had to ramp up the brightness through the window about 5x to even see the pin in there. |
These changes to the Lounge are minimal, but should make the later finishing of the car much nicer not having the "po-go" pins right in the middle of the lounge area.
Lighting Mods to "Sub"
The Subs turn out to have been assembled backwards with the underframe and the body shell. The fix is quite simple. Remove the body shell (6 screws), remove the lighting LED strip (3 screws), reverse the LED strip, remount the LED strip (3 screws), reverse shell to underframe, and remount shell (6 screws).
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| Corrected orientation of GGD 72-IC-1/2 "Sub". |
The roof with the vent over the diaphragm should be on the same end as the generator hanging down from the underframe now.
An Experiment - Painting Over Kitchen Windows
Some of the discussion with Alan Houtz, who's been doing some experimenting with the GGD cars had some trouble painting the stock kitchen windows to blank them out, to replicate the way the cars looked typically after about 1940-41, as the SP extended the back-splash of the exterior wall of the kitchen, above the sinks.
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| Kitchen of SP 10507 or 10513 Hamburger-Grill conversion of the 77-D-4, Bob Zenk collection |
Usually the diners until about 1954-55+, had only the three windows towards the doors covered and painted over, so that will be the version I'm going to replicate in my test.
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| Stock GGD Kitchen Windows removed from the car. |
As Alan had warned me that there was problems painting the windows, I decided to lightly sand the panes that I'm going to paint with some 600 grit sanding stick.
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| I'm applying Tamyia masking tape to the windows I want to keep. |
I masked both inside and outside of the windows, so that I could paint both sides to get good light blocking effect. Lighter painted cars, like the SP Yellow or Daylight painted cars, I'd say that very dark gray or black would be needed for the light-blocking, and then a light colored primer, either white or light gray, before moving on to the car's exterior color is applied.
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| The first few light coats of StarBrand really did have trouble evenly covering. |
As Alan experienced, the interior side of the window strips had a lot of trouble getting even coating of the paint into all the nooks of the windows.
Tamyia Spray of Dark Olive
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| Exterior of Tamyia sprayed windows. |
Between coats I was checking against either my bright shop lights (10k lumens) or against the bright sky when I was outside painting.
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| Interior of Tamyia sprayed windows. |
After two coats, I decided I could put down another pass of SP/UP Dark Olive Green to adjust the color slightly to match the rest of the car.
Masking Removed
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| Masking removed from interior side, notice windows are upside-down. |
Now that the windows are painted, there is enough light block, but I'm also thinking there was some light prisming happening pulling light in from the edges of the windows. So this is another aspect that I won't have to deal with if I do my permanent kitchen window blanking with solid styrene pieces.
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| Masking removed from exterior side. |
My next chore is putting the windows back into the shell. I actually found them to be 'loose' so, I've added a couple small drops of Testor's Canopy Cement to the spanning sections of the plastic between the windows to temporary keep the windows in place, but I can easily remove this experiment when I want to do the permanent version.
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| Completed 'stock' GGD window painted and installed. |
While this works, I'm not thrilled with the gaps at the edge of the painted panes and the window frames. When I fit my more in depth version of this process, I'll have the blanking pieces fit tighter, although slightly offset in depth, probably about 0.005" depressed compared to the frames, but the gaps will be eliminated.
Patching the Wrong Car Number
Another mystery is how the factory that did the lettering got the wrong series of numbers on the Dark Olive Green SP cars. They put SP 10002 and 10004 on the cars, which are 72-D-3 class, which were very different cars than the 77-D-3/4 class cars, which we have the models of. So I'm still debating exactly which car number this model will be, I'm planning to paint it with tan walls, which means it's in the "Apricot Scheme".
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| Over spraying paint, doesn't really hide the 3d aspects of the pad-printing gel-ink. |
This is the result if the existing pad-printing is over-sprayed. The pad-printing is thick enough to still be seen. Now it's possible that the future decals will draw the attention to their color and away from the uneven surface underneath.
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| Simply removing all of the lettering and some of the paint too. |
However, the better method is to remove the pad-printing first and touch-up the paint. I used my trusty fiber-glass brush from P-B-L to gently remove the lettering. It also stripped some of the paint from the rivet heads, so I'll have to patch this area with my airbrush and some StarBrand SP/UP Dark Olive Green, which is out of production now. Tru-Color's SP Dark Olive will work equally well.
Painting the Interior for 77-D-
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| Aisle-side for my 1st 77-D-3/4 car receiving the 'Apricot Scheme'. |
I decided to start this 'rough' interior painting with Tamyia Wooden Deck Tan, which has been one of my 'go to' colors to paint OwlMtModels Lumber Load kits. Most of my painting was done by 'angle-masking' and I only used actual tape masking around the dining table section of the interior. Most of the green floor is not going to be visible through the windows.
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| Kitchen-side of the diner with 'Gloss Aluminum' Tamyia paint in the kitchen. |
I originally tried using some Tamyia Gunmetal paint in the kitchen, but I've decided to switch over to the last bits of Gloss Aluminum from my Santa Fe "Shadowlining" projects from earlier this year.
Fixing the Window Sashes
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| Aisle-side of SP 10112 - Bob Zenk collection |
The SP cars which received Air-Conditioning, had nearly non-existent lower window sashes. Some of the smaller bathroom windows had very subtle ones. The regular larger windows when rebuilt were basically fixed in place, and possibly had second panes hung from the inside, as on the new streamlined cars typical of the 1937+ cars.
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| Oversized window sashes on the 77-D-3/4 Diner's Aisle windows. |
On my first Dark Olive Green I used a chisel-blade to carefully cut and carve off the over-sized blocks of material.
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| After I carefully carved down the lower window sashes. |
On the Diner's aisles and dining windows, the modified version, should have a row of rivets. So sadly, I'm thinking I'll need to lay in a row of Archer Rivets before I touch up the Dark Olive Green paint on these diners.
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| Small toilet window & Aisle windows did have thin sashes. |
I carved down the height of the two small window sashes on the 77-D-3/4. Taking about 2/3s of the height and then cutting from the bottom. I may still shallow the relief of these sashes to be shallower off the car's side.
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| SP Dark Olive Green Diner, Kitchen-side after window modifications |
I'll be redoing the kitchen's blanked windows again before I repaint and decal this car to apply the car number.
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| SP Dark Olive Green Diner, Aisle-side after window modifications |
But for now, the car's looking good. I'm not really looking forward to making these modifications to the Daylight and TTG cars. --- but at this point there's not really any other option that I see on the horizon if the modeler wants to make this improvement. So I see color matching and patching in my future.
Faster Method?
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When I moved to the higher number of areas needing work on the 75-CS Lounge, I pioneered a new method, which is using my flush-cutting Sprue Cutters (from P-B-L) to good effect, only needing minimal cleanup.
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| SP 2938's more plentiful window targets to modify. |
I know I'm deviating from the Dining Car focus of this post, but I want to point out the simpler method to make this window modifications on the cars with more and smaller windows.
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| The Lounge 75-CS after I made the rough cuts with the flush-cutting sprue cutters. |
Sadly on the Lounge cars, there should be NO evidence of these sashes. The windows by my estimate should actually be a little taller compared to the 'belt' rail of rivets. So given that there's laser cut windows on the way to fit the stock openings, I'm not going to be modifying the size of these windows on ALL of my 75-CS Lounge cars.
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| Right side of 75-CS Lounge Car after window mods. |
Yes, for those wondering... I looked up in my photos if the "Subs" should or shouldn't have these sashes, they should not. *sigh*... So I foresee lots of snipping and patching paint schemes on my IC-72-1/2 and my friend's which I've offered to do the upgrades on.
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| Left side of 75-CS Lounge Car after window mods. |
So for now, here's the progress on the 75-CS Lounge Car. I have also flipped the lighting bar on this car, so that the "Po-go"s land into the sofa in the Barber's space, which I think will still work better than landing in the middle of the Lounge Space, just outboard of the truck bolster.
Removing Solid Diaphragms
I'm getting slightly ahead of myself by doing this now, but no harm in starting to plan out my next couple of steps.
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| 75-CS Lounge 'blind-end' as I'm removing the diaphragm. |
In future posts, I'll be going into my process of installing Hi-Tech Diaphragms to these cars. For now, don't be surprised if you see some of the models without their 'solid' Golden Gate Models stock Diaphragms anymore.
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| 75-CS Lounge with the solid diaphragm and leaf spring removed. |
The process of carefully getting the diaphragms off is a bit tedious, so take your time and get it done without damaging the car end or yourself!
I will point out at this stage that there are four pins holding the diaphragm in place, and the two holding the ends of the leaf spring. I will be reusing the leaf spring holes and redrilling them, plus adding new holes at the bottom of the door for the lower spring for the Hi-Tech springs.
But we'll get into all of this more next time!
In Closing
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| In this shop and still looking pretty good, the partly stripped down GGD DOG Diner, waiting for the next round of upgrades. |
I think this is more than enough for this week's update on what I'm doing on my GGD fleet. I'll be making a couple more updates as I work on the various steps to upgrade my cars.
Feel free to comment below, please include your name.
Jason Hill
Related Articles:
Golden Gate Depot Harriman 2.0 Review - Out-Of-The-Box - Initial thoughts on the new cars.
OwlMtModels Announces development of Golden Gate Depot "Upgrade" Parts and kits. - From Sept 8, 2026.
SP Passenger Car Interior Colors - August 1950 Assignments - Data from Bob Zenk's collection and consolidated by Jason Hill for modeling interior of our passenger cars based on SP's own Aug 1950 paint drift cards.