Many of us forget that by the 1930s the SP's fleet of HW passenger cars had completely pivoted away from the 'arch-roof' car heritage from the Common Standard Era and Harriman (ending in 1913), with the legacy cars continuing into the mid-late 1920s. By 1928-29 the construction standards had changed to Clerestory roof styles. Along with the arch roofs, the throwback to wooden cars of the 1890s with their fancy transom windows were replaced with plainer utilitarian looking cars of the Roaring '20s.
These cars were then upgraded with new 'Art Deco' interior stylings of the mid-late 1930s, air-conditioning, and fluorescent lights. Much of the interior design for these upgrades were pulled from the new 1937 Daylight equipment being delivered at the same time. While SP was pouring millions of Dollars into the two new trainsets and six GS-2 streamlined Northerns, they couldn't buy all new passenger cars to cover all of the SP's vast milage and services across the country... but perhaps they could revamp the interior of their HW cars to trick the passengers into thinking they're in a newer car when they're inside it.
These cars were then upgraded with new 'Art Deco' interior stylings of the mid-late 1930s, air-conditioning, and fluorescent lights. Much of the interior design for these upgrades were pulled from the new 1937 Daylight equipment being delivered at the same time. While SP was pouring millions of Dollars into the two new trainsets and six GS-2 streamlined Northerns, they couldn't buy all new passenger cars to cover all of the SP's vast milage and services across the country... but perhaps they could revamp the interior of their HW cars to trick the passengers into thinking they're in a newer car when they're inside it.
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| SP 73-C-1 with National Federation of Financial Analysts excursion at Glendale May 15, 1952 - Roy R Platt posting (cropped) |
About 10 years ago I started working on doing conversions to Walthers "Paired Window Coaches", turning them into stand-ins for the SP's 73-C-1 coaches, which were modernized and fitted with A/C in 1937. The body will still be a foot short, and won't be exactly correct, but I'm trying to expand my options for modeling some of the post-archroof era. The 73-C-1 is one of the larger groups of cars that fall into this group, the other being the 74-CC-1. Unfortunately, the windows of the 74-CC-1 are fewer and more squat in appearance than those of the Walthers car, so I feel the 73-C-1 prototypes will be easier to 'fake' with the stand-ins than the 74-CC-1.
The order that I'm presenting these kitbashes may seem weird, but it is in the best kitbashing order of construction and photos of which cars I have on hand. I thought I took more construction photos of the SP 2337 and 2346, but I can't seem to find them now.
SP 2344 (Intercity - Day Service, a.k.a. HW San Joaquin)
The simplest conversion is to the three cars with minimal upgrades for the heavyweight (1937-1941) San Joaquin. These cars retained the full length seating arrangement of the previous coach configuration for maximum seating.
Many of my conversion car bodies started as CNW models, so don't mind the yellow and green, as that will all be painted over before the end.
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| SP 2344's stock Walthers underbody. |
While the basic Walthers model is pretty good, when I have photos of specific SP cars, I'll be moving equipment around and repositioning to as best match the photos that I can.
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| SP 2344 starting disassembly. |
To paint these models, I've decided that it's worth the pain to pop every piece of glass out of the car, then paper-towel stuff the interior of the car while painting the SP Dark Olive Green on the exterior. Somehow in the last few years, I misplaced the interior for this car... I'll find it again and finish the car up!
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| Unmodified interior high side-view. |
The Walthers model has a fairly well detailed interior. If I was pushing to crazy levels, I'd be putting two of he anti-mascara headrests on each seat back.
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| Unmodified interior, top view. |
The bathroom's don't need a lot of work, as usually I'll be putting a bit of Scotch-tape on the interior of the prism-glass. Don't use the "Magic" type of tape, but the type that results in 'foggy' or 'milky' look when applied to replicate the sand-blast etched glass look.
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| SP 2344 stock sides with one bathroom windows not removed, to be painted over. |
Among the first steps on the outside of all of these cars is scraping some of the paint from the top of the vestibule doors so the new extended letterboard plastic sheet will bond well to the existing carbody.
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| SP 2344 other side with all windows removed. |
I usually remove the car-sides to do the major work on them, especially as the letterboard work will be right against the car-ends which are a separate part.
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| SP 2344 with letterboard modifications over the vestibule doors |
These car have extended letterboard, which runs all the way to the end of the car over the door. This requires gluing in an extra strip of styrene and blending it down to match the letterboard in shape. The new upper part of the door needs to be fashioned and a new door window has to be made from scratch for the new sized window.
The SP 2344 will need the "1/4 round" A/C ducts installed along with the A/C hatch in the roof, which I'll be showing more on the SP 2337 and 2346 kitbashes below.
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| SP 1050, an ex-EPSW coach shows roughly what the SP 2344 will look like, except 2344 will have the extended letterboards over the vestibule doors. |
SP 2337, 1937 Modernized (Long Distance, Intercity Service)
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| Time to change the car to fully modernized "Deluxe Chair" configuration |
Here's the basics of a disassembled Walthers coach. The extra sets of seating have been removed to make room for the mens' and womens' dressing rooms at each end of the car. The tighter coach seat spacing is kept on these models, as I have to loose the foot of carbody length somewhere... and like with modern airliners, the leg room is the first to go!
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| Single window is dropped into the Walthers carside |
The main changes to the car sides is changing the New England Rail Service windows around to reflect the blanking of the aisle windows and converting the windows in the dressing room/annex areas to single windows. Today, I'd probably just draft and 3d print a section of replacement windows to match the Walthers sides and 'drop in'.
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| Both carsides of SP 2337. |
The two completed sides of SP 2337 are slightly different. The Walthers sides also are keyed differently to the core body of the car, so I decided to build the sides to match which way the underframe seemed to be pointing with the brake cylinders against the prototype photos of the car.
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| High-angle view of stripped down interior, this for another car, modernized T&NO 412/413 48-seat chair cars. |
The SP reduced the seating to 48-seats for the typical 'Transcontinental" deluxe chair cars. These cars would run through on the T&NO between LA, sometimes San Francisco, and New Orleans. So I'm planning to build one T&NO car, but it also gives reason for T&NO modelers to build or have SP Pacific Lines long-distance cars too.
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| New dressing room and annex room walls constructed from sheet styrene and painted interior buff color. |
Here's the core structure of the car reassembled with the new interior walls fabricated from sheet styrene and painted with a buff color to match the rest of the interior. Repurposed seats from the coach configuration are re-used to form the sitting furniture in the 'dressing rooms'.
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| Another view of the interior coming together. |
The main challenge remaining for the SP 2337 is to make or build the 1/4-round under-sized A/C ducts to fit along side the wide clerestory roof. I've pretty much decided that I will want to design and 3d print those to fit the Walthers car, but haven't gotten around to it for now, as of 2016. Note from 2025 me, I still haven't designed the ducts, but the technology of printing has come so far since 2016, I think it would be the best option now.
Detail Views
Note that my designations of "Front," "Rear," "Left" and "Right" are totally subjective to which way the seats are facing. The seats in cars like this can be rotated to align with which way the car will be moving in the train. In most of these cars, I didn't bother to turn around every seat in the interior of the car, but I may do that on some of the 'later' conversions I do.
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| Left Front |
Left Rear of the car, a little paint damage from the number of times I've opened the car's roof.
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| Left Rear |
The Left Rear of the car showing the safety handrails in the aisleway. Note the A/C hatch in the roof. The roof isn't quite sitting down properly in this photo, but it is possible to get it to seat properly, I just didn't for this photo.
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| Right Front |
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| Right Rear |
Detail view of the Right Rear of the car. Note the rivets were also sanded down. I need to still replace those with rivet-decals and touch-up the Dark Olive paint at some point.
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| Safety handrail installed along the aisle walkways in the SP 2337. |
One often overlooked detail features on our passenger car models is the safety handrails that were built with some 0.012-0.015" phosphor-bronze wire.
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| Underbody with some NERS details added, such as the large pressurized water tank. |
Some A/C boxes and details added to the underbody of the SP 2337. The "Front" of the SP 2337 is to the right in the underside view.
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| OwlMtModels pickup etchings used. |
I used 30-gage wire from TCS and OwlMtModels 10001 pickups (out-of-produciton, as of 2022).
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| Reverse view of the trucks and pickup-setup. |
Lighting
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| Direct LED lighting option |
I originally looked at direct lighting, with the LED strip pointed down, but this does create 'hotter' spots of lighting than if you flip the LEDs and point them at the roof. The direct lighting version also requires more dropping resistors to dim the lights.
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| Interior LED lighting setup installed. |
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| Photo of dimmed room lights, with interior lighting. |
One of the hardest things to photograph with any realistic impression of what the human eye sees is the way a lit car looks in a dimmed or dark room. As I've said with all my lit passenger car blog posts is the goal of having the lighting only show up when the room lighting is reduced or off, but isn't noticeable during "daylight" lighting of the layout room.
SP 2346, Variation on 1937 (Long Distance, Intercity Service)
The SP 2346 and 2347 were regularly assigned to the West Coast after WWII into the 1950s, resulting in one of these cars being high on my list of Must Model kitbashes to have a reasonably accurate West Coast consist..
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| Right Side of SP 2346 when completed |
The SP 2346 and 2347 were slightly different from the rest of the 73-C-1s in that they received the usual upgrades of A/C, etc but the ducting was put inside of the clerestory section of the roof, so no external ducting was visible.
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| Left side of SP 2346 when completed |
The window changes are somewhat different from the lower SP 2331-series of this class. The two pairs of aisle windows were reduced to only one pair on these two cars, requiring some more work to kitbash these cars.
Detail Views of Window Changes on SP 2346
The SP 2346 and 2347 were slightly different from the rest of the 73-C-1s in that they received the usual upgrades of A/C, etc but the ducting was put inside of the clerestory section of the roof, so no external ducting was visible.
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| Left front corner |
Combination of new paired window and single window forming the dressing room on the front end of the car. I haven't made the new door windows for the SP 2346 yet.
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| Left rear corner |
The Left Rear corner has a blanked window at the end of the main seating area, forming the center corner of the aisle on that end of the car. I think I still need to change out the prism-glass window from the corner, as that would be the aisle all the way to the end-wall inside the vestibule.
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| Right Rear |
Right Rear corner required the same dressing room window changes as SP 2337. The A/C hatch is also fabricated from sheet styrene and glued to the roof on the "rear" of the car. The concept of "front" and "rear" is simply based on which way the model's seats are facing. The prototype cars could have their seats turned around to face as-needed for the car's direction of travel in the train.
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| Right Front |
The same modification is required on the right side as shown above on the left side. 20+ years ago I thought the 'wide' spaced lettering on "C H A I R" was weird, but it's actually started to grow on me to the point I like the prototype cars that have that look, even though it means I have to cut the decals apart and individually apply each letter to make it look right.
As the 2346 isn't finished, I still need to add the safety handrails too.
In Closing
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| SP 2337 "in service" circa 2016 showing what the car looks like "in context". |
I'm going to wrap up this blog post here, as these cars have been in this condition since about 2016 when I was going to do more work on them "before doing a blog". Now I see it's been 8 years and I've not done more on them, but I wanted to get this information out.
Jason Hill
Related Articles:
SP 1050 Coach (Part 1) - History of SP Coach & Chair Cars - Kitbashing an Ex-EPSW coach, (Part 1).
SP 1050 Coach (Part 2) - Modeling Update - SP 1050, Ex-EPSW Coach kitbashed from Walthers Paired-Window Coach (Part 2)
Modeling Index for SP Heavyweight Passenger Cars
Modeling the Southern Pacific's Owl Nos.57/58 (Part 1) - WWII to Korea
Modeling the Owl (Part 2) - Korea to 1960
Modeling SP 2701 60-CC-1 Chair Car from Model Power 67ft Coach (Part 1)
Kitbashing an SP RPO-Baggage from MDC-Roundhouse Parts - SP 6102 - Express-Baggage Car
Mistakes in Modeling - Part Oops!
What's the nominal minimum radius curve now with fixed mount coupler pockets versus the swing mounted couplers?
ReplyDeleteThe layout's I've planned to run these cars on are better than 36" Radius, usually 48" with 1/4" spiral easements ~12" long. They probably can be run down into the 36" maybe 32", but at a certain point the fixed coupler's aren't the problem, it's un-eased curves, S-curves (sometimes in switch-work), and exactly how closely coupled the fixed coupler boxes are set up to bring the striking faces of the diaphragms that cause the limiting factors.
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