Kitbashing SFE 1456-class HW Diner (Part 1) with a Rivarossi Model and Opening Thoughts

Jason, Why Are You Modeling The Santa Fe?!

For many years I've thought about doing a Santa Fe Heavyweight passenger train.  Probably something like a Grand Canyon or California Limited consist.  A number of a years ago I also picked up some Walthers HW metal-sided kits for various Santa Fe cars to do such a project, mostly these were HW Chair Cars and a HW Lounge, but I didn't get a dining car sadly.  Thankfully, I knew the Rivarossi HW Diner is a good starting point for a fairly involved kitbash for a SFE 1456-class Diner using Colin Kikawa's pdf file from the 4th Quarter Warbonnet (which is also on-line in pdf form, linked here).  So that's what we'll be looking at first.

The goal of my kitbash is to do a modern kitbash of this kitbashed model by Colin Kikawa.

I've also decided to model this car as one of the Santa Fe's unique "Shadowlined" cars with the faux fluting, which was painted on over the aluminum painted HW cars to blend in with the newer Santa Fe streamlined trains circa 1947-1948 (iirc).  The Santa Fe kept some cars in this scheme for a while after the extra Budd consist cars were delivered, until most of them were repainted into the TTG by the 1950-1952 era, as I recall.

I also don't really want to paint the Santa Fe's TTG scheme on any more cars than I have to.  Many of my cars for this project will need to be painted in the more 'classic' Santa Fe 'Coach Green' and I'll be debating what scheme to paint the HW Lounge in.  

Santa Fe's TTG scheme was not like SP's, but added a splash of Aluminum (Silver) to the roof and trucks.

Speaking of Santa Fe TTG, I already have one TTG car, a Walthers 6-6-4 that I'll plan to include in my train, the Chama Valley.  I still need to do some finishing on the model, a little running weathering and some window shades will be nice to give the car a more completed look. 

For my example here, a Centralia Shops N-scale 6-6-4 in MoPac scheme that I'm considering doing.  This image is one I found on a ebay sale tonight. - Where's all my MoPac modelers to help me with this one?

I also have a second Walthers 6-6-4, which is undecorated that I picked up about 15 years ago with the intention to paint it also in either the 'shadowlined' scheme or in the much more challenging MP Eagle's blue and gray-scheme, if I can find some good decals and paint color info for doing that scheme, that is.  So far, my research suggests the name 'Colorado River' would be a good choice for the car.  Sadly, I've never seen a Walthers 6-6-4 car done in the MoPac's scheme.

The reason for the seemingly random choice for MP car is that the two 6-6-4s that they regularly used on the Richmond (Oakland) Grand Canyon "North" trains used one that was assigned for the through passengers to New Orleans on the MoPac connection.  Thus 1/3 of the days a MP car was assigned to the pool to balance mileage for that assignment.  So it wouldn't be a surprise to see a MP 6-6-4 running in the Santa Fe's train west of New Mexico.

Tom Casey's SFE 1404 extreme kitbashing of two Rivarossi Diners to make his model. - his photo taken from his pdf kitbashing article, linked below.

One of my delaying factors was that my friends pointed out that the larger 1401-1418-class cars should be used for modeling the HW trains that went over Tehchapi Pass, but at this point I don't want to go to the trouble of kitbashing a 1401-class car.  Those cars have been modeled before by extensive kitbashing, as seen on Tom Casey's ATSF_hwt_Diner.pdf on the old.atsfrr.org website page.  While Tom did an AWESOME job on this model, I am already up to my ears in SP Diner-bashing projects!

The Starting Point for My Diner

I'm deciding to start with a second hand PRR-painted Rivarossi HW Diner body.  Most of the modifications are removing a couple of the older kitchen window dividing frames, and adding a lower flange to the car's channel-frame, which is visible below the side-sheets.  In the kitbash pdfs that I'm using for reference, they remove the whole underframe and replace it with completely new styrene fabricated floor and underframe.  That's a bit too much work to do on this 'simple' kitbash, so I'll be keeping the underframe of the Rivarossi car and only doing the modifications.

Right side of the car with no work done yet.

Left side of the car with minimal work on the vertical kitchen window bars.

I seemed not to have taken a picture of the kitchen windows before I removed the vertical bars from them.  Oh well.  Here's the mostly stock left side of the car.

Detail view of the kitchen windows being cleaned up.

The upper windows (called "gussets" according the Santa Fe articles, but SP modelers would know these as "transom windows") need to be covered and filled, except for the kitchen windows, which were kept as full height windows on the Santa Fe 1456 in San Diego.

Transoms Covered

Right side with roof installed, transom windows covered, and NERS A/C Duct installed.

The Dining section had the transom windows covered along with the aisle transoms covered as well.  I used some 0.010" x 0.100" strips cut to length to fit inside the depressed window frames.  The original kitbash article calls for 0.010" x 0.125", which I assume was done by removing the top of the bar of the window, and allowing the plate to cover down to the main window.

I had put a section of New England Rail Service air conditioning ducts on over the dining section.  The kitchen end of the duct is a little short, so I'll probably need to extend it a little with solid styrene, as we'll see later.

Left side with roof installed, transom windows in the dining area covered.

The left side is coming together with the transom windows going away in the dining area.  The prototype photo of 1458 in San Diego in Shadowlining, has the upper windows still operable, and the left two are open in that photo.

Adding Lower Flange to Frame Channel

Scrapped lower edge of the channel so the glue may bond to it.

While the original kitbashing article called to remove the whole channel details and replace it all with 0.100" x 0.030" vertical strip and 0.010" x 0.040" wide flange on the bottom, I don't really want to do all that so I'm trying a simpler version to see how it looks using a single 0.010" x 0.020" strip, which is aligned flat to the channel, this way it will only stick out 0.010" and be stronger bond to the body, making it less likely to get knocked off.

Strip installed down the length of the carside.

Mid-car frame flange.

Detail of flange across the stirrup step installed.

The main trick is that the end of the car, I need to make the flange look like it goes behind the stirrup steps.  After looking at this detail view, I still need to add some little bits of the strip at the very end!

Completed channel flange Right side.

Completed frame rail Left side.

The car body's starting to look pretty good now.  

Removing Unwanted Underframe Boxes & Tanks

Removing the Boxes and Tanks except for the double-box.

The double boxes are mostly correct for the SFE 1456-class, but the rest of the underbody tanks and boxes have to go.  I remove them by carefully cutting with my key-saw Zona razor-saw blade.  

Underside view with most of the bits removed, notice that the tank is part of the center sill.

I probably should have done this before adding the frame flanges, but I was able to do it without damaging the flange.  If I decide to remove the rest of the tank remains on the centersill, I'll have to do it with my Dremal end-mill bit, and very carefully mill it away.

3/4 underside view with parts removed.

I finished up with some light file work to clean the plastic edges of the boxes and tanks up to the channel flange.

Underside view of removed parts.

The new underbody parts will need to be built up with styrene blocks to support them below the channel flanges.  I'll also fill in the openings with some styrene plugs later.

Model Within The Model? - The Roof!

This is one of the fun parts of this whole conversion, building all the roof details!

Colin Kikawa's kitbash roof view photo, which is what I'm working from.

The roof needs a large number of strips with rivets added.  Colin Kikawa used 0.005" strips with rivets added.  I'll probably use some of my spare Archer Rivet strips to do this on the Santa Fe Diner which I picked up to do all the rivet replacement on SP 10014 project car.

I started by removing the existing details from the roof.  This includes three small box vents, the small roof hatch at the end of the car and also the injection point at the center of the car roof needed to have a little sanding and cleaning up.

Right side of the roof with my pencil notes.

I spent a bit of time working out from the photos of the other kitbashed model where the details should go.  The major square patches are where the Steam Injector Air Conditioning hatches go.  On this side there will be an overhanging vent intake and one of the small hinged hatches.  I'm using a mechanical pencil to sketch out where the details will go on the roof.

Left side of the roof with my pencil notes.

The lines across the center of the roof will have some narrower roof vents on them with a peak, for now I'm just roughing out the size of how large they will be.  The right two of the clerestory side vents should have a box vent built-up on them.  There will also be some smaller hinged hatches, one near the A/C duct and one between the door and the end of the car.

Straight down top view of the marks.

The roof hatches are roughly 6.5ft x 5ft towards the kitchen end and 5.5ft x 5ft long towards the middle of the car.  I may enlarge these bases of the Steam A/C hatches, as I have some new info that Colin Kikawa sent me.

Scribed bonding surface of the roof.

So I decided to scribe the roof with the corner of my chisle x-acto blade and then bond the hatch 0.020" base plate on with ACC glue.

The 5ft roof hatch is glued on now, and the 6.5ft one is scribbed to be glued on.

On the second hatch, I decided to glue a 0.040" x 0.040" styrene strip down the center to create a more pronounced ridge line to the hatch.  Extra ACC was used this time to fill the triangular voids between the hatch piece and the scribbed roof.

Here's with the second hatch bonded onto the roof.

If I end up needing to make these pads larger, I'll probably do that by adding strips of styrene of known size around the edges of the basic pads before I add the 0.010" cap sheet on the top.

The 6.5ft roof hatch needs 4" of elevation, so I added another 0.020" set of plates to it.

In Closing

Someday my shadowlined diner will be done?

I think that will do it for tonight... Lots more to do on this project but I'll close with the end-goal photo of what I hope to achieve when I'm done.

Jason Hill

P.S. Much and many thanks to Colin for getting in contact with me and offering more support for this project.  I look forward to putting some more information into the next part of this blog as I continue working on this model.  Currently, I'm researching and digging up parts to continue the project.

Related Articles:

SFE 1456-class Diner kitbash by Colin Kikawa, along with multiple other interesting kitbashes - Enjoy!

Tom Casey's ATSF_hwt_Diner.pdf - SFE 1404 Kitbashed Diner

SP HW 72-D-3 Cafe-Lounge & Diners from MDC Kitbashing (Part 1)

This is the second post in my series of MDC Food-Service Kitbashes, specifically this time on the 1937 Cafe-Lounge conversions of the 72-D-3s.  Last time I started with the 77-D-2 Dining Cars (Part 1), and the odd-ball car of that class which was converted to a unique Cafe-Lounge pilot conversion in August 1936 of SP 10910, about six months before these cars were converted in 1937.

Right side of my SP 10913 from circa 2017.

I pretty well finished my first model back around 2016, but I didn't quite finish the car.  A few small details like the A/C roof vents, stirrup steps, and adjusting the interior to fit properly with the car's internal weight.

Left side of my SP 10913 from circa 2017.

I've noticed now, in 2026, that I should have also corrected the size of the windows in the dining and lounge sections too, so I'll be working on that later here as well.  However, let's start back at the beginning.

Prototype Cafe-Lounge & Dining Cars

I know it's painted in the wrong color for passenger service, but the SPMW 7021D is my model of a 72-D-2 class Diner, which was a very similar design to the 72-D-3s which we're looking at today, before they went through the Cafe-Lounge conversion in 1937.  This photo nicely shows the original window arrangement of the six evenly spaced windows in the main dining section.  The roof-top swamp cooler I believe was a non-A/C modification which was applied at some point, possibly after MW conversion of the 7021D.

Left side of SPMW 7021D, an ex-72-D-2/3 class "Diner" to show what these cars looked like before the Cafe-Lounge" conversion in 1937.

I should add here that Chicago & Alton (608 & 609) and Oregon Short Line (369) both had 72-D-3s as well, plus UP had some cars similar as well, although the 72-D-2 and -3 as-built only had 5 windows in the dining section when new.

A few months ago I posted my 'Timeline Graphic' meant to give an idea of the number of cars in various services over the years with consolidated notes on each one from the SPHTS Passenger Car books.

Excerpt from my Timeline of the SP's 72-D3 and 77-D-2 Cafe-Lounge conversions from the 1930s to 1960 era.

The five cars of 10911-10915, were rebuilt from the old 72ft non-A/C diners from 72-D-3 class.  The rebuild included changing the 3 sets of windows away from the kitchen by pushing them about 3ft towards the end of the car.  They retained the 2'5" window columns in the dining section's 3 windows, but had 2'0" columns between the lounge section windows, which I won't be replicating on my models because I just noticed that in 2026, not 2012 or whenever we started these kitbashes... oops.

Also of note, the dining car section of the SPHTS Vol.4 shows that SP 10012, 10013, 10015 (72-D-2s) were painted in TTG3, and 10012 suggests this was done in Sept 1948.  All four cars including the 10014 received Waukesha 1 Enginator A/C in 9-11 1937 when they were converted to Cafe-Lounge service.

The rest of the SP's 72-D-3s (except SP 100011), SP 10000-10002 and 10004-10005 were never upgraded with A/C and were all retired in 1948 & 1949, except for 10002 which was leased to the CCC in 1937 and then to R&LHS in 1938, before being stripped in 1938, and finally retired in 1940.

SP 10913, Construction 2014-2015 Era

SP 10913 Right Side before I cut open the far right aisle window

By this time I've already roughed out the body kitbashing enough to actually have the trucks under the car body and the roof roughed out as well.

SP 10913 Right Side, after I cut out the rough opening of the high aisle window.

These cars retained their bulkheads at the end of the frame with the vestibules, thus retained their 72-D classification, not increasing the structural frame length of the floor.  the doors on the SE and NW corners were enclosed, leaving only vestibule doors with steps at the SW and NE corners of the car.  I'm not sure why the door was kept at the lounge-end of the car.

SP 10913 Left Side

The Kitchen windows were cut open all the way to the bottom of the letterboard.  This is to allow blanking styrene plugs to be placed in the lower window opening to replicate the kitchen windows of the time, which interestingly probably was the first appliance of this window style on the SP Diners, which didn't seem to get this style until about 1940.

SP 10913, Completed 2017 Version

Left side of the as-completed kitbashed model.

I pushed forward back in the day, fitting the car with underbody equipment parts and some interior tables and lounge chairs from Palace Car Works.  The Kitchen was a stolen Rivarossi Diner interior kitchen.  The wind-vane smoke jacks came from Kit-Bits from BCWs, which I believe are out of production now sadly.  I believe most of the underbody equipment is PSC plastic parts.

Right side of the as-completed kitbashed model.

I used the MDC step wells and my standard Walthers HW 6-wheel passenger trucks, which should allow future LED lighting in the car.  The car was finished with Star Brand SP Dark Olive Green paint and ThinFilm-160 lettering for post-1946 SP lettering arrangement.  The window shades are aluminum painted paper shades.

SP 10014, 72-D-3 Diner, Post-WWII Era (March 2026 Work)

This whole time I've had a second Cafe-Lounge body, which I've not finished past basic primer.  This one I believe was actually roughed out by my friend John Ruehle.  Once I put the SP 10913 into service, the requirement for a second one was relaxed some as another car was used in La Mesa Club's second West Coast consist, leaving the SP 10913 to work as the Cafe-Lounge on one consist alone.

Left side of SP 10915

So this second body was planned to be Cafe-Lounge SP 10915 to be in the second West Coast consist, but then fell by the wayside as it wasn't really as needed, so it has sat for 10-12 years now.

Right side of SP 10915

This body had more issues with damage to the rivet rows of the MDC body panels, and a couple of the joints were a bit rougher than the SP 10913's body, thus why I put the 10913 into service first.  I did give the body a shot of SP Dark Olive Green, but that really showed that I needed to do more body work before committing to putting decals and more mechanical work into it.

Left side of Dark Olive Green painted body.

However, now that we have have Archer Rivet Decals, and their Pullman Rivet Pattern decal sets, I'm going to start doing more body work to complete this body.

Right side of Dark Olive Green painted body.

The roof also seems to have a bit of a bow in it, which I'll have to work out what to do with as I get the car farther along.  I'm considering reusing some of the Athearn-MDC era magnetic roof retaining pieces to draw down the middle of the roof over the dining section.

Right side exterior, interior of left side.

These elevated views are to show the location of the splice joints in the body.

Left side exterior, interior of right side.

Not that much to more to say about the other side looking into the interior.

Converting from SP 10915 to SP 10014

At this point, I looked again at the SP Lounge Timeline Graphic for the 72-D-3 Cafe-Lounge rebuilt cars.

Excerpt from my Timeline of the SP's 72-D3 and 77-D-2 Cafe-Lounge conversions from the 1930s to 1960 era.

The interesting thing about history is... nothing ever works out the way it was planned to.  The majority of these Cafe-Lounges were pulled back into the shops in May 1942 and the lounge chairs were pulled out and tables were placed back into the 'lounge section', converting them back into 'dining cars' again.  The cars had their numbers and lettering changes on the exterior of the cars. 

The SP 10011 was retired in 9/49 and converted to serve as SP 145 1/5/50 as a air-conditioning Instruction Car, with most of its windows covered over with sheet metal and painted DOG, then TTG in 1955, before being converted again to a conference car in 10/59 and painted in SSS of the era and finally being retired somewhere around 1970.

The SP 10014 seemed to be the longest lived of these ex-Cafe-Lounge turned Diners, the SP 10014's history is a little simpler.  Being retired in 1/51 and transferred to SPMW service in 2/53 as SPMW 646, the car was transformed into the dorms and offices for the crew of the Rail Fissure Detector Car as their "Tender".  The car was still painted in Dark Olive Green until circa 1954, then in TTG until about 1985 when it was repainted to the Solid Gray scheme.  According to the Business Car book by SPH&TS, it was always operated with SPMW 4520 (ex-USAX Kitchen Car), turned supply and maintenance car  which complemented the support of SPO-1001 and SPO 4901 detector cars, which were painted Daylight and have been made available in brass.  As for the revenue version of the model, I've settled on the SP 10014 as the Diner to squeeze most of another year out of the model compared to the SP 10011.

What Makes a Diner or a Lounge?

I should note that, given the SP did the same type of thing to the dining section of the San Joaquin Daylight's Triple-Unit Diners, swapping 2/3s of the dining tables out for lounge seat and small drink stands in low traffic times during 1949, which usually only took a few hours and a few men to swap the tables and chairs around during layovers at Oakland and Los Angeles.  This makes me think that all of these Cafe-Lounge cars could have been temporally swapped back and forth from Cafe-Lounge to full Dining configurations depending on traffic needs and train assignments. 

This reason alone makes them an interesting car to select to model to increase the operational options of how to employ the car.  I am currently looking at having some non-77-D-3/4 options for extra passenger trains, charter groups, etc and MAIN (Troop) train movements for Korean War.  The SP seemed to get rid of their non-A/C 72-D-3s by 1949, too bad as they would have found use with the MAIN trains within a year of their retirements.

Time for some Body Work

So now that this car body has a proposed new life, I've decided to start seriously looking into what it will take to finish this body into Diner SP 10014, instead of the sister car SP 10915, which remained in Cafe-Lounge service.

Left side with Liquid Surface Primer applied over splice joints.

I also used some of the Tamyia Liquid Surface Primer (LSP) as a more precise sand-able filling compound than something like Squadron Putty, which shows here as vertical columns of darker gray.

Right side with Liquid Surface Primer applied over splice joints.

At this point I've decided it won't really be worth trying to use "S-scale" Archer Rivets to replace the original MDC rivets on both sides of the car where I'm going to need to sand the LSP filler.

Right Side of the body after flat-sanding down the splice joints and rivets.

This results in my sanding the whole car side down smooth and eliminating basically all of the original rivets.  

Left Side of the body after flat-sanding down the splice joints and rivets.

The resulting depth of the Dark Olive and underlying primer being exposed, and the LSP on top.  Oddly enough, having the car in this strangely colored arrangement, it actually makes me think of some of the modern condition of surviving passenger cars during various stages of preservation and repainting.  Not sure I would want to keep the model in this condition though, as I have a mission for it.  But it does make one consider what some of these cars looked like during their yearly shopping if heavy repair and repaint work needed to be done.

SP 10913, March 2026 Rebuilding

I'm starting the 2026 rebuild to raise the top of the windows to match the size that the prototype car's windows were replaced with in 1937, which I missed in my first kitbashing of this model 10 years ago.  So it's time to take it in hand again.

Left side of SP 10913, starting rebuild

The first step here is the marking of the work that I need to do.  I took the interior out from the dining and lounge sections so I don't damage them.  Next I popped the windows out, however the wall sections in the non-kitchen end sandwich the clear styrene windows in place, so I can't remove the glazing at that end.  I'm hoping that I can work around damaging the plastic windows too much during the rebuilding.

Right Side SP 10913, starting rebuild

I was able to get the glazing out on both sides of the dining windows and the aisle section.  I'll be covering most of this car's 2026 Rebuild in future parts of this post.  Let's look at the other car that's not as far along.

In Closing

Maybe... just maybe, I should have split this post into two posts... but as these cars are so closely connected I think it's better to just talk about them in context as they each tell a different part of the same story.

I will look into posting a Part 2 of this post soon when the Archer Rivet Decal order arrive for the SP 10014 or when I do more work of significance on the SP 10913's window modification.  I expect that the mechanical (underframe, bolsters, etc) won't be done on the SP 10014 until the body work is sorted out, but I know many of you that read these blog posts are interested in the mechanical work on these scratch built and heavily kitbashed cars for your own projects, so I'll try to take extra 'how-to' pictures when I'm working on that part of the car again.

Jason Hill

Related Articles

SP HW 77-D-2 Diners from MDC Kitbashing (Part 1) - SP 10096 or SP 10910/T&NO 931?

Modeling "Super Index" Page - with links to my other articles.

SP Passenger Car Statistics - (Part 1) Dining Cars (1930s-1950s) - More in-depth car-by-car research on the SP's HW Dining Cars (data-roster info from SPHTS Passenger Cars Vol.4 book), with extra assignment data from various sources.

SP Passenger Car Statistics - (Part 2) Lounge Cars (1930s-1950s) - More in-depth car-by-car research on the SP's HW 'Full' Lounge Cars (data-roster info from SPHTS Passenger Cars Vol.5 book), with extra assignment data from various sources.

Index for Modeling Pullman Pool HW Passenger Cars - Overview of Pullman Pool HW Car Models

Index for Modeling HW SP Passenger Car Classes - Overview of SP HW Car Models