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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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. |
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| 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.
SP 10913, Construction 2014-2015 Era
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Right side exterior, interior of left side. |
These elevated views are to show the location of the splice joints in the body.
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| 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.
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| 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. Several of the cars continued past 1950 until retirement as diners.
The SP 10011 and SP 10014 seemed to be the longest lived of these ex-Cafe-Lounge turned Diners, leaving 3 Cafe-Lounges to return to that service post-Feb 1950.
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.
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.
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
Jason Hill
Related Articles
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
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