Modeling SP passenger cars, Part 19

In recent parts of this series, I described work on creating Southern Pacific lightweight sleeping cars. Most of that work was collected in my article in Model Railroad Hobbyist, in the issue for October 2023. The more dramatic projects were those that used sides from Brass Car Sides to create two car types: 13 double bedroom (13 DB) cars, and 4 double bedroom-4 compartment-2 drawing room (4-4-2) cars.

The work on those cars can be well understood in this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/04/modeling-sp-passenger-cars-part-14.html , followed by the nearly completed cars shown here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/10/modeling-sp-passenger-cars-part-18.html . Below is a view of my 4-4-2 car, shown bringing up the rear of a train passing Shumala on my layout.

But work is not complete on some of the other cars I’m working on. As I mentioned in passing in a couple of previous posts, the stock Rivarossi bodies are rather light when unmodified. Addition of brass car sides is a real help with weight, but cars not so modified need additional weight. I have used, as I often do, steel nuts glued inside the car with canopy glue. For passenger cars, I use 1/2-13 nuts, which I paint flat black to minimize their visibility inside the car.

And while one of these model cars has the roof temporarily removed and the inside accessible, I also need to add view blocks. As I showed in the MRH article, the great majority of modern lightweight cars had all enclosed accommodations, which in turn means that unless someone had opened a door into one of the rooms, there was no way to see through the car. This is certainly clear for the stock Rivarossi lightweight sleeping car, the 10 roomette-6 double bedroom (10-6) car.

At one time, Rivarossi did market an one-piece, molded interior for these cars. It’s a nice idea, but unfortunately they chose to model this interior with all room doors open. Here you see it in my already repainted and lettered SP 9051, a Lark 10-6 car.

To make new view blocks, I simply cut rectangles of 0.010-inch styrene sheet to fit, and painted both sides with one of the SP passenger interior colors. For the car shown above, I chose a pale gray, Tamiya “Corsa Gray,” PS-32, a somewhat bluish light gray. I installed the blocks with canopy glue.

This is an adaptation of my view block ideas to the Rivarossi molded interior. As I showed earlier, for example in the MRH article mentioned in the first paragraph, above, without a molded interior, a full-length styrene strip serves nicely as a view block. The car below is the 4-4-2 car I created, an all-room car, and the view block is painted a cream color.

Another way to add weight to these cars is to replace the very light plastic Rivarossi 4-wheel trucks. I have some of the Central Valley No. 139 trucks rebuilt by Brass Car Sides with Northwest Short Line wheelsets, which do add weight. They also require body-mounting the couplers, but I have wide enough curves on my layout that this will work. 

An aside about trucks for these lightweight cars: Pat Wider’s excellent article in Railway Prototype Cyclopedia, Volume 6 (2001), entitled “Lightweight Passenger Car Trucks,” pages 76–104, is a good introduction to these trucks and also tabulates actual trucks on specific cars of many railroads. 

An even better article, that includes information on model trucks, is W. Gordon Anderson’s “Passenger Trucks of the Lightweight Era: Part 1,” in Mainline Modeler, Vol. 3, January-February 1982, pages 72–83. Below are Anderson’s photos of two model trucks. At left is the Rivarossi truck, and at right is the Central Valley lightweight No. 139 truck.

What prototype trucks do these models represent, and which ones do we want to represent? The postwar SP 10-6 cars had 41-ND-11 trucks, while many of the pre-war 13 DB and 4-4-2 cars had 41-HR trucks. (The Pullman truck code 41-N means 4 wheels, 1 bolster, and N = an 8'6" wheelbase; an “H” in the code indicates that all springs are coil springs.) 

The stock Rivarossi truck has a nearly 9-foot wheelbase but looks approximately like the Pullman 41-N; however it has a lower overall truck height, and roller bearing representations resembling no prototype. Below is a Pullman photo from Anderson’s collection, showing a 41-N truck.

On the other hand, the Central Valley truck is really a 41-E (the code E means it has an elliptical [leaf] bolster spring, instead of a snubber, while also having coil springs), though otherwise similar to the 41-N shown above, and like that truck, has an 8 ft. 6 in. wheelbase.

I believe the Central Valley truck is the right length and is close enough in overall appearance to be used on the SP cars I operate. I will return to their installation challenges in a future post.

Tony Thompson