Some years back, I adapted an E&B Valley kit of a streamlined Pullman-Standard diner to serve as a Southern Pacific streamlined diner. I mentioned this car in a post about using mainline passenger equipment on a small layout, with a very brief description of what was done (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/05/mainline-passenger-cars-on-small-layout.html ). Because I often get queries, either as comments directly to posts, or as private email messages, about how I do such projects, I thought it would be useful to describe what was involved here, particularly where information comes from and how it can be used.
Because this project is a dining car, the first source I would consult is Volume 4 in the superb series, Southern Pacific Passenger Cars, covering dining service cars (Southern Pacific Historical & Technical Society, Upland, CA, 2010). I looked at photos and floor plans to find something similar to the E&B Valley model. I soon realized that the closest SP class to the E&B Valley model was Class 83-D-1.
Let’s start with the floor plan, shown below with the forward end of the car at left. (You can click on the image to enlarge it.) Notice that the kitchen is at left, with a passageway alongside it, and the dining area for passengers is at the right. The kitchen has a loading door in about the middle of the car.
Photos of this same class show the arrangements. Below are Pullman builder photos of both sides of Class 83-D-1, taken in the fall of 1949. In both photos, the dining area is toward the camera; the lower photo shows the passageway side. The cars were painted in SP’s standard Two-Tone Gray for assignment to the San Francisco Overland, but received no train emblem. The same paint scheme was used for cars in pool or stand-by service.
Clearly this is similar to but certainly not identical to the E&B Valley model. The SP prototype shown above has one more window in each area (dining and kitchen), than the E&B Valley model (below). This might be because the E&B Valley model has a vestibule, which the SP diners did not. In addition, the E&B Valley floor plan is flipped relative to the SP version, with the kitchen on the north instead of the south side.
And one more detail, the E&B Valley model has deeper skirts, typical of older cars, compared to the postwar SP diners shown above. But since this is a stand-in anyway, and will only be seen in passing trains, I decided I could accept the discrepancies, relying on the paint scheme to identify the car. The kit I built was undecorated, so paint was my first challenge.
In applying the paint scheme for this car, I tape-outlined and painted the stripes, rather than wrestle with decals (I did that once: never again.) After the paint scheme was applied, I needed to add proper diaphragms to the car. Though built with full-width diaphragms, as can be discerned in the builder photos above, it was not many years before SP began to remove these from passenger equipment whenever they were damaged or the car was in the shop for other work.
For an example of how SP cars that originally had full-width diaphragms looked after removal, here’s the diner end of a Shasta Daylight articulated coffee shop-kitchen-diner, photographed at West Oakland in October 1961 (detail of Don Munger photo).
I made my own styrene face plates to mimic the above appearance, as I’ve described in several of my previous posts (for example, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/06/passenger-car-diaphragms-part-3.html , the post in which the above photo was included). I’ve added some rust to the model face plate, below.
So now I can include this pool-service diner in my deadhead passenger extra trains in layout operating sessions, as you see below, in a train passing the Shumala depot. This is the passageway side of the diner.
I enjoy being able to include some of my passenger models in op sessions, even though my limited staging track length prevents me from operating realistic-length full passenger trains, This stand-in diner is just part of that story.
Tony Thompson
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