| Useing Athearn dining cars for sleeper/lounges
Us modelers that started in the seventies used the Athearn streamlined
passenger cars and I still do. The problem with this is Athearn never followed
through and made any sleeper cars. The Santa Fe "Chief" was an
all sleeper car train that included an RPO, Baggage Car, possible Dome car
and an Observation car on the tail end. I decided to use Athearn dining
cars as sleepers as there were some "Pullman cars" or Double bedroom
lounge cars with similar window configurations. You can see and example
of this in Kalmbach's "Classic Trains" Summer 2008 edition on
page 59. All I did different is paint "red" curtains for the sleepers
and "green" curtains for the diner. The green would indicate the
"turquoise Room" on the Santa Fe. |
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| Green curtains for diners and red curtains for double bedroom lounge
cars. It's just and example of squeezing out something extra from toy trains.
Ah, but then, all my passenger and mail trains have interior lighting with
rechargeable battery packs, most have Centralia Car Shops trucks, Kadee
couplers, American limited diaphragms and plenty of lead weight to keep
them tracking at 90 miles an hour. |
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