Making a start on a utility passenger car

The 'passenger' car is simply a flat car with a bench. Here's the flat car part. Bench is still to come.

On-and-off over the past few weeks I've made a start on a very simple, open air passenger car for the Mt. Lowe layout. It's based on one I saw a plan for in this book:

This is one of the best RR books I've read. Highly recommended!

The Portage Railway, aka the Hunstville and Lake of Bays Transportation Company, was a narrow gauge railway that ran in Huntsville, Ontario from 1904 to 1959 and not in California's San Gabriel Mountains as did the Mt. Lowe railway. Strangely though, I don't have a problem with that. For this little layout I think this Ontario vintage, barebones people hauler - the so-called 'canopied inspection wagon' that is basically a bench on a flatcar with a canopy above - stylistically fits in with the overall scene. Plan 7 in the book's drawings section spells out the configuration and dimensions. 

A peek at the book's drawing as I work out dimensions

Two changes I plan to make to the car are: 1) change the height of the bench above the flat car's floor, and 2) make the canopy's supports a little less flimsy. The bench's seat seems a little low and the canopy looks like it would blow off in a light breeze, so both of these will be changed once I start work on passenger accommodations. 

For now though, the task at hand is building the basic flat car.

Based on a Peco NR-122 wagon chassis

I'm basing this project on a Peco N-scale wagon chassis kit; it's their so-called 15' wheelbase steel type chassis, kit # NR-122. I had bought a couple of these kits a long time ago to try my hand at building E. L. Moore's narrow gauge coaches. That didn't happen, but these chassises seemed just the right thing for this project.

HO scale Kadee couplers - leftovers from my spares box - were used.

It turns out I did at one time make a start on those E. L. Moore coaches. I had built up a Peco kit for one before setting the project aside. This meant I had to do some rather crude chopping on the chassis to replace the kit's couplers with some HO-scale Kadee units. 

Styrene strips were added to restore the deck after chopping the chassis for the couplers.

Super glue was used to stick the couplers to the chassis. You can see in the above photo I had to restore some of the hacked and chopped chassis with styrene strips to restore solidity to the thing. Those pieces are the same thickness as the metal weight that is provided in the kit.

Once all this basic structural work was done the next task was to build up the deck with pieces of styrene. I followed much the same procedure as with last year's trolley project.

This post's lead photo and the one above give you an idea of what the built-up deck looks like. I didn't strictly follow the prototype in the book. My rendition was more driven by scrap styrene I had on hand to build up something that seemed plausible. 

The couplers sit rather low and only about half are gripped by the trolley's couplers. Well, I've taken the flat car for many spins around the track and they don't decouple, so I'll declare the couplers ok even though they are very unprototypical - they work, so I guess that's some sort of prototypicalness :-)

Now it's on to a bench and canopy.