So over the weekend, I complete my third version of the Chessie Steam Special Auxiliary Tender (with help from my 3 year old daughter). Since MTH nor Lionel did not make one with their scale engines (even though they had the tooling to do so since NYC Tenders already existed), I went off to make my own.
Version 1
My first version was made from a scale hudson tender. It was pretty straight forward to paint and decal:
Version 2A
Version 2A was made from two hudson Tenders that I cut and spliced to get the correct length (or close to it). Unfortunately, I did not use the same tender body, so the thickness was slightly different:
Version 2B
Because I have LTS (Long Train Syndrome), I ended up having more passenger cars (13) than Lionel Pullmor engine could pull. So I took the motors from an MTH Railking SD engine and mated them with a new frame I made from brass to give another motor to pull the train (one of our club members said it was just wrong when I used the Aux tender to pull the train without the steam engine 
):
Version 3 (The Final Version)
After finding someone on the forum selling the prototypical NYC tender, my daughter and I went on the odyssey of making the third version. I made the coal bunker cover out of sheet aluminum. Then I did the primer, and she helped me with the airbrushing of the other three colors (yellow, orange, and blue). I then clean up the decals from Version 2 and applied them last weekend. Here is the result (which I am very happy with):
