A couple of months have passed and I still have this observation lounge car on my work bench. While searching the forum I have found pictures of members installing pull down shades and venation blinds in their passenger car windows. As long as this car was apart, I thought I'd give it a try.
My research turned up this observation car used tan venation blinds in the passenger lounge area and most likely silver pull down shades in the crew areas. eBay had an old set (circa 1957) of Walters O-scale tan blinds and I clicked buy now.
First, I installed the silver pull down shades in the crew areas. Then I trimmed the old water transfer decals and applied them to windows using Micro Set in the passenger section. The water transfer decals worked great.
At this point, it seemed like a good time to update the cars incandescent lights to LED. I purchased a Hennings 21000 Passenger Car LED lighting kit and mounted the circuit board in cars front hallway. Realizing there wasn't any place in this car to hide the circuit board, I just pulled down the tan venation blinds in the front hallway.
The LED lighting worked so good… I had to install more details inside the lounge car. Mostly, the walls inside this car seemed too plain. According to historical data this car should have blue walls, tan ceiling and the curtains were a striped pattern done in tan, rust and blue. Based on old photos, here's the best curtain pattern I could recreate. The reason my pattern is extra long, was so I could cut the exact lengths needed to fit in-between the windows.
Here’s what the new curtains look like installed next to the blue walls and tan venetian blinds.
This is a semi scale car and a basswood floor was used during construction. Therefore, I needed to lower the height of the chairs so my passengers would not be above the side windows. This was done by removing the legs from the chairs. Also, most my passengers are 1/45 scale and there feet and bottoms needed to be trimmed so their heads would be about the middle of the cars windows. Here's an inside view from the back of the car looking forward towards the bar.
I'm ready to put this lounge car back on the shelf and move on to the next project.
