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Reply to "18” Dome Coach Interior Upgrade"

T.Albers posted:
Those photos look great Hancock52!  Where did you find the plates and coffee pots?  The full size overhead dome windows on your Lionel 21" 9000 series passenger car are exactly correct per the UP builders spec.  In your cars these large windows allow a much nicer for your viewers to see all the fine details you added. 

On K-Line cars they have a bar that crosses the window and blocks the view into the dome.  This bar across the window was used on other railroads dome cars but never on the Union Pacific's 7000, 8000 or 9000 series dome cars built in the 1950's.   

Also, now that I see how nice LED lighting looks in the dome area, I want to try that next.  How did you get the table cloth effect?

All the plates, cups etc. and foodstuffs are "quarter scale" miniatures actually made commercially for dioramas and indeed dollhouses. You can find tons of it by a Google search or on fleabay.

The "tablecloths" are inkjet printable self-adhesive vinyl.

Yes, whatever else can be said against Lionel's effort on these 21" ABS UP Excursion Train cars, they got the domes practically perfect.

The dome lighting was another exercise in going over the top. All the LEDs I used come from Evan Designs and are supplied as standard by them fitted for wiring to track power. The overhead lighting is two "Mega Chip" LEDs (big square ones that throw a lot of light). But what I read about these cars is that they also had floor lighting. They come stock from Lionel with no lighting at all but four rectangular holes cut into the sides of walkway well to let light in from the illuminated compartment underneath. That does not work well so I added floor lighting, again using Evan Designs LEDs that come wired in sets of four, one set on each side fitted in mock Fresnel lenses that are actually push button inserts from Mouser Electronics: 

6_FloorLighting7_LitSurfBluePearlSeats

This is not a finished project. There is one area in the front of the car where I am adding a few more interior details (in the prototype it’s a rest room area and small “lounge” as our ancestors called it), which I won’t get to until I finish something else. So this is what the work in progress looks like with a large quantity of my crappy wiring in place:

8_Wiring

I admit I lavished a lot of effort on a bar area in the belly of the car under the dome seating. All of the figures had to be placed to match the side windows, which again Lionel rendered based on the prototype car:

13_Barflies1

P.S. Norton (Pete) doesn't know it yet, although he'll find out in due course, but he's been my inspiration on a completely different project that is also still in progress. He also put me on to the idea of headrests and I have some coming from Scale City but I think I will end up printing my own.  As Pete says, finding suitable images for this purpose is problematic. 

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Last edited by Hancock52

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