A “Pike-sized” Passenger Train

Unless one can afford (and find) brass models, there are no exact models of LV passenger cars available in HO except for Bethlehem Car Shops’ 800-900 series commuter coach. On the back burner, I have been working on a “good enough” model of the early 1950s Black Diamond, using an assortment of kits, to run at our annual club show. My goal is to get it close enough for someone to say “Oh, that’s the Black Diamond!” but not spend the time on it that would be needed to satisfy the real purist. This project is in the same spirit as a series of articles that ran in Model Railroader, entitled “Pike Sized Passenger Trains.” I don’t expect to finish this project anytime soon, but I keep seeing questions about modeling LVRR passenger trains, so I’ll share my thoughts on how to approach this.

Mickey & Warfel’s Lehigh Valley Railroad Passenger Cars – Photo and Diagram Book No. 1 is an indispensable guide – it features HO scale profiles of most of the LVRR’s passenger equipment. My recommendations come from simply laying some plastic passenger car kits over these drawings.

The Athearn “standard clerestory coach,” with the battery box covers cut off, laid over the drawing of LV coach 1501 in Mickey & Warfel’s book. Note that many of the LV’s “heavyweight” cars had 4 wheel trucks, a fact often difficult to spot in photographs of entire trains.

Fortunately, the LV’s older cars were rather short, and the Athearn baggage, combine and coach kits can “stand in” for some of them, as long as you don’t count windows or worry too much about their shape. Cutting off the battery box covers and adding a sheet styrene skirt enhances the look. To go a step further, you could replace the Athearn 6-wheel trucks with 4-wheel trucks for some of the cars, but this requires relocating the bolsters on the underframe, and body-mounting the couplers.

Some of the shorter cars that were modernized in the 1940s can be represented by Con-Cor’s smooth side streamline cars. In most of these cases, the truck swapping goes in the opposite direction, since most of these slightly longer and heavier cars had 6-wheel trucks.

The Valley’s 81 ft diners and parlor cars can probably be represented by Rivarossi cars – heavyweights, or streamlined for the modernized cars. I haven’t really looked closely at these cars since I obtained the Black Diamond consists.

The Pullman Standard deluxe coaches can be represented by Eastern Car Works’ no. 1300 Osgood Bradley commuter coach, either as is, or you can replace the roof and ends with ECWs Pullman Standard roof and ends, which are available as a “core kit.”

Finally, the standard commuter coaches are well represented by the Bethlehem Car Shops kit no. 710.

Put a consist of these cars behind a pair of Proto 2000 PA-1s, and you’ll have a “good enough” (IMHO) Black Diamond – better, if you don’t mind doing some kitbashing.

PS – Part 1 of an excellent article by Bob Chapman on “Kitbashing B&O’s National Limited” appears in the March 2002 issue of Model Railroader. Chapman covers replacing windows, ends and roofs on Rivarossi cars. These techniques used should be directly applicable to modeling LV passenger equipment, if your standards for “good enough” are on the high end of the scale!

– Ed