C&S Narrow Gauge Passenger Cars

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Living for several years in Colorado, I naturally caught the narrow gauge bug and began assembling a collection of Colorado and Southern equipment. The C&S was a subsidiary of the Burlington, so it dovetailed with my existing interests. Models of C&S passenger equipment are few and far between, limited mostly to brass imports. I found a few vintage E&B Valley kits, one C&S baggage and two Rio Grande coaches. The kits are not quite up to modern standards of detail, but they look good enough once painted. The finished models are approximates of C&S cars, while still capturing the feel of the prototypes.



The coaches are flat kits with the car sides, ends, floor, and roof all cast as separate parts. The assembly sequence is relatively simple, but requires patience and careful aligning of the parts. E&B supplies plastic trucks (assembly required) with the kits, but I had a couple pairs of Blackstone trucks that I substituted. 


I built the coaches mostly following the kit instructions. The only difficult part was keeping the roof straight and true. I found that attaching the letter boards to the roof helped to stiffen it. The overlap of the letter board over the car sides also helped disguise any misalignment that occurred during construction.




The baggage car is built differently. Instead of cast sides, the kit simply contains a collection of pre-cut styrene panels and 4 door castings. It’s up to the modeler to piece together the pieces to form each side. I used a ruler to help align the flat pieces and glued it all together with plastic cement. The underframe and roof were the same parts as used for the coaches and would have resulted in end platforms similar to the coaches if assembled according to the E&B Valley instructions. The C&S head-end cars had no end platforms, so I decided to shorten the underframe and roof to model this. I cut sections out of the center of each piece. The resulting car may not be totally accurate, but is close enough for me.



All the cars were painted Pullman green and lettered with Thin Film decals.






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