# Building a New Haven Radio-Telephone Car



## C.Vigs (Jul 30, 2015)

I thought some people on the forum might be interested in this project.

After WW2, like most railroads, the New Haven re-equipped its premier passenger trains with stainless steel equipment. As part of this order, two of its 'County' series baggage-parlor-lounge cars (New London County & Putnam County) were outfitted with Radio-Telephone equipment for service on the New York-Boston Merchants Limited, allowing passengers to place calls from the train. This service lasted into the mid-1950's. See more on these cars here:
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/the...609.html?sid=68bf08d47a2c3ca8ba4f5f3e91ad3b9c

I decided to model Putnam County using a standard Railking 60' streamlined car as a staring point. 

After disassembling the car, I cut out all the window posts on both sides, and sanded the remaining frames smooth. The car was measured and marked for new window posts. 
















To capture the distinctive roofline of the New Haven's cars, the ends of the MTH car were flattened, and the roof trimmed by 3/4" on both ends. I drew new end pieces in CAD software and had them 3D printed by a friend in PLA plastic. They sanded easily and were glued directly to the car ends.
















The main tools used so far are a handheld cross-cut saw and sander from Micro-Mark, in addition to sanding by hand. 
More progress is to follow.

~C.Vigs


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## Guest (Sep 8, 2017)

Interesting project. Please keep us posted.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Cool, looking forward to seeing progress pictures on this one.


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

Railking passenger cars are well made. It should come out nicely. I'd like to see your progress.


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## Spence (Oct 15, 2015)

Very interesting project. :thumbsup:


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Oh, this is a cool project. VEry cool. I love the idea. Good work so far, too.


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## C.Vigs (Jul 30, 2015)

Thank you for the encouragement everyone! An important resource for me has been http://www.alphabetroute.com, where a significant number of official New Haven equipment diagrams have been uploaded. The one relevant here is passenger diagram 206-207. While New London County & Putnam County were constructed as baggage-parlor-lounge cars with the rest of the county series, by the early 1950's they had been rebuilt to eliminate the baggage section, replaced with drawing rooms. See the diagram below:

View attachment Passenger Diagram 206-207.pdf


New window posts were cut from 1/8" wide styrene strip and sanded to provide a snug fit before gluing. The equivalent of one window per side is actually blanked out, helping give the car a distinctive look. The radio-antennas were also 3D printed, sanded, and secured to the car roof. MTH's stock end diaphragms were modified slightly to fit beneath the new roof end pieces. Finally, a strip of Pullman-Standard style fluting from Union Station Products (https://unionstationproducts.com/) was cut down from 5-ribs wide to 4, and secured above the window band. 






























Next for the exterior: new letter boards and monogram plates.

~C.Vigs


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

Looking good so far.


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## Nikola (Jun 11, 2012)

Nice.


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## PatKn (Jul 14, 2015)

Great project. Thanks for sharing.


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## C.Vigs (Jul 30, 2015)

Some progress over the past few days. Letterboards and monogram plates mounted. On the real 'Putnam County', the lower letterboard was 19'6" long, or a third of the length of the car if I didn't scale it down. Both letterboards are shrunk to two-thirds of their scale length. 

















A quick coat of white primer shows all the cracks and joints needing to be filled. Two cycles of filling-lightsanding-priming yield the near-seamless result below.

















~C.Vigs


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Very cool project. I love this and how you post progress reports. 

THANK YOU!!


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

It's looking great, you're doing some quality work there. :thumbsup:


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## C.Vigs (Jul 30, 2015)

Thank you Lee, Gunrunner, and to everyone who's commented, and for the complements. My favorite threads are always the cool-project kind, so I figured I would start sharing them myself. 

~C.Vigs


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## c.midland (Sep 22, 2015)

I'm really enjoying this topic. It's nice to see people making what they want, and sharing how they did it. I've gotten a few pointers from this project that will help with with my own. Thanks for posting.


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## Wood (Jun 9, 2015)

Wow, Lots of craftsmanship presented here. Very nicely done and good information. Very impressed with the historical data you have given in your links. It is quite a collection of history for Northeast and Midwest modelers of the Alphabet Route. 

PS Welcome to this forum. Hopefully you will enjoy the company and share more of your projects and information.


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## Mark Boyce (Jul 22, 2015)

C.Vigs, That is some mighty fine work! :thumbsup: I'll be glad to follow along!

I see you joined in 2015, same as me. I'm also glad to see you posting! I haven't been posting much on this Forum myself for a while due to too many irons in the fire myself.  This is a good place.


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## C.Vigs (Jul 30, 2015)

I'm glad people are enjoying this thread, expect a few more like it as I go down my list of projects (and maybe one about past projects I didn't post). 

Over the past week the car has been given a coat of aluminum paint, to simulate the stainless steel exterior. When dulled slightly with a clear coat at the end of the project it should give off a nice finish.

















To remove the roof from the MTH cars, the shell must be twisted to release the snap-connects. This puts a torsional stress on the new window posts, which I foresee being a problem at some point in the future. The window posts will be braced with a thin styrene sheet on the interior.

Interior work was also started. As seen on the interior diagram on the first page, the car contains a number of parlor - lounge seats in a booth configuration as well as private drawing rooms and the radio-telephone room. For the parlor section, I'm using the stock MTH interior as a base, as it already has some basic wiring attached and contains the only one of the three stock lights I could retain with the new window configuration.









The roof also received a coat of satin black; too shiny for my tastes, but like the aluminum should be dulled down with a clear coat. 

















Now the tedious part; masking off the window frames so they remain silver while the rest of the window band receives a coat of red-orange paint.

~C.Vigs


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

That's looking great. I do have a couple of suggestions.


C.Vigs said:


> To remove the roof from the MTH cars, the shell must be twisted to release the snap-connects. This puts a torsional stress on the new window posts, which I foresee being a problem at some point in the future. The window posts will be braced with a thin styrene sheet on the interior.


You can nip the sharp edges off the latching tabs so that it doesn't take nearly as much force to pop the top off the cars. Given all the work you're putting into it, that might be a good idea. The screws should hold the top just fine.

Also, have you considered lighting these cars with LED lighting? Once you see that, you'll never go back to a couple of bulbs!


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

gunrunnerjohn said:


> Also, have you considered lighting these cars with LED lighting? Once you see that, you'll never go back to a couple of bulbs!


GRJ got me started on LEDs. I have put LEDs in some of my cars and engines. I plan to install LEDS in all of them at some point. You can"t go wrong with them and you'll never have to change them.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

My thing with LED's is the lighting is so much more even, they don't flicker, and you can adjust the intensity. The bonus is they also use about 10% of the power that bulbs use.


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## C.Vigs (Jul 30, 2015)

gunrunnerjohn said:


> That's looking great. I do have a couple of suggestions.
> 
> 
> You can nip the sharp edges off the latching tabs so that it doesn't take nearly as much force to pop the top off the cars. Given all the work you're putting into it, that might be a good idea. The screws should hold the top just fine.
> ...


Remember that thread in August where I was having trouble with the LED headlights I put into my Providence and Worcester Dash-8 TMCC install? I got those in a bulk package of 50, so they will definitely be going in here! :laugh: 

My idea was to use the current incandescent temporarily, as I'm away from my home workbench (where the LED's are) for at least a month. When I get to them, the main lounge area will get one or two, and the three drawing rooms with windows will get them. I'm going to use the fourth compartment with the blanked out window as a 'junction box' to keep my wiring neat. 

As for the screws, unfortunately the sections of the roof with the mounting columns were removed to achieve the rounded ends. I worked under the assumption that the tabs would be strong enough on their own, and didn't think that they might be too strong. Nothing a little sanding can't fix.

~C.Vigs


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

gunrunnerjohn said:


> My thing with LED's is the lighting is so much more even, they don't flicker, and you can adjust the intensity. The bonus is they also use about 10% of the power that bulbs use.


I love the lack of flicker, and while I know you can add that to incandescent lights, why bother? The energy reduction is a big thing to me: run a traditional incandescent-light passenger train with twelve cars and a couple of locos and you are right at the 10 amp single-channel limit of most power supplies with just one train. Make the lighting LED, and you can run two trains within that 10 amp limit.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Adding enough filtering to incandescent bulbs to prevent flicker requires some really huge capacitors, and of course you still have to have the rectifier to generate the DC. If you're going to that trouble, might as well go all the way and stick the LED's in too.


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## C.Vigs (Jul 30, 2015)

I decided the easiest way to achieving the aluminum window frames would be to paint the entire window band first, and then hand paint the frames. Slowly over the last week the red-orange window bands were applied. 





































The next exterior work will be painting the window frames, drafting, printing, and applying decals, and then a clear coat. The interior needs some internal walls and its own painting. LED lights will most likely wait until December when I have access to my full workbench again. 

~C.Vigs


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## Wood (Jun 9, 2015)

Nice work Vigs and I enjoyed seeing that beautiful finished woodwork in the cherry bench.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

gunrunnerjohn said:


> Adding enough filtering to incandescent bulbs to prevent flicker requires some really huge capacitors, and of course you still have to have the rectifier to generate the DC. If you're going to that trouble, might as well go all the way and stick the LED's in too.



Absolutely. I still have problems with the white light - I prefer the yellow from incand. - and yes, I know you can paint them or filter, but . . . . for all that I still install only LEDs. If they weren't easier and cheaper I probably would stick to incand for the color, just adding tethers between cars of something to end the flicker, but that on top of the flicker and all, no doubt.


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

Nice job. I wish I had that kind of skill.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Lee, you can simply put yellow LED's strips in, I did that with a set of heavyweights, and I really liked the effect, so I bought a bunch of reels of yellow LED's. You get the incandescent look with all the benefits of LED lighting.


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## Mark Boyce (Jul 22, 2015)

They are looking great, C.Vigs!! Yes, I think John's yellow LED strips would look better like incandescents!


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## balidas (Jun 3, 2011)

Beautiful work!


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## PatKn (Jul 14, 2015)

Very nice work so far.


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## C.Vigs (Jul 30, 2015)

Finally back at my workbench for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Over the last two months, I have painted the window frames aluminum, painted the seats on the section of the MTH interior I'm keeping blue, and did some touch-up work on the window band. 

On Wednesday, I added an LED to the roof to replace one of the MTH bulbs I had to remove, and wired the interior. The rear of the car is composed of four compartments (private drawing rooms, the telephone booth, and a room for the radio phone equipment and operator), seperated from the rest of the seating. I'm using the area of the compartments as a junction box, and installed a terminal strip with velcro. All lights and pickup leads go to the terminal strip. Walls for the compartments will be built so the wiring and strip are hidden. 

































The monogram plates were painted black, and the New Haven logo applied. The logo was printed on a household printer, cut as small as possible, and applied with a drop of white glue. Lettering was added to the car by hand (with a VERY fine brush, and a fairly steady hand). Doing the lettering this way is temporary until I can have decals made (probably after I make a few more cars so I can order in bulk). For my first attempt at hand lettering, I am pleased with the result though.

















































While I never call a project "done", I will probably do very little additional work on this car until decals are made. Up next in the to-do list is the New Haven's parlor car "New Rochelle". 

~CJV


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## Spence (Oct 15, 2015)

Boy, it's coming out great. :thumbsup:


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

That's just cool.:smilie_daumenpos::smilie_daumenpos:


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## Guest (Nov 24, 2017)

Really neat project. Thanks for updating us with your progress.


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## Nikola (Jun 11, 2012)

That is awesome as-is. No one will be looking at it from 3" away. And even if they were it still looks fine.


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## c.midland (Sep 22, 2015)

The car looks great!
Microscale sells alphabet decal sheets in multiple sizes and fonts if you wanted to go that route. Clover House and possibly Woodland Scenics would have dry transfers if your more inclined. I've used both, and thing the dry transfers look better, they are a little more difficult to apply. 

Just needing the lettering, some decal paper for your printer and a little time using Microsoft word would lead to pretty good results, and you could print an entire page for future projects.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Looks great, and that's pretty darned good hand lettering!


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## PatKn (Jul 14, 2015)

Excellent job. :appl::appl::appl:


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## C.Vigs (Jul 30, 2015)

Second car done, Parlor-Lounge "New Rochelle". Like "Putnam County", the stock MTH coach interior makes for a nice simulation of parlor car seats, so I kept them. The Lounge section is along the two windows closest to the door; here I shaved off the seats with an X-acto knife and added benches made out of bass wood strips along the walls. 

For historical background, the New Haven had five Parlor-Lounge cars in their streamlined fleet. The Lounge was really a smoking area, with seats available those who bought parlor seats in the same or a neighboring parlor car. They were originally in the "River" name series ("Hudson River", "Housatonic River", "Connecticut River", "Thames River", and "Blackstone River"), however they had to be renamed soon after delivery as their names conflicted with a series of sleeping cars on the New York Central. Pullman operated parlor service on the New Haven at the time, and they kept track of their cars via names, rather than car numbers and railroad assigned, and were none too pleased to have duplicate names on their roster. They were then given the "cities" series names, as with the rest of the New Haven's parlor cars, however with a "New" prefix ("New Haven", "New Milford", "New Rochelle", "New London", and "New Bedford"). 

































Hopefully up next is two straight parlor cars, "Danbury" and "Attleboro". 

~CJV


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## Wood (Jun 9, 2015)

Vigs, The lighting is superb. With the red window band and the lights you have given a great accent to the whole car.


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## DennyM (Jan 3, 2016)

Very nice Vigs


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Very nice. It looks great with the lighting.


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## papa3rail (Oct 8, 2016)

Nice work, I like the idea of super detailing some passenger cars.:thumbsup:


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## Spence (Oct 15, 2015)

Very nice work. :appl:


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## PatKn (Jul 14, 2015)

Looks real good. :thumbsup:


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