Walthers has supplied us with some excellent passenger car models. Walthers has played kind of fast with the roadnames though. Great Northern for example did not have 10-6 Pullmans or 12 bedroom pullmans but Walthers has them in GN paint. Great Northern had the following pullman cars 6 Roomette 5 Bedroom 2 Compartment Pullmans in the 2nd. Pass series 8Duplex Roomette Four sections 4 Bedroom the 1st Pass series 16 Duplex roomette 4 Bedroom pullmans in the Glacier series 7 Duplex roomette 4 sections 3 Bedroom 1 compartment in the River series. Best to be sure your rode of choice actually had the car made by Walthers
Good info, although I would be highly skeptical of getting a true-life representation of specific passenger cars from any manufacturer.
It is a personal choice as to how much disbelief to suspend in our hobby. No scale rendering of prototypical items is going to be perfect. Our rails, turnout throwbar actuation, couplers, lights....they're all representations that we must overlook. Passenger cars don't have scale waving people in them, smoke looks unlike smoke, the track noise is unrealistic, water doesn't scale if real water is used, and of course few layouts have more than a portion of an entire solitary mile of main line. So, while I am personally a bit finnicky about my locomotives (I won't get a generic one such as an International Hobby Corp.) I understand that wheel spacing on steamer drivers will be wider in most cases so that the larger flanges, in scale, can be used. I won't get a FM Trainmaster for the Lone Pine & Whistle Rwy if they didn't run on their system. But sometimes, when money is a bit tight, and when some otherwise fine and 'doable' cars can be slipped into a consist that wouldn't have ever included them, and when the importer discounts them heavily, a person just has to suck it up and suspend a bit more disbelief.
I'm with COverton on our models. While I'm not big on passenger cars, I've got some for my local, all stops "Boll Weevil." The great thing now is that Walthers stopped that @*#^* idea of drilling 48 of the #80 drill holes and installing your own hand-grabs and steps. As far as I know those little drills will break even with a precision drill press.
I love modeling passenger trains, and I learned very quickly that the more "prototypically correct" passenger cars available come at a premium that my budget doesn't cover. For example, Rapido makes some beautiful examples for both the NC&StL and L&N. I just can't justify paying in the $50 range for a passenger car, when I can get examples that give me the "feel" and look at $20. I enjoy doing what I can to make them more realistic, or taking other road names and repainting and decaling to get what I want. I suppose after all that work, plus the addition of metal wheelsets and Kadees I am paying more than $20, but that's the fun part to me. An analogy might be this - we all know telephone poles are there to carry wires, but on a layout the wires aren't necessary. We see them without them being there, and unless they were done with super-fine wire, then it would detract from the scene instead of help it. When sitting back and watching my passenger train proceed through my field of vision, I see the train without noting if the proper undercarriage details are present, or if the right number and type of windows are there. I do admire those modelers that do all they can to get it "Correct" though, very much so.
I run my passenger trains fairly fast so I dont have the time to look at all the details. Now the freight is a different story. I make them long and slow in the "uphill" direction and a little faster in the "Downhill" direction.
Sometimes I fail to understand Walthers... I have a complete Northern Pacific passenger train except one very important car: An observation! I have written to the company, gotten a reply that said "they were looking into it" and there is where it ended. Lately, I've even seen some new coaches and sleepers added to the consist but still NO OBSERVATION CAR!! That one is a mystery.
