Full Version: Passenger car interiors
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I am curious as to what others here do for passenger car interiors. I have never put an interior in a passenger car, but I have used window shades to partially obstruct the interior view. I have always felt that you can't see much through the windows anyway. Now I have a MDC Harriman observation car, and it has rather large windows. I am considering adding some kind of interior. Any suggestions here?
My hobby shop has what appears to be an older stock of IHC interiors. While they are for IHC (or Athearn?) cars, I am sure that they could be cut to fit almost anything else.

Andrew
Depends on the contents. Walthers made plastic Chair seats. You can make little tables out of scraps of wood, with Kleenex table cloths. You can also make seats out of stripwood and cut them to size.
Problem you run into is the overscale thickness of the sides which leads to cramped interiors. In OO scale we use HO figures which are 7/8 our size.
I use styrene to make bulkheads for bedroom cars. For seats I buy the Pike Stuff coach seats, cut them apart, and glue them to the floor of my cars. If I want to do a lounge or sleeper where there might be single armchairs, rather than the two abreast coach seating, I cut the seats in half and glue styrene to each side for arms, and install passengers. For dining cars, I put the seats in place with passengers seated, and then glue the table tops to the passengers laps. If that puts the tables too low, I ad a small shim to each side underneath the table to raise it up a bit. Dome cars are the most challenging because you need to make a floor for the dome and in effect do two interiors, one for the dome and one for the rest of the car. The IHC interiors were originally made for Rivarossi passenger cars. They can be cut down to fit Athearn or other shorty cars. I heard from a fellow railroad club member that IHC was out of business. A friend went to their web page to get some passenger car interiors, but the page said they were sold out. If the company is now out of business, there won't be any new product.