Indiana RR High-Speed in 1:24 scale

I was asked by Jan Giradot, the list owner/moderator of the Yahoo Large Scale Trolley list to build him a large scale model of an Indiana RR high-speed car.

This is car 65, preserved at the Illinois Railway Museum, it is also the first car in the museum's collection of over 400 pieces of railroad rolling stock. This photo is of the car operating just 5 days ago as part of the annual Trolley Pageant

I had started this project a couple months ago, made a decent start, but was increasingly unhappy with the way the car was progressing. As part of cleaning up the train room/workshop last week, in disgust I tossed out the body shell and determined to start fresh.

Same basic concept, styrene construction, laminated layers of varying thicknesses to make the cutting easier, add rigidity, and get that 3 dimensionality. Laid out the sides in .020 styrene as seen below. The sides will actually be the interior window frames, all of the car sheathing will be added on to this.

 Progressed pretty quickly, it's really a simple car, at least for the sides.

 Got the rear end mocked up, this is the easier of the two ends, it's pretty much three flat wall/window sections, with steel work wrapped around to get the rounded look.

Now the front end, more of the same, three wall/window panels with the wrap around to get the rounded finish. Main difference here is the front windows are angled, so basically the end needs to be done in three parts, the lower and upper pieces which are the simple rounded end, and then the angled windows need to be added.

What you're looking at is about 4 hours of effort, it's always amazing how things can flow so fast when you're in the mood/right frame of mind, and then there's other times when it seems like you can't even figure out
which end of the X-acto knife to use !