Modeling the Fox River 300's in O scale - Update

After a flurry of decaling this morning, I am proud to line up 6 Fox River Line cars, mostly complete, complete enough for service/operation/public consumption. Still some final detailing to finish on some cars, some will receive window guards, couple of roof mount fuse boxes need

to be installed, but basically we're done.

The Fox River Line had 7 of these cars, technically I have all 7 as I have 6 in O Scale, and one in 1/2" scale. The O scale cars are numbered 301-306 (no #300).

The Fox River Line had two basic paint schemes, both featured an orange body with yellow/creme window, red oxide roofs and doors, and black underbody. The difference is towards the end, cars had a white "sunburst" design added to the end dashes to aid in visibility. After struggling with how to manage getting all these sunbursts the same size, I ended up using white decal film, I sized and printed the shape on the back of the decal paper, cut to size, and voila ! I have 3 with, and 3 without the sunburst,, time will tell when I get the last car which one is the tie-breaker.

The weekend wasn't just a Fox River decal fest,, after a long put-off trip to Chicagoland Hobbies for the necessary decals, I also finally lettered some of my painted, but unlettered CA&E cars.Finally complete are St Louis car #456,

and Kuhlman car #312.

I am also ecstatic to report that I was able to successfully salvage my Chicagoland Traction CA&E Pullman car. This car became very brittle over the years (it's primarily a resin cast kit, and the resin was an early, sort of expanded foam type that apparently didn't age well),last November the car disintegrated in my hands as I was packing it up to take to Trainfest.

One side completely collapsed through the window area, and the surprise of it all caused me to drop the whole damn thing to the floor.

Long story short, a fellow modeler supplied me a used side and I was able to match it all up pretty well (It's not a perfectly built model kit, but it's more than servicable, and a heck of abetter than it was 4 months ago). As a result of the rebuilding, it also got a new paint job, it was formerly in the final red/white scheme, this time painted to the blue/grey with red.

All's well that ends well I guess.