Amtrak Ex/Metroliner Cab Car....

I have recently purchased a Bachmann HO Scale Metroliner Car and am very interested in turing into a cab car. In June Amtrak will start to use these unique cab cars in Keystone service between NYP and Harrisburg. We are currently using them on the New Haven-Springfield trains and on the SAB-WAS train the Vermonter. If anyone out there has any info on how I turn this old Metroliner car into a unpowered modern cab car please let me know.....

If you're lucky, and found one of the dummy units, it should be reasonably easy. There should be photos of the strobe assembly on the roof which should be kitbashable with plastruct and aftermarket details. Mount a diaphragm on the cab-end, and re-paint in your favored scheme.
Changing a powered unit is a lot more difficult.

This page on my website should give you a good start. If you need a more detailed description, give me an email address and I'll send you a write-up.

I would like to thank both astrosa and Xplorer2000 for thier quick reply to help me with my dilema. I did link to that web site that astrosa reffered me to and found it quite interesting. The car I did get was an unpowered "Dummy" unit. The car in the link (9636) is a perfect model and appears to be very expertly done. The instructions on how the project was done were not detailed enough though. MR Astrosa please send me the detailed description that you mentioned in your last post. I would very much appreaciate it. My E-Mail adress is [email protected]. The face of the car seems like its going to be the difficult part of the project.....

Hi Astrosa,

At the risk of sounding like a "me too! -er", I too would like to receive the more detailed description of how you made the conversion. My email address is:
[email protected]
although if this involves an attachment for

Sorry, Astrosa... I must have mis-clicked before finishing the message and suddenly the system started sending it !!! ...so continuing on from:

"...although if this involves an attachment for..."

What I started to say was that, if the attachment is a "Word" document (a "doc" file), or an "Adobe" document (a "pdf" file), for some reason my hotmail email account cannot open these (all other files I've received so far otherwise are OK, but the doc and pdg are usually the most frequent attachments I get), so if these are the types of documents you'd be sending, please use my work email address:

[email protected]

and that should be OK, but I'd prefer to get the personal email if the attachment is not a doc or pdf file.

Sorry for the complication!

I'm sure others might also be interested in how you did this, so perhaps you'd consider submitting an article in one of the magazines. Besides "Model Railroader" or Railroad Model Craftsman", there are others which would be appropriate: "Mainline Modeler", "Rail Model Journal", "NMRA Bulletin", perhaps some of the society journals for PRR/PC/CR/Amtrak, or others.

Thanks for sharing your insights and efforts.

Sincerely,
Vytautas B. Radzivanas
Perth, Western Australia

Spencer, glad you liked what was posted on my site. The model is actually 9646, originally built for Midwest service, and not 9636 which was part of the West Coast fleet with slight detail differences. Do note that the description on the site wasn't meant to be a how-to article - just an overview summarizing what was done. The cab face is indeed the most difficult part, and it's the make-or-break point as well. On eBay right now is an attempted kitbash like this, and although much of it was done well, the builder didn't model the cab front properly, so it really suffers as a result. That's where I spent most of my time on this project, and it definitely paid off in the end.

Vytautas, the article I have is in fact in .doc format, though I think I'll also attach a .jpg or two as well. Regarding publication, my original intent was to submit the article to a magazine (probably RMC, since MR didn't seem that interested) but was asked by Otto Vondrak if it could be published here on the Railroad.net website. I haven't gotten a chance to complete the illustrations that were supposed to supplement the text, but it's still in the back of my mind somewhere. Believe me, I've gotten enough feedback through my website that I know there's interest in seeing the finished article.

You two should be receiving mail shortly!

Thanks, astrosa, for the material which I received to my office address, but then forwarded beck to my personal address since my office computer ciuld not unzip the combination. But lo and behold, my personal email at home did unzip it after forwarding, and when unzipped, I was able to download the word and photo files. Amazing, since directly to home I cannot open Word or pdf files, but when sent zipped I can. Yet to my office I can open Word and pdf, but not anything zipped!

I am so computer illiterate it's not funny. I can USE complex application programs once someone else installs them and if there are no hiccups, but hopeless in something mundane such as transferring or merging files, or anything that requies cascading menus! I'm from the era where there used to be separate toggle switches for on/off and each function.

Anyway now I have all you have sent me and thanks for it, very well done.

Vitautas B. Radzivanas
Perth, Western Australia

atrosa- Whenever you can complete the material, we'd love to run the full feature here, so just let us know!

-otto-