I´ve been wondering why there are no olive green Southern Pacific heavyweight passenger cars available for the non-brass HO scale market.
As far as I know, both Bachmann and Athearn produce(d) Southern Pacific heavyweight cars only in Daylight colors, which is not correct, since only some heavyweight headend cars and a few heavyweight lounges were painted in the Daylight colors, mainly for use on the San Joaquin Daylight.
And although I like the Walthers heavyweights, I´m disappointed that Walthers only produced Southern Pacific heavyweights in the two-tone-grey scheme for the Overland Limited (well, actually Walthers produced the Overland Limited, consisting of SP and UP lettered cars in the same two-tone-grey paint scheme). And even Branchline also only produced two-tone grey heavyweights of the SP.
But since I don´t want to model the Overland Limited, the two-tone grey scheme i not interesting for me. All the other SP heavyweight trains were painted in olive green and kept that scheme mostly till the late 50´s. So here is my question: Is there any HO manufacturer out there that produces olive green SP heavyweights? I would really like my Cab Forward to pull a nice olive green heavyweight Argonaut or West Coast…
Or do I have no other choice than to buy Walthers “Pullman” lettered heavyweights and then search for SP decals?
I recently bought a four car set of SP Heavyweight cars in the Pullman Green livery.
These are the 60’ Rivarossi cars that still appear on e-bay on occassion.
Rivarossi still sells 60’ passenger cars, however the only two roadnames offered are Pennsy and Chicago Great Western. There are however painted but unlettered cars also available, these cars come in the Pullman Green colour. The cars available are a baggage car and a coach.
At one time, Athearn DID produce the SP heavyweights in SP Pullman green. You might check EBAY or some of the larger hobby shops like Caboose Hobbies in Denver, to see if there might still be some available. They were the older Blue Box kits.
Also, Branchline produced heavyweights in SP Pullman green. These were the full-length kits and made up into a very handsome car. I’m with you about the Walthers cars–several of their available roadnames would benefit with quite a few of us modelers by being released in Pullman Green instead of their insistence on ‘transitional’ paint schemes.
Doesn’t Walthers offer quite a few of their passenger cars in a “painted but unlettered” version? That is what I had planned to get for the green SP cars I was wanting. I haven’t checked out the selection as yet mainly because I haven’t gotten to that stage yet but that was my plan as I to wanted the green SP passenger cars.
No, as far as I know there are no painted but unlettered heavyweights offered by Walthers. It´s either fully painted or totally unpainted, but no green SP cars anyway…