can anyone tell me what the difference there is between palace car company’s interior kits for Athearn heavyweight 70 foot coach kits? interior kit # 9503 says coach car and interior kit #9553 says parlor coach. i look at the photos of the kits and i see ne differences between the parts.
Looking at the enlarged photos at their website, http://www.palacecarco.com/proddetail.php?prod=9553, it looks like the seats are different. The coach seats are paired, and the parlor seats are individual.
Pardon me but I’m not really meaning to be facetious but I have to ask when was the last time that you had your eyes examined. I looked at the pictures associated with these two kits and the differences to me are self-evident. Kit #9553 is for a Parlor Car while Kit #9503 is for a conventional coach.
Perhaps you do not know just what a Parlor Car was. The closest thing to a Parlor Car today is an Observation Car sans sleeping accomodations. In addition to booths the seats in these Parlor Cars looked much like the Captain’s chairs that you might find in luxury vans–there were two rows of these seats against the windows sometimes facing outward and sometimes facing inward although I guess, like Captain’s chairs, they might swivel allowing you to face in any direction you darn well pleased. Pullman company ran these on short daylight runs–like Observation Cars today they were usually found as the rear car in a passenger consist; Parlor Cars were considered first-class accomodations and, as such, Pullman commanded premium pricing for seats. They were referred to as Coaches because, after all, they were not intended as sleeping facilities.
On the other hand Kit #9503 is designed to configure a conventional model coach i.e. akin to seating in one of those alternate modes of transportation where you spend hours looking at the chrome dome of the person in the seat in front of you. These seats were convertable in that they could hinge over allowing you to look at traveling companions directly without having to look over the seatback.
I need to edit my above statements by stating that not all the seating in Parlor Cars was in these Captain’s Chairs seats; some Parlor Cars had individual armchairs somewhat like seats you find in Cocktail lounges. Sometimes these seats which were fixed to the floor faced inward, sometimes they faced outward. Looking more closely at