Okay, I knew Walthers made the Oscar & Piker set, but was there an attempt at the prototype, or something that looks simmilar?
In a quick summary - absloutely not. Those cars were a joke perpetarted upon model railroaders. The shortest cars I know of were about 40’ in length and were that short for the same reason modelers use shorty passenger cars - curvature of the prototype. As I recall CNW had some 60 footers but never anything as short as those two cars.
I believe the prototype for these were actually on John Allen’s Gorre and Daphetid model railroad. For those unfamiliar with his work, John had a whimsical side to him. He believed model railroading should be fun and while doing some magnificent work, he also included elements that were pure fantasy. He even had a dinosaur on his layout. If total realism is your thing, than these types of cars are not for you. On the other hand, for a modeler with limited space which forces him to run short trains with really short equipment, they could be just the ticket. Even though they never existed, an imaginative modeler could create a reason that they did. Imagination can be as much a part of this hobby as realism.
I’ve never heard these linked to John Allen, but it sounds like something he would do. Hard to believe, but back in the sixties and seventies, a lot of model railroaders kinda got off on putting jokes in their layout, jokey placenames etc.
Maybe whimsical, but nothing was perpetrated on anyone. Walthers also sold the Oscar and Piker under the premise that they were a low cost primer to their 6600 series craft model passenger cars. In the 1976 catalogue, they sell for $5.50 and $6.75 as a complete kit. The full size cars sell for around $10.00 plus another $5.00 for the interior detail, but they didn’t usually include trucks or couplers, so they were about 1/3 the price of a complete, full size model. The construction materials and methods were identical to the full size passenger cars, so you had the option of a lower cost “experience” kit.
Plus they were provided with decals like"minimum radius car," or “short of funds car.” They were a fully operational model, and some people are able to take things in a hobby less than seriously.
BTW, I picked up some custom very well-done wooden bodies for the Oscar/piker set for about 10 cents (for comparison, my friend sold a set from walthers for about $75) and all it needs is a floor, trucks, and some couplers. I’m tempted to cut an athearn baggage car down to the same length and start a SL series…
Anywho, I think it’d be neat to design a 1:1 scale set! My guess is I’d have TRAINS magazine all over it and the general public demanding that Walthers make more…
I’ll try to dig up my book about John Allen’s layout and post a picture. I think he even gave the cars their names but my memory is a little fuzzy on that point.
One of the hardest parts about building one of the older series Walthers passenger car kits was forming the end of the clerestory roof – and the Oscar and Piker did give you good practice in how to do that. You had to shape the wood and fit a metal beading. It was also good practice in joining wood to metal, smooth painting and decaling, and detailing an interior etc. Walthers never passed the cars off as anything other than a tongue in cheek model, just like their beer can tank car using a real beer can, or the Jimmy Carter peanut car.
A lot of guys made the roof on their Oscar (or was it the Piker?) removable – so they could show their friends the “girl in the shower” which was considered pretty naughty stuff back then.
Dave Nelson
I believe the picture below is the “prototype” for the Oscar and Piker cars.
The original was an On3 contest model John Allen built and the smaller one is an HO version his friend Bill Hoffman built for the G&D.
Along those lines, does anyone remember the Penn Central steam locomotive decals sold by Walthers years ago? Since I wasn’t hatched until '76, I missed them. However, looking through the letters sections in old MRs roughly 20 years later, I still can’t believe how upset some of those folks got!
I didn’t know there was a John Allen connection with the Oscar/Piker se. But, from what I’ve seen and read, it wouldn’t surprise me…especially after seeing photos of the dinosaur on his layout 
Hey that sounds like a pretty good Idea… Speaking of that, one of my fellow RR club members decorated the interior of a sleeper semi truck with couple really goin at it.
Could be, but I don’t remember anyone at the time or later saying that. Besides the JA cars are narrow gauge wood cars, not heavyweights like the Walthers ones. Some narrowgauge passenger cars were in fact quite short !!
Those John Allen/Bill Hoffmann cars look more like whimsical versions of the Sierra Railroad’s very short passenger cars. They have two trucks unlike the Walthers joke cars. Distant unreliable and ancient memory is the Selley offered more realistic versions of those Sierra cars in solid metal, possibly lead based, and that the resulting HO models weighed a ton.
Dave Nelson
Right you are, and also offered by Ulrich. They were neat little bulletproof models of cast zamac for the one-piece roof/sides, basswood, and wire, with a surprisingly good assortment of sharp underbody details. After cleaning the metal flash, the parts fit well and assembled easily with Goo and a little solder for the railings. I suspect it was the lead in the castings that brought about their demise.
Binkley also and I beleve another, but they were all the same car, same mold, tere were two of them, one pasanger and one combine. They were nice but the chelsery windows were cast solid, thats why I tend to go with the mdc cars which were open and offered as 4 different styles of car.