Today the chief engineer was scheduled to oversee some tracklaying, but something else caught his eye: an observation car at a bargain price! Just the kind of rolling stock the chief had in mind for his personal business car.

Almost none of the passenger cars on the LoCo have interiors because they're nearly all bargain-shelf Athearn models -- not that there's anything wrong with them. On the contrary, at the prices commanded by commercially-available finished models, there wouldn't be but a tiny handful of rolling stock on the roster if it weren't for the bare-bones models from Athearn, which the management of the Lost Continent Railway finds perfectly presentable.

The body shop at Dog Water Flowage is still under repair after its nearly total destruction in a conflagration triggered by a short in the heating element of an unauthorized distillery hidden under the floorboards, so the chief engineer began to assemble the car on his own, normally a very quick and easy task of screwing the wheel trucks to the floor, then the weights. Windows snap into the openings and a few extra bits of detail like the brake wheel and the railing around the observation platform would finish the car in just a few minutes.

But the head end of the car has no bulkhead for the vestibule, so the chief cut one from a piece of .020 polystyrene using the rear bulkhead as a pattern, carefully tracing the windows for a doorway and cementing it to the sides with some scrap styrene strip.

"That was pretty easy," the chief thought, wondering how long it would take to add a couple rooms and a side passage. The trick, he realized after eyeballing the job, was that the sides and roof of Athearn cars are cast as a shell that clips over the floor. It would be much easier if the roof came off. How difficult could that be?

Only one way to find out.

I started the job of trying to cut the roof off by carefully scoring just under the rivet line with an X-acto knife. After about five passes I began to understand why modelers go straight for their Dremel tools when they start a kit bash like this one.

Still, I was hesitant because I knew a cut-off wheel would melt the plastic even at the Dremel's slowest speed, so I practiced a bit by cutting the roof off an old Tyco caboose, and the results were promising enough to let me dare to move on to the observation car.

It's nearly impossible to make a straight cut, and the burr of melted plastic makes the cut look like hell, but I took my time, kept at it, and found it doesn't turn out nearly as bad as it first looks once the burr is carefully scraped away.

Cutting with the Dremel tool revealed what the X-acto knife only began to hint at: These models are made with plastic so thick it could deflect bullets! Battleships don't have armor plating this thick! Even after going all the way around the roof with the Dremel's cut-off wheel I had to use a utility knife to finish cutting through the thickest parts of the plastic.

With the roof finally sawn off, the job of building up the interior begins to look much more conceivable than before.

Before I begin on the interior, however, there's just a little more work with the Dremel tool to do: I'll have to saw off the head end of the car so I can lay the sides out flat on the work bench. That way I can square off the upper edges of the sides so the roof will sit flat on them.

After the sides are squared off, I can glue the bulkheads again, then glue the whole kit and kaboodle to the floor