Don Watson (aka DocWatson) decided to build his own private car:

Ever since I’ve been modeling in large scale, I’ve wanted to build a private car. You know one that is typically owned by the railroad owner or senior executive and dragged along behind some freight consist. At first, before 1:20.3 became so popular, I considered kitbashing a couple of Bachmann coaches in 1:22.5 like Theron Bailey’s wonderful Bachmann-based private cars he showed at the last ECLSTS. Kevin Strong’s fantastic scratch built EBT combine has also spurred me on.

With the advent of 1:20.3 and the availability of kits at that scale, especially the ones made by Hartford, I decided it was time to reconsider the project. Since the majority of my 1:20.3 kits and other, commercial cars are D&RGW, I figured that the private car should resemble cars of that railroad. The one thing I definitely wanted to avoid was making an exact replica. That’s too difficult at my skill level and, besides, I didn’t want the ‘rivet counters’ to have a field day with the results of my effort. However, I am a stickler for details so whatever I came up with had to look real enough to be believable.

So last fall I began my research. I’m basically a lazy person by nature, so I really wasn’t interested in hand making every part. On-the-other-hand, I also wasn’t about to buy a Hartford passenger car kit and kitbash it, especially since there are many things in Bob’s kit that I decided I couldn’t use; like the pre-cut end pieces and siding sheets. Besides, most private cars were longer than the coaches, and therefore, I figured none of the pre-cut parts would be long enough anyway.

After much consideration and consternation, I decided to model my private car after the Rio Grande Southern ‘Edna’. I chose this car because it was originally a D&RGW business car named the ‘San Juan’. One of the major problems was finding drawings of the car. I admit, I really didn’t dig all that deep. Since I didn’t want to do the research to try and locate a set of plans for the Edna nor did I want to take the time to draw my own plans I decided to take the easy way out. I did the next best thing; I cheated and borrowed a copy of Hartford’s D&RGW coach plans. I then made a few simple scale drawings of the basic floor plan and adjusted the overall length to come as close as possible to the actual car’s dimensions. As it turned out, the model will be about 1 foot shorter than it should be but still longer than the Hartford coach. You want to know why, don’t you? Well, as it turns out, the overall limiting factor was the length of Hartford’s scribed siding, but that’s another story.

In addition to having, at my disposal, a set of Hartford’s plans, I did manage to locate several photos and floor plans. Since the plans were in S-scale, I was able to convert them to determine the correct window placement. I will also base my interior details on the Edna although I plan to take a few liberties with them.

Both of these drawings are from “Rio Grande Narrow Gauge Varnish” by Herbert Danneman (Colorado Rail Annual No. 25).

So basically, my project will be based on the RGS “Edna” and I will use Hartford’s 1:20.3 coach plans for the majority of the construction details. As you will see in later discussions, I also managed to talk Bob Hartford into selling some parts from his coach kit. There were some things I just wasn’t willing to fabricate. The purchased items included: 2 sheets of the scribed siding, a set of his laser cut roof carlins, 2 roof end castings, and a set of his hardware components. I wish to thank Bob for this.