Building interiors for Passenger Cars from our .stl files
Doug Langford sent me an e-mail in May:
"I found your website for STL files for MDC passenger cars. I have the old 50’ Freedom Train style cars as well as some of the 36’ cars that I would like to put interiors into. You have STL files for the 36’ cars but not the 50’ cars posted. My son has a new 3D printer and has offered to print the interiors if I get the STL files.”
I had published the files of the 36' cars after we had tested them at the Three Lakes Fab Lab but, I while I had finished the drawings for the MDC 50' cars I had not run a test print of each to make sure they were correct. Covid 19 and the Pandemic closed the access to the Lab and to the local library where Jack Zimmer printed his 36' interiors.
After Doug's e-mail I had to dig a bit in my files to find the 3D files in my backup as they are large files and I had changed computers since the 2019 files were first created. The system, Vectorworks, also had been updated 3 times in that period so a little work was needed to bring myself and the system up to date.
I had most of the MDC 50' cars but did not know the Freedom Train car set. Doug sent me photos of the cars.
The only one that needed a little change was what I called the circus publicity car.
It had storage and vats for making posters to promote the P. T. Barnum and J.R. Bailey GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH. The Freedom train used the open space for equipment storage for the locomotives used or cars in the train. I made a few adjustments and made an interior for the Freedom Car.
STL Files are on the passenger cars workshop pages
These are the drawings I had posted on line showing, left top to right bottom, Observation car all seats facing rear, Observation car coach seats facing forward, Business car, on the same frame, with a table, a coach, a combine, the mail car with seats and sorting bags along with the openings for the mail car doors, and the publicity car.
This publicity car needed to fit the 1776 car in the Freedom Train set so I went into the drawings and removed the storage and vats and added a row of seats in place of the rear washroom and coal heater.
Doug's son Michael printed the .stl files to create the interiors as seen below.
These are the 3, 1776 train cars and his 36' car interior out of the printer. From here they started the ART Work on the 3D prints.
This is a finished interior, painted and ready for installation in the 1776 car.
Here is a coach and 2 prints of the interiors for the Freedom train after printing and painting.
NOW for the installation into the cars.
As you can see the interiors fit the cars and their talent took the .stl data and created colorful interiors with passengers and a trainman.
I hope to see more of the cars with the roofs on in a train on their layout.
In the meantime here are a few photos of Doug's layout for your enjoyment.
Many thanks to Doug Langford of Puyallup, WA and his son for sharing their use of the files I created for my MDC cars and applying them to another set of cars.
The passenger cars are in the workshop section Passenger Cars ( if you look at the date you can see it has been a while since the club has updated the cars page date but additional information has been added.
Again Thanks to Doug for his asking and using our files along with the photos of the process.
Paul Wussow
President TLMRC
Updated 6/27/22
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