California Zephyr Progress
3/12/06                                                                 G. Trimble
The Dome Coach metal work has been completed.  These cars have full skirts (no
truck cutouts) which required the more narrow inside hanger type trucks.  Since none were available these had to be custom built where each truck had about 80 separate pieces of which most were custom CNC milled. 

                                                       ---Click on pics for enlarged view---

Silver Zephyr 6/10 Sleeper
4/7/06
This Budd car had very few pictures that provided underbody detail and some of the prior modellers have taken liberty with what was there.  From the enhanced pictures I was able to view, it appears the water tank was as shown here and not like that on the above dome coach.  It does not appear there was a protective bolster on each end of the water tank from the information seen.
The body shells used were manufactured by Sunset Models.  The alternators used here were 45Kw units rather than the 25Kw units indicated on the original Budd plans.  Later modified cars usually had enclosed refrigeration compressors for air conditioning compared to those of the original cars as shown here. 

If anyone has more information of the underside detail of the original Budd cars please point me to the source using email address of
rails@linkline.com