Walthers Comet II Commuter Cars

Back in the 1990s, I picked up quite a number of Walthers Comet II commuter cars. The late Frank Cicero had an article in the May 1995 RMC on doing a fairly extensive rebuild for these cars. At the time, I was on an extensive travel schedule for work, and these were good projects to take along and work on in the hotel room in the evening. I did fleets of cars for New Jersey Transit, MBTA, and Metro North.

Rapido just released sets for the same prototypes. While they're extremely well detailed, I'm not inclined to get any after pulling the cars I did in the 1990s out. The problem is that they'd basically go unnoticed in the pretty large fleets I did back then, and especially as fleet cars, they'll do.

Below is an NJT coach.

Here is the cab end of an NJT cab car.

The main problem with these cars is the lack of lighting. I did these well before I discovered DCC and well before manufacturers made either factory-issued coach lighting or easily added lighting kits. Thus a problem here is that although the Walthers cars have metal wheels, they're insulated on one side, so the trucks pick up on only two wheels per side. When I worked on these 25 years ago, I added Walthers soffit bulb kits to several, as I did with this Walthers Amfleet from the same period:

However, these flicker. I need to look into LED strips with capacitors to install better lighting with these cars. Here's a bottom shot of one car with details added per the Frank Cicero RMC article:

And here's the car right side up.

A number of the cars I worked on in the 1990s I haven't fully reassembled. I need to pull these out, inventory them, and make them all layout capable. Below are photos of several otrhers from my fleet:

Since taking this photo, I've blanked out the right hand end window on this car. I need to locate a CDOT decal for that space.

This one has the right hand end window blanked, but the chassis still needs paint, couplers, and trucks, and of course it needs interior lights.

This is the same cab car in the closeup above, but before I added the car number and number board decals.