STEP 7 PASSENGERS APLENTY

Seated people – Unless you leave your passenger cars sitting empty in a yard on your layout, you’ll need to have people in them for the cars to look right. Walthers, Preiser, and other manufacturers sell HO scale seated people in bulk packs. I used a Walthers SceneMaster set and a Preiser seated figure bulk pack for this project.

People placement – With the feet removed, our newspaper reader can now take a spot in this coach. He’s glued in place with CA. You don’t have to put passengers in every seat to make it look like your train is full. Space people so that when you look across a row, you see a passenger on one side of the train or the other.

Floor height – In order to manufacture model trains, some allowances always need to be made. In our case here, the floor has been raised to cover the car weights. Correspondingly, the seats were lowered to be the correct height when viewed from outside the car. You can see the problem it causes this couple trying to ride our train.

Challenging seats – Coach seats were easy to do; the diner seats where another matter. First, because of the chair arms, I had to select figures that had narrow hips. Next, as the table has a cloth on it, they lost all of their legs. Finally, many still had to have their hips reduced to fit. The waiter didn’t require any modification.

Necessary adjustments – Unfortunately, lower seats and higher floors means that our passengers need to leave their feet at home. This is an easy enough operation to accomplish. Simply clip off the lower part of the leg with a sprue cutter until the passenger sits correctly in the seat.

Detail worth doing – The Rapido cars have LED lighting. All the work you put into adding passengers into your cars is worth the effort, since you can see them well. As shown in this photo, the woman seated in the smoking section is clearly there for the right reason, even though the cigarette she is holding is rather large for HO scale.