With this beautiful car we have the first of a group of passenger cars that were built by James Trout. As noted in a prior article he was an artist with Disney for more than 40 years and put his considerable skills into action in his American OO models.

I will begin by saying what this car is, it is an ATSF combine and it caught my eye as a perfect car to have for a Santa Fe branch line mixed train, such as would have run on the line I traveled along so many times with my parents growing up in Kansas. Although I have to note that this specific car is from a group (2602-2608) which were actually not used in mixed train service, instead they were rider cars for The Fast Mail. For more information on these cars in general see this page in the Santa Fe Railway Historical Society website. 

Still though, this car really caught my attention not only for being at least very similar to a mixed train combine but also as I had recently completed a similar model someone else started years ago, they converted a pair of Scale-Craft bodies into a combine (seen here). That car, when I completed it, seemed like a nice car for my layout to run on an approximation of an ATSF mixed train, and I planned to upgrade it with an interior. Now, with this new Trout model here, I am not so sure….

The arrival of this car and others with it may mark a slight turning point for me. Let me explain. The first issue, if it is an issue, is that this model is so well made. When I look at the average vintage model in American OO, I definitely have better modeling skills than a lot of people back in the day. But this combine, it is built at a level of old-school craftsmanship I have aspired to but never quite achieved, one that is rarely seen today in any scale.

This model must have taken many hours to build. It is obviously scratchbuilt and there are hardly any commercial parts to be seen, the most visible being the Nason trucks. The sides are sheet metal — some sort of a dull tinplate material — and he used some sort of rivet making die or machine to punch in all the rivets. It is an accurate and beautifully built scale model of the prototype, with real glass in the windows and an interior. As always, click on the photos for a closer view.

The couplers are an interesting choice, they are HO Devore couplers. It was an oversize (for HO!) working knuckle coupler produced in the 1950s that scales out very close to correct in OO. Trout at one point had a large layout, but with the limited swing they offer I am thinking that Trout either only displayed this particular car as a shelf model or he had very wide radius curves.

Of course the lettering was all done by hand as well. It does not look like it was at any normal viewing distance though and clearly Trout had the steady hand of a real artist.

Basically, this and other cars that recently arrived have suddenly pushed the bar much higher for me in American OO. I have over the years had fun building and rebuilding quite a few nice, neat models. I own other models built to a similar level as I have achieved, but built by others (thinking especially of Pierre Bourassa, William Johann, William Gilbert, and Fred Schorr). But these models have really challenged me, they are absolutely the best scratchbuilt models ever to be in my train room and certainly leave the average model built on a pre-war design now looking less good than it did before, no matter how neatly built. Also, while I would love to run this model, I actually can’t as my curve radius is not big enough – and even if I swap out the couplers out it will look better on 36” or more radius. That issue I will have to ponder as years go forward.

There are quite a few more of these cars by James Trout to describe one by one, about half and half ATSF and his personal road which I will introduce in a later article. Some are very complete and in beautiful shape and others have significant issues from storage that I will need to address. In any case, it is good that I have at least the skills to lightly touch up these models as needed, the group is giving me a good challenge and I will aim to describe a couple every week or so, be watching for more of these stunning models.