Regular readers know I periodically feature projects underway and for what will probably be the last post of 2010 I have this progress photo of a set of four Nason passenger cars.

The cars are all the later style Nason cars with stamped brass sides. With enough time last week to tackle something that would take some time I got the sides all pinned back on. Each car had unique challenges in terms of assembly and truck and coupler mounting as all had been previously built by other builders; undoubtedly each of those builders could have set up a similar photo on some cold winters night. During re-assembly I was able to re-use about 80% of the original pins (having saved them carefully initially with each car body). I painted the sides and the bodies (roof/ends/floor) separately with spray paint. The painting underway in the photo is I had touched up the pins and had begun to paint the trucks.

Speaking of trucks, the four wheel trucks came together pretty well (one has Famoco wheelsets and the other S-C) but the six wheel Nason trucks really took some effort to the point of questioning why go to all this effort? The finished product looks and rolls great with upgraded wheelsets but I will say that among the Nason trucks the bolster heights vary and they are overall higher than any other brand of truck. Basically you ideally mount them directly to the floor with no bolster and only a thin washer to be at the right height but they took more tweaking than that. I only had three pair of usable Nason trucks as well, so the RPO got a good pair of trusty Scale-Craft trucks which suited better the mounting that had been done by a prior owner.

The Pullman (closest to the camera) has dummy Scale-Craft couplers which allow for lots of swing and the others have Kadee long shank couplers. I had them all running well around the layout prior to this photo and they will be a sharp set of cars when the decals are done. I also have a string of Zuhr streamline passenger cars nearly to the same point now, more on those in 2011.