Walthers Milwaukee Road
48-Seat Diner
48-Seat Diner #121-126
Walthers Part # 932-9203
HO scale, $44.98
Walthers has released
the seventh car in the Milwaukee Road Hiawatha series, an 85’ 48-seat
dining car. The model is based on the number 121 to 126 diners built in 1948 for
Morning and Afternoon Hiawathas. When assembling one of the
Twin Cities trains, note that the Milwaukee Road always operated these diners
with the kitchen as the forward end.
These diners use the
same construction features Walthers has used on the earlier Hiawatha
releases. The cars come with unpainted pre-shaped wire handrails and
matching locating dimples on the car. To match the rest of the 1955
vintage Hiawatha
train, the diners are painted in the 1950 scheme with black roof instead of gray
and without the earlier maroon letter board. The car rides on the same 8’
wheelbase Nystrom trucks Walthers uses on other the other cars in the series.
The car comes with a
full interior cast in buff colored plastic, and is designed to accept the
Walthers #933-1049 lighting kit. If lighting is added to the car, he
modeler may wish to paint the interior in more realistic colors. The
center third of dining area had walls with an off-white color covered with a
diamond shaped pattern of leaves, and gray chairs. Both of the end thirds
had bleached walnut walls, lowered ceilings of yellow and turquoise, and
gray-green upholstery on the chairs. The walls in the corridor beside the
kitchen were dark wood paneling. The kitchen area was largely made of
stainless steel surfaces.
These cars are very
similar to the 115 to 120 series diners built in 1947 for the Olympian
Hiawatha. The external differences include the air conditioning system
and placement of the roof details, so that a modeler could easily adapt these
new cars to model those on the west coast trains. The Olympian
diners had a unique diagonal table arrangement in the 40-seat dining area when
new, which was modified to a more conventional 48-seat configuration in 1951.
Reviewed by Gary Quale
