DRGW Baggage-Dorm 1230

Rio Grande Baggage-Dorm 1230 and 1231 were part an order originally meant for the Chessie. The DRGW purchased the completed cars and split them between their two secondary trains, the Royal Gorge and the Prospector. The baggage-dorms were placed on the Royal Gorge. When the Royal Gorge was canceled in 1965 the cars moved to secondary service on trains like the new Ski Train service. Car 1231 was painted into silver to match the Rio Grande Zephyr's all Budd stainless fleet while 1230 was kept in aspen gold for the Ski Train. 1230 is now in the collection of the Colorado Railroad Museum, while 1231 is in private hands. This is a Union Station Products kit on an American Limited car core.

Being the first Union Station Products kit, I had no idea what to expect of the building process. The car sides are thin sheets of styrene that have been cut out and etched on a cnc router. As such the first step is assembly of each car side. (i skipped this crucial step and assembled the sides while on the car core) 1230/1231 have stainless steel fluting on the lower half of the car that extends onto the underskirts. The fluting in the kit comes seperately and has to be cut to length and applied to the car sides.

After side assembly is complete then comes mounting it to the car core kit. The American Limited car cores are an out of production kit meant for building cars like this, usually with old etched metal sides (see my Thrift-T-Sleeper build for an example of metal sides). This is where I screwed up. I assembled the car to the body before attempting to curl the lower side skirts inward like the prototype. Doing so with the car assembled was near impossible as it wanted to break apart and almost did on one attempt. But after some trial it eventually gave in and is at least somewhat close to how it should look. Next step is painting and decals.

7/23/2025: Started work on the under body details this week. Unfortunately it all has to be done by eye as there are no underbody plans available online. Trying to get the major items as the car does have full side skirts so it wont affect to much if its off by a bit