For those not in the know about vintage HO scale rolling stock, Selley was one of the early manufacturers offering a set of short passenger cars. These were kits with metal parts including the roof, truck frames, end platforms, really everything except the wood block floor and some clear acetate for window glass. Producing cast metal detail parts beginning in 1941, the company made a small number of freight car kits but a wide variety of freight car parts including doors, sills, underframes, etc. The coach and combine made their debuts, respectively, in February and March of 1960.
I fell in love with the combine at a train show in Ohio, buying the kit and bringing it home back at the turn of the century (is it too soon to use that phrase?). Eventually I found another, and two coaches to match. However, that's all Selley ever made. While other manufacturers added baggage cars, observations, parlors, etc. in their range of passenger offerings, Selley only ever made the combine and coach, marketing the combine as a complete one-car train.
These are short cars*; 6 inches long, an attribute that enables them to handle tight curves without that ugly overhang, according to the manufacturer. So when I stumbled across a vintage metal kit for a baggage car with a similar length I was intrigued. Who had made this? It didn't take long to discover it was New One, a manufacturer from Japan. These kits were similar to Selley's, only the roof was wood and the parts such as the end steps and railings were more crudely stamped metal instead of lovely detailed castings.
The New One car, or rather, "re-kit"** I bought is a real basket case. It was missing the roof and one of the end steps and railings but no matter; those were parts I didn't need. At first sight I immediately began forming in my mind a cunning plan to combine, pardon the pun, one of my Selley combines with these sides to make a "Selley" baggage car. The big question was whether or not they would fit together.
The Selley construction was different from other manufacturers' methods. Instead of offering sides and ends and roof as separate parts or casting the body as one piece, they cast part of the roof with the sides, leaving the top bit above the clerestory windows to be attached. So in order to fit the baggage sides to the Selley "roof", the lower roof parts will need to be cut away from the old Selley combine sides and added to the New One sides. Then the length (width) of the New One sides will need to be reduced by just about an eighth of an inch on each end. A real kitbashing challenge!
My Selley kits are still unbuilt but from time to time I take them out, inhale that glorious vintage kit aroma, and admire all the gleaming metal parts. I'll add the New One baggage parts to the same box as the Selley kits. For now that's where they'll live, but someday they'll get their day on the workbench and after that, time on the high iron conveying passengers - and their baggage - to their destinations. Of course I'll need to rebuild my New One ten-wheeler to pull the whole lot...
*While the Selley cars are short, they're not "Sierra" cars, a moniker often assigned incorrectly to any short combine/coach pair that vaguely resembles the cars used on the Angels branch of the Sierra RR. Those cars were much shorter and sagged noticeably. The MDC Overton cars are shorter than the Selley cars; the Binkley shorty cars shorter still. The Ulrich one-piece cars, another combine/coach pair, are about the same as the MDC, maybe a little shorter. There were other metal side cars; New One, already mentioned above, and Alexander alongside Mantua. However, much longer than that and we're leaving "shorty" territory and getting into the 50' and larger range.
**One of my YouTube videos is about re-kitting a Wabash box car. Sometimes it is best to crack that old glue, clean off the parts and rebuild the car. This baggage car is one of those cases, though I'm going to re-kit the car before kit-mingling the parts with the Selley combine. Re-kitting is just the first step.
