As I said on the last page, this was not a project I set out to make originally. It was born of necessity. How to remember the woman who literally meant the world to me? How to remember her in a way she'd appreciate, and in a way that spoke from my heart? The answer was simple, I would give her the trip we never could take before she was gone... behind a steam train. As we had plans to build out a passenger train as a set-piece for our planned wedding, it only made sense to carry that forward. I would make a funeral car to carry her ashes home, but one that would match the paintscheme for our wedding train, also my railroad empire's Executive Inspection Train, also known as an Office Car Special.

Before she passed, this picture came across my Facebook feed. The "What If Flags?" group had a member who posed the thought: After the American Freedom Train concluded on December 31st, 1977, what if AFT4449 had been leased by Southern Railway for their growing Steam Program?" Obviously, she wouldn't have run in her original Southern Pacific Daylight colors, and she really shouldn't run in her American Freedom Train red, white, and blue. But then what? Luke Winzenried came up with two similar ideas, both based on the original Daylight scheme, and both trimmed in gold. One had the Daylight Red replaced by white, and the orange traded for green. This made 4449's skirt green. The other, as seen here, replaced the red bands with the green, and the orange to white, making the skirt white. While the green skirt might have looked nice, the white skirt allowed the white band to follow down the train, bracketed top & bottom by Southern's green. It was this scheme that I realized would be perfect for JDG Industries Office Cars and matching streamlined engine, albeit Dreyfuss stramlining not SP Daylight.

Building a Funeral Car especially, and any Office Car in general, is far more than just chosing the right starting point and a paintscheme to cover the carbody in. Interior and exterior lights have to be chosen: do you use overhead LED strips to simulate flourescent tubes, do you have external dual, end-of-train maker lights, do you have lit numberboards, do you go to the extreme of adding the observation lights that illuminate the truck assemblies? A power system has to be devised: does each car have its own battery, or do you take the time now to develop a unified model equivalent to HEP or Head End Power? And thats just the outside details. Then comes all the decisions for internal layout. In some cars, its easy as the windows are an opaque plastic that obscures the inside details. But that cheat completely defeats the point of building a funeral car.

What follows is my journey into making these decisions to build a memorial for the woman I loved with every molecule of my being.

There were two first competing issues. One was how to paint it. The other was what would be the perfect funeral car. As I model in "G" scale, I had to chose from the cars available. As the wedding train/Inspection Train is based on LGB streamliners, my first hope was to use one of them. But the only car that really came close would be a baggage car, which is historically accurate on American Rails, even to 2018 when President George H.W. Bush was transported to his final resting place by train. But it wasn't what I wanted... A small casket sitting in the doorway of a baggage car.

In scale, it just wasn't fitting enough. I wanted the casket fully visible inside the car. I could have hacked apart a coach and turned it into an exhibition car like those used by the American Freedom Train in 1976. I thought about it, but we only had one picture together, and I didn't know what else to add for display. While I pondered the car's base model, I switched gears and worked on trying to figure out how to paint the car. If I was to have it match the rest of the office cars, then I needed at least one, if not two additional cars to provide line matching for the length of the car, once I figured out what it would be.

So I shipped two cars to my friend for painting. In retrospect, the hurried nature of the main project left me shortchanged in making decisions. I chose to use Burlington Northern (BN) forest green for the green portion of the cars. This ult-imately, while exactly as I chose them, is not what I want. It wasn't till earlier this month as I was sorting through 20,000+ pictures looking for memories over the last several years, that I realized I had the answer sitting in front of me all along. When I built the Styro-Slicer hot-wire foam cutter, I used some model paint to paint certain parts, including some that have a beautiful metallic-flake emerald green. THAT should have been my choice along with a satin/semi-gloss pure white, or maybe something that could simulate a white opal effect. That would have been perfect for her as she liked white opal.