Small interior details for a 1950s Streetcar diner are easy and fun to make. When building the diner scene shown in the photo above, I knew that I’d want to include enough interior detail to make the model interesting to look at. The diner has small windows, which meant that I only needed a suggest the furnishings, so I made them all myself using my computer and an assortment of materials I found around my workbench.
The diner was built from the body of an old interurban car, and it needed stained glass in the upper arches. I copied patterns from the internet, modified and scaled them in Corel Draw image-editing software, then printed them on clear overhead transparency film. I used a commercial laser printer, but an inkjet printer will also work if you make sure to use film that’s compatible.
I cut the film strips to fit the openings and glued them to the inside walls of the building with contact cement, using as little glue as possible.
Some of the windows are boarded up, so the paper liner I would make in the next step took of those. However, I also wanted a couple of windows with screens on the back of the diner. I cut two screens from an old cone-shaped basket-style coffee filter. The coffee stains provided instant weathering on the screens. I carefully cut them to size for the window openings, then tacked them to the building with minimal glue to avoid clogging the screen material.
For the interior walls and floor, I used Corel Draw again to create wallpaper, tile, and some signs. I downloaded signs from the internet, resized them for O scale, and placed them around the walls. I also made a bathroom door using the same technique. I printed them out on heavy paper and glued them to the interior with contact cement.
I made the counter from scrap plastic strips. I installed brass pins in the bottom of the counter to make it easy to install in the model. The back counter is made from a piece of wood covered in aluminum tape to simulate stainless steel. I built the stools using slices of wooden dowels with plastic rods for posts. Like the counter, I mounted the stools in holes I drilled in the floor.
I finished the interior with pieces of painted junk from my scrap box. The pieces just need to simulate the types of things you’d expect to see in a diner, without having to be actual items.
I carved a cash register from a scrap of Balsa-Foam, but you could make one just as easily from pieces of styrene. I painted the cash register gold. I also included a seated and standing figure to give the scene a bit of life. Since this wasn’t going to be a museum model, I didn’t add any interior lights, but you could do that easily enough with several LEDs.
Making the interior for my diner was easy to do, and you could make these details in most any scale, simply by resizing them appropriately. You can read my complete diner-construction article in the March 2023 issue of Model Railroader magazine. And you can download a PDF of my interior diner details here.
Click below to download two sets of O scale diner signs and graphics covering the floor patterns, wallpaper, windows, and more that Daniel created for this project.
