The idea of a see-through car for inspecting trackwork is not new. You can buy them from various companies. However, I thought it might be fun to make one myself. A car like this is great for seeing how the wheels behave when they go over turnouts. This is especially important if you hand-lay your own track and turnouts.

The hardest part, in my mind at least, was how to mount the trucks to the see-through material. So I looked through my drawer that contains "stuff" that will never see the light of day on my layout and found this old caboose from the Bachmann starter set I bought in 1999. I removed the trucks and loosened the body from the frame.



My objective was to salvage the bolster pin area from the caboose's frame. The frame's metal weight was in the way, so I cut it with a razor saw. Eventually the frame became weak enough to snap off the end of the frame. Here is a photo of the frame cut up into several pieces. The remaining parts, of course, go right back into the parts bin. You never know when they come in handy.



Now that the demolition is complete, I needed to cut a piece of "Lucite" (clear plastic sheet, some sort of plexiglass). We bought these at Lowe's or Home Depot. An 8x10 sheet doesn't cost but a few dollars.
















I took an average N-scale freight car and roughly measured it. Next, I cut a piece of this Lucite approximately 5/8" wide and 3" long (above). You can get fancy and make the sides perfectly smooth and round the corners, but this car is meant to be a tool, not to be run on the layout.


The next step was to attach the salvaged truck mounts to the plexiglass. Where on the sheet to place these was roughly determined from the sample freight car. Five-minute epoxy was used to glue them down.



I removed the trucks and metal wheels from a Micro-Trains car that I wouldn't run on my layout. These were attached with the screws from the caboose mentioned earlier.



I lived with the car, unweighted, for a while, but it just became too hard to keep on the track. So, a variety of weights were added to get the car up to the NMRA spec of 0.95oz for this 3-inch car.



The last photo shows the car in action. It is very easy to see what the wheels are doing when they run over a turnout. This was a simple project, especially if you have all the parts laying about.