Con-Cor - 0001-007014 - Passenger Car, Lightweight, Smoothside Vista Dome - North Pole & Southern - 2023

Specific Item Information: It is a Vista Dome Carand will be the 2nd in a planned group of annual Christmas passenger cars that will continue on for the next few years. It is the one of most Colorful Christmas car we have ever produced and continues the theme of the Christmas song “Carol Of Bells” and is decorated with Carolers part of the musical Score.

Series Information: Several manufacturers have a tradition of releasing an annual Christmas car.
- Con-Cor has been making an annual “N” Christmas Collectors Car since 1975.
- Bev-Bel has been making Christmas and Holiday cars at least since 1978 (until their end of business).

Model Information: This car is a bit of an odd-ball. It was apparently originally made in the 1970s by Kato for Con-Cor. Early examples are labeled Sekisui/Con-Cor Japan. Later examples have the label milled out and replaced with 'Con-Cor'. This would presume that the tooling was moved from Japan to the United states at some point.
Early versions came in kit form with Rapido couplers. Later versions are Ready-to-Run (RTR) and come with either dummy knuckle "Rigid Face" couplers or Micro-Trains couplers.
It is modeled after the 46-seat dome-coach built by Budd for the CB&Q (Burlington Route) in 1956 to run on the Denver Zephyr. It is very similar to the 46-seat dome-coach built by Budd for Great Northern’s 1955 Empire Builder, the latter having “slab panel” sides instead of corrugated sides.

Despite the model having corrugated sides, Con-Cor marketed and packaged it either as a 'Corrugated Dome' (stainless steel finish) or a 'Smoothside Dome' (painted finish). The Con-Cor literature refers to it as a 'mid-train dome', which means it is not a dedicated tail car and can be used between other passenger cars.

Yet, in spite of the Con-Cor labeling and manufacturing , the Con-Cor website sometimes refers to this model as a 'Rivarossi Corrugated Dome', with a stock number starting with 0003- or 003- that is the company prefix used by Con-Cor for Rivarossi products. This is actually to complement the Rivarossi lightweight corrugated range that is missing a dome car, in particular in the Con-Cor/Rivarossi 5-car corrugated passenger sets.

So, though technical the 'corrugated' and 'smoothside' versions are the same, we have created two different body styles in order to match the Con-Cor denominations.

Warning: Con-cor designed subsequently another mid-train corrugated dome, inspired by another Budd dome built for the California Zephyr, that is not to be confused with this one.

Prototype History: The Vista-Dome is a deluxe coach with a glass compartment rising out of the roof. This railroad passenger car has a second floor with 24 or 30 seats, lots of windows and no obstructions. The front and rear walls of the dome are windows. The entire side of the dome is made of windows. Curved glass is used to transition from the side to the roofing on vista-domes. All of this glass allows passengers to view the all the great and vast scenery. At night only the only lights used are to illuminate the floor allowing passengers to look up and watch for falling stars. A Vista-Dome has only one set of stairs up and down. It is not the place to hide from a ticket collecting conductor.

The Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad, the Burlington Railroad, introduced the Vista-Dome passenger car into regular service in 1947 on it's Twin Zephyr train. It was part of the standard equipment of the California Zephyr train when that train started running on March 20, 1949. The Twin Cities Zephyr train included 5 Vista-Dome cars. Standard height dome cars, 24 inches over the roofline were not suitable for service on most eastern railroads because of clearance problems. Budd built domes with a 19 1/2 inch dome top for eastern service. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was the only pre-Amtrak east coast railroad that had Vista-Domes in revenue service. The domes were a part of the Columbian and Capitol trains.

More photos on this website.

Road Name History: Fictitious railroad created by Bachmann Trains for a series of holiday themed trains and rolling stock.

Brand/Importer Information: Con-Cor has been in business since 1962. Many things have changed over time as originally they were a complete manufacturing operation in the USA and at one time had upwards of 45 employees. They not only designed the models,but they also built their own molds, did injection molding, painting, printing and packaging on their models.

Currently, most of their manufacturing has been moved overseas and now they import 90% of their products as totally finished goods, or in finished components. They only do some incidental manufacturing today within the USA.

Important Note: The Con-Cor product numbering can be very confusing. Please see here in the article how to properly enter Con-Cor stock numbers in the TroveStar database.