Next up are the Bistro (RB) and Restaurant/Bistro (WRB) rail cars. Food can be purchased on the bottom floor of the RB and WRB cars, but the WRB also has a top floor restaurant where you may sit down and order, like at a restaurant.
It's my understanding that the longer routes get the WRB--but some of the relatively shorter routes don't have either a RB or WRB, like the Zurich HB - Bern route, and the Luzern - Basel route. Go figure.
Anyhow, here's the Bistro car.
Here's the Restaurant/Bistro car.
Now for the interesting part.
During the middle of November 2013, SBB began a trial run of a Starbucks WRB on the Genève-Aéroport - St. Gallen route. Opinion on the subject has ranged from "This is the end of the world!," to "This will never work, it failed before with McDonalds," to "Cool!"
Those of the "Cool!" mindset can find out more here (change the language option at the top if necessary):
sbb.ch/starbucks/
One of the great things about making papercraft models, as opposed to buying HO and N scale models, is that you don't need to wait years for a manufacturer to release a new rail car--you can create it yourself.
So, here's the Starbucks WRB car.
As I did with the A and B cars, here's a comparison of the models' sides.
The strobe atop each rail car is marked with a green triangle, and this reference object could possibly mark the "front" of the car. One interesting thing is the red horizontal bar (vertical in this orientation) always slants in the same direction on both sides--the rightmost side always slants upwards, from bottom left to top right (tilt your head to see this horizontally.) The bar always slants the same way, even if the rail car is attached "backwards."
For the most part, the cars show mirror symmetry. One notable exception is the position where the horizontal bars start and end on the WRB (the blue arrows.) It looks like this was done to always have the same amount of top windows on each side not touching the red bar--three windows on the left side and two windows on the right side.
The other exception is the size of the Starbucks logo on each side. The logo
could have been kept the same size, either both large or both small, but perhaps shifted over a little. Perhaps this was a compromise design between SBB and Starbucks? The logo isn't very subtle on one side. Obviously.
This wraps up part one of this entry. In part two, I'll show the behind-the-scenes work involved in making the RB and WRB models.
Cheers!