Union Station Products now makes side kits for a couple of the passenger cars that the L-1s were originally intended to pull.
The original plan was that the L-1s would pull trains that connected with the planned, but never implemented, Chessie streamliner. One set of these connecting trains would run from Ashland, Kentucky to Lexington. The other would run from Charlottesville, Virginia to Newport News.
The consist for each train was to be an L-1 pulling a Budd-built consist of a baggage-coach combine, two coach-lounges, and a lunch counter-diner-observation. When the Chessie plans were canceled, the L-1s and the cars purchased for the connecting trains were put into other service.
Following the big sell-off of the Chessie Budd cars in 1951, the C&O kept one combine and three of the lunch counter-diner-observations, which they used pretty much all over the system, right up until Amtrak day.
In the last year, Union Station Products has released side kits in HO, N, S and O scales for the Budd baggage-coach combine, and the lunch counter-diner-observation car. While these are cars C&O passenger train modelers can readily use for other trains from 1948-1971, they are two thirds of the cars you'd need to model the consists that the L-1s were intended to pull. These four-car trains are a neat "pike-sized" passenger train.
I suspect that it would not be difficult to get USP to produce the coach-lounge sides, now that there's a locomotive to pull them.
