Heat, Lights, and Wide Loads

Where to start?
The names are the easiest, I guess. The cars that didn't get painted this spring (two cars in Antonito, and most of the Chama fleet) will get painted off-season, so essentially everything will be relettered anyway. And we're not trying to name our parlour cars with "San Juan" era parlour car names - we do have some ideas, but nothing's firm yet. Finally, the car renaming is centered around interior displays being planned by the Friends, and I wouldn't want to take "Chama" off the table for coach passengers.
Heat: Marvin and I had a long discussion about this last month. The simplest solution is probably electric baseboard heaters, but a quick calculation on the energy needed to run them will convince you that the "handy 110 volt generators available at any hardware store" simply won't cut it. We need to do some more thinking on this one, but a collection of heated cars for each terminal is definitely a priority.
Lighting: we had only (ahem) one operating day when lighting was needed. And I was suprised to find out that the last five cars built (517, 520-523) have a solar-and-battery lighting system already installed and functioning.
Seat widths: Hoss, we have one unalterable constraint on the seating: we've got to be able to get it through a door. My original sketches in the proposal that started this project (back in February, during the drafting of the RFP response) called for a mixture of chairs and love seats. I'll sell you two tickets for the love seat for a special deal (list price " />), and we'll even name the seat after you if you ride enough . . .
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
JAC