MTL made the mistake because they followed the caption on page 24 of Morning Sun's Color Guide to Freight and Passenger Equipment Volume 2 which reads "...Villa Royal was a 10 sections, 1 drawings room, 2 compartment car rebuilt in January 1931 from El Monte, a 1911- built car featuring 10 sections, 1 drawings room, 2 compartments."
But then you look at the photo of Villa Royal and it's clearly not a match to the MTL model. The aisle side pictured is completely different.
Unfortunately it doesn't look like the lettering was drawn accurately either.
I understand when deadlines come and go and information is hard to find and educated guesses have to be made to get product out the door. But frequently with MTL it seems like I'm holding the exact same information they used, and come to a vastly different interpretation of the material. Lake Merritt, a proper 10-1-2 is pictured on the same page in the color guide as Villa Royal, and the window pattern clearly matches the MTL model. It's just like the goofy Rock Island express boxcars where they bypassed the proper P-S car on the same page as the incorrect car/number series, and clearly were using the color guide for their information since matching verbage from the color guide caption made it onto the box label, and yet produced the wrong car. And the BNSF covered hoppers last month that used Trinity 5161 numbers instead of ACF cars... It's just sad at this point. It really is.
