My latest operating session

Not having hosted an operating session on my layout since July, I planned for and hosted two sessions this last weekend. Preparation for these sessions naturally called for a lot of checking of the state of the layout, and indeed a few repairs proved necessary. One of them was a rail connection that was no longer electrically connecting. This just required a touch of solder, and of course verification with a meter.

I also made a few improvements in scenery and other details around the layout. Some of these, naturally enough, were repairs to things that had gotten damaged or needed to be re-glued, but in a few cases I was able to upgrade something. At left below is the model palm tree that has been alongside my winery for years. The fronds are some kind of fishbowl plant, which has sadly withered and sagged. At right is the upgrade to a far healthier looking palm tree.

When the sessions came along, on the first day the crew was Ray Freeman, Leo Pesce, Jeff Allen and Richard Brennan. All had operated here before, but for widely different numbers of times. For a couple of them, this meant that they experienced something of a learning curve in the session.

The first-day crew that began at Ballard is shown below, with Leo at left and Ray at right. Ray is holding the throttle, so Leo must have been conducting. It looks like he is pointing out the next switching move.

Below you see Jeff (at left) and Richard, who had begun with a shift at Shumala, but now have progressed to take their turn working at Ballard. I believe Jeff was conducting at this point, and appears to be pointing out an industry that was either going to receive a set-out, or one needing a car picked up.

The next day there was a different set of four people to operate, and this time we had a first-time operator, Bob Rosenbauer. He worked with Lisa Gorrell, and they are shown below sorting out the cars in the yard at Shumala, with Lisa at left, who was the conductor here.

Meanwhile, the other crew, Cliff Linton (at left, below) and Steve Van Meter were engaged in switching at Ballard. It looks like Cliff was uncoupling cars for a spot.

These were good sessions, and even with a few glitches (the fear of every layout host), it did go well overall, and everyone seemed to have a good time. I managed to minimize the threat of Host Flaw Hysteria (described in more detail elsewhere: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/07/pressure-what-pressure.html ).

Tony Thompson

Small project: old brass baggage car, Part 2

In the previous post on this topic, I showed a heavily tarnished Ken Kidder model of one of the Southern Pacific’s distinctive 40-foot baggage-express cars. The prototypes were built as full postal cars but were rebuilt in 1929 y T&NO into postal-baggage configuration, with a few eventually ending up on Pacific Lines, rebuilt this time into baggage cars. The description of all that, and my start of work to prepare the model for use, is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/06/small-project-old-brass-sp-baggage-car.html . 

The body had been painted Dark Olive Green. The next step was to mask the body (a good job for Tamiya masking tape, easily flexible to match the end contour at the roof line). This was a simple step, as the fascia strips on sides and ends make an easy masking reference. Then I painted the roof black, along with the trucks (wheel treads were masked). I could now decal the body, using Thinfilm Decals set HO 160-SP. 

It may be worth mentioning that although the postal apartment’s door and window arrangement remain on this car body, it had had the entire postal apartment removed, and was now operationally a full baggage car, which is why it is lettered that way. This mirrors the prototype appearance on Pacific Lines.

With lettering complete and protected by a coat of clear flat, I weathered the body lightly with my usual technique of washes using acrylic tube paints (see the “Reference pages” linked at the top right corner of this post for descriptions and illustrations of the method). 

In the era I model, SP continued to keep passenger equipment fairly clean, so only the lightest of weathering was applied. Sides of SP passenger equipment were washed, less frequently for head-end equipment like this car, but roofs were not washed. Here is the body at this point.

Next I glazed the windows using clear styrene sheet, installed with canopy glue, and that completed basic body work. Next I turned attention to couplers. The original screw hole in the Kidder body for a coupler is quite small. I drilled it out and tapped it for a 2.0 mm screw. The chosen couplers were Kadee no. 36, with its small gear box, well suited to this kind of end mounting. 

 Next I wanted to add at least some indication of underbody equipment. Most photos of these cars don’t show underbody areas well, but there does seem to be some indication of an air tank on the left side (as seen from the postal end) and what is likely a brake cylinder on the right side. The photos mentioned are on pages 73–77 in Volume 3 of the series, Southern Pacific Passenger Cars (SPH&TS, 2007). 

I used a short piece of wood dowel for the air tank, and a brake-cylinder-like part from my stash of passenger car parts. But there is no intention here to do more than suggest this equipment in a side view.

Then came diaphragms. Late photos of these cars on Pacific Lines showed them with what I have called “skeleton” diaphragms, ones with face plates but no side canvas accordion folds. These are discussed in an earlier post (it can be found at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/05/passenger-cars-skeleton-diaphragms.html ), and modeling is discussed there too. These are visible in the prototype photo shown in the first post in this series (link provided in the top paragraph of the present post). 

I added a pair of my own versions of the skeleton diaphragm, built out of styrene sheet and strip, to the car with canopy glue. Then trucks could be attached and some weathering added. Here is the completed model.

Though these cars would have been a tiny minority in the SP Pacific Lines passenger car fleet, I have enjoyed researching, painting and lettering the model, and will no doubt include it is an occasional passenger train in future operating sessions.

Tony Thompson

The “literature” of model railroading

What do I mean here by “literature?” I don’t mean novels or other creative literature. I mean it in the sense familiar to any professional or academic: the published work in and about the field. This ranges from professional journals to books, volumes of conference proceedings, and monographs. And in professional fields, having a submitted paper accepted for publication will require it to contain adequate citation of the literature, in the sense just described.

What is the point of this? To give credit to the work of predecessors, to show that you understand where the paper you have submitted fits into that literature, and even to mention viewpoints that may conflict with the one you have espoused in your paper. One becomes accustomed to having the citations in mind while writing or reading a professional paper, and checking submitted or published citations to see if they seem appropriate. Having been both an associate editor, and then editor for five years, of a major journal in my field, metallurgy and materials, this used to be a completely instinctive process for me. My late friend Richard Hendrickson’s professional experience as an English linguist was entirely parallel.

But model railroaders, relatively few of whom are professionals in the sense just described, usually have no such experience and usually don’t even have any idea of the concept. Richard was in fact the one who pointed this out to me, and I immediately understood what he meant.

I guess my professional background died slowly. I’ll give one example. When Jim Hediger reviewed the First Edition of Pacific Fruit Express for Trains magazine, he commented thus: “Here is a superb illustrated history of the company whose name is synonymous with perishable freight. Rounding out the work is the most complete bibliography and index I have ever seen in a rail history book.” 

Having acted as editor for that entire book, and collected references from my co-authors as well as researching those for my own chapters, I can take credit for creating that bibliography (and I indexed the book, too). To me, Hediger’s description was a real compliment, and we included it on the dust jacket of the Second Edition of the PFE book. 

This came home to me more recently when a reader of one of my “Getting Real” columns in Model Railroad Hobbyist noticed a long bibliography, and wrote an email commenting on it. And in fact the same would be found in all volumes of my book series, Southern Pacific Freight Cars. Obviously to any experienced researcher, such bibliographic resources can be a gold mine in pursuing information beyond the publication in hand.

Incidentally (I’ll say more about this presently), nearly all that literature cited in those books is the literature of professional railroading and railroad history. That is obviously part of the literature of our hobby.

But in model railroading itself, what comprises the literature? The most obvious answer combines not only books, such as the familiar Kalmbach Media soft-bound books on practically every aspect of the hobby, but also the magazines: Model Railroader, Railroad Model Craftsman most obviously, but also the defunct titles, such as Mainline Modeler, superb resources with many timeless items of information. Today, we need to include on-line resources such as blogs and museum archives.

Many modelers, of course, discard magazines after having paged through them, much as one would do with a weekly news magazine. That means they have no personal archive of magazines, except maybe an occasional helpful issue or article that is saved. But increasingly, magazine archives are appearing on-line, making it unnecessary to keep your own shelves of old magazines. (Though the on-line material often has been digitized at pretty low resolution, meaning that photographs are a complete loss; and on-line archives have a distressing tendency to suddenly disappear.)

As a single example of something I was able to retrieve from archives and greatly enjoyed and benefited from reading, below is the first page of Frank Ellison’s landmark series of six articles, tellingly titled “The Art of Model Railroading,” which appeared in Model Railroader in the issue for June 1944. And yes, I’m old, but not old enough to have read this when it came out.

In these six articles, Ellison was promoting the idea that operating a layout went far beyond building locomotives, laying track, or creating scenery. Instead, he suggested, it would need to be a coherent whole, not only with all those “construction” aspects, but also having flexible electrical control and above all, a realistic operating scheme. This was a pioneering idea, and tracking it down in the “literature” to appreciate it is part of what I’m writing about.

One more example of a magazine article from the distant past that is still worth reading is Doug Smith’s article on freight car forwarding, published in the December 1961 issue of Model Railroader. Smith not only reviewed a number of proposed systems for car forwarding, he went on to suggest ways to update the Ellison car-card system, ideas which are relevant today. And most important, he emphasized prototype practice as the guide we should follow.

It remains my opinion that there is a literature of model railroading, and awareness of it should be the hallmark of any serious modeler, particularly those who write articles — though I wouldn’t foresee serious lists of literature citations in model magazines. The further literature is that of professional railroading, both operations and history. It too is important to modelers, and I’ll have more to say about that in a future post.

Tony Thompson

An old Shake ’n’ Take project: Conclusion

This series of posts describes a freight car build that originated as a so-called “Shake ‘n’ Take” kitbashing project at the 2015 meeting of Prototype Rails in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Previous posts in the series gave the prototype background, links to project directions, replacement of original car body ends, and addition of details. In the previous post, Part 3, the model had been given a coat of Tamiya primer (see that preceding post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/10/an-old-shake-n-take-project-part-3.html ).

As stated in that previous post, the model was now ready for its final paint coat, and that was applied. The model was also removed from its “paint shop” trucks and give the correct ones that it will operate with. In this condition, it’s shown below. 

Next came application of decals. A very nice decal set for this car was assembled by Steve Hile, and the lettering elements were all well arranged and complete. I enjoy this part of a freight car project, when the model assumes its identity as an individual car. Once all decals were in place, the car was given a coat of clear flat.

Next, the car needed to be weathered. I used my tried and true method of washes made from acrylic tube paints (see the “Reference pages” linked at the top right corner of the present post). Then, after another protective coat of clear flat, I added route cards and a few chalk marks. Here is the completed model.

Incidentally, the black paint patch under the right-hand door is the service stencil for the air brake reservoir (and was only on this side of the car). The black sill patch toward the right of the car side is a repacking stencil, applied on both sides. You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.

Just for comparison, here is the prototype photo I relied on in carrying out the project. You will note the same paint patches that were applied to the model, are visible here too, and were the reason they were applied to the model. (Chet McCoid photo, San Diego, Dec. 26, 1954, Bob’s Photo collection)

Finally, I want to wrap this up with an image of the heading for the project directions, appropriately crediting Richard Hendrickson for the original idea of the conversion, along with Greg Martin’s management and Schuyler Larrabee’s editing. Thanks, guys.

This concludes work on my 2015 Shake ‘n’ Take project from Cocoa  Beach that year. As always, an interesting project with some learning aspects, and a distinctive freight car as the product.

Tony Thompson