My Zaca Mesa winery

In my layout town of Ballard, there are two wine shippers, the larger of which is the Zaca Mesa winery. This is a large structure, made from a resin kit for a power house that I bought partly built, and then modified and completed. Here is the lid of the kit box, showing how the kit was intended to be built.

The upper photo above shows a receiving building at the right, for hopper cars of coal for the power plant. Since I wasn’t building it as a power plant, that annex was superfluous for me. I made it into the shipping building for a lemon packing business, and located it in a different town, Santa Rosalia. I modified the various openings with roll-up doors, especially the open archway on the end.

I also didn’t think the triple plain smoke stacks in the original power house kit were suitable for a winery, so replaced them with ventilators from my stash. More obviously, I changed the roof of the Magnuson building by giving it a tile roof, creating more of a California look.

In the foreground above, you can see my addition of a platform for loading tank cars (for details, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/02/tank-car-loading-platforms-part-3.html ). A close-up of the platform also shows the building sign, shamelessly copying a real Zaca Mesa winery in Santa Ynez (Santa Barbara County); here’s their website: https://www.zacamesa.com/ ), though I didn’t copy their logo or building.

Lastly, the building has some loading doors, which are useful to me as the place that cars other than tank cars (more about that in a moment) can be loaded. The third photo from the top in this post shows a Class XT car (house car body with internal tanks) being loaded at these doors. 

The role of this winery in layout operation is conveyed by a background post of mine, about wine as an industrial commodity (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/02/wine-as-industrial-commodity.html ) . There’s also an article in Model Railroad Hobbyist, in the issue for May 2023 (introduced at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/05/my-column-in-may-2023-model-railroad.html ). 

Wine grapes would be brought in from nearby vineyards, crushed and fermented, then aged to the desired degree. They can then be shipped out in bulk (in ordinary tank cars or XT cars) or packaged in bottles. As my modeling year of 1953 precedes widespread use of insulated box cars, un-iced reefers would be used for shipments of packaged wine.

I have always enjoyed having this industry on the layout, in part because it looks large enough to justify rail shipping at frequent intervals. Far too often, we model embarrassingly small industries, then regularly ship carloads to or from them. This one, at least, avoids that problem of scale.

Tony Thompson