A new armor load

Almost ten years back, I upgraded an HO scale Roco “Army” flat car, improving details, repairing the deck, replacing the undersize trucks, and repainting and re-lettering. Here’s a link to the concluding post in that series: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/12/upgrading-roco-flat-car-part-3.html . 

I then wrote a lengthy series of posts about a wide variety of military loads, mostly armored vehicles, that could move on that flat car, posts starting with the term “Roco flat car,” though loads weren’t restricted to that flat car. If you want to search for those posts, use “Roco flat cars” as the search term in the search box at right. Here's the concluding post in that series: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/10/roco-flat-car-part-10-still-more-loads.html .

On thing missing from my series was a more modern tank. I had used the various World War II vehicles from Roco, appropriate since older vehicles very much remained in use stateside for training during and after the Korean War. But I thought a more modern tank, such as served in Korea, would be good too. 

An excellent reference, discussing in detail the evolution of tank design from World War II’s M26, through the M46, to the M47, is contained in Jim Mesko’s book, M48 Patton in Action (Squadron/Signal Publications, Carrollton, TX 1984). That historical material, of course, is presented as background for the M48 tank.

There aren’t too many good photos of the M47 in the U.S. (many were transferred to U.S. allies). Here is a view of one in German service during winter maneuvers in Germany (U.S. Army photo). The hull, suspension, and turret show the extensive differences from the Sherman family of tanks.  

Though these have been available in HO scale as ready-to-run models, none seemed available when I wanted one. Instead, I located a Roco kit (their number 5086) for an M47 Patton tank.

The kit is quite simple, a body in two halves, the treads and suspension for each side, and a turret with main gun and commander’s hatch. There are no kit directions, but the location of all parts is pretty obvious. It also comes with a machine gun for the turret top, but these weren’t installed during shipping. I glued the parts together with styrene cement.

Then to make the tank into a load, I needed to add tread chocks from the Heiser set of resin parts, which I’ve shown in a previous post (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/07/more-about-vehicles-on-flat-cars.html ). That post also shows the boards applied along the side of the tracks.

Most photos I have been able to find of these tanks in the U.S. show minimal lettering, most visibly the absence of the distinctive white star on the turret sides. So I left mine unlettered. The as-built model above is pretty shiny, and was next given a coat of flat finish.  

Finally, I experimented with the new load. The M47 weighed about 48 tons, so could be accommodated on 50-ton or 70-ton flat cars. It’s shown below carried on a 70-ton flat car, ATSF 93459, representing a General Steel Castings one-piece body (Walthers kit), on the SP main line, passing the caboose track at the engine terminal in my layout town of Shumala. 

Like a number of armor loads I have assembled before, I enjoyed both the modeling and the chance to learn more about armored vehicles. Previous posts have listed many of the prototype publications in which this history can be found, in addition to the Mesko book listed above. Military loads like the M47 continue to be seen in mainline trains during my layout operating sessions.

Tony Thompson 

My latest operating session

Last weekend, the Bay Area enjoyed a visit from Bob Hanmer, well-known layout owner and operator from Chicago. He joined  the monthly operating session at Paul Weiss’s Central Vermont layout on Saturday, and on Sunday he operated on my layout, along with Seth Neumann, Jason Schoenmann, and Jim Radkey. This was session no. 108 on my present layout.

In some ways, this was an entirely ordinary session, in other ways much less so. For one thing, the long-running “trackwork wars” on the segment of my track between the towns of Ballard and Santa Rosalia (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/12/trackwork-wars-part-17.html ) was again tested, and though certainly not problem-free, largely performed well with locomotives at slow speeds. 

The problem was confined to the area between the switches to Jupiter, and to Track 7 in Ballard. More there yet to do, but a considerable improvement over certain past sessions. Here is that area, right above the valley between the two roofs of the MOW sheds. Rail right there seems to have freed itself from the ties, allowing locomotive wheels to shift it out of gauge. This will be fixed. 

Another aspect of the session was the renewal of something Bob Hanmer and I have been doing back and forth.  I had discovered that a source of printing paper from my online printing plant could be a mill on Bob’s layout (see the description at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/10/another-visit-to-bob-hanmers-layout.html ) For this session, a new waybill in this story was included, which of course Bob discovered, as was intended. The routing even obeys Car Service Rules.

The crews started out with Jim Radkey (left) and Seth Neumann at Ballard, with Seth conducting. What Seth is reaching for in the photo, I don’t know.

Meanwhile, Bob Hanmer and Jason Schoenmann were working at Shumala, In the photo below, Bob (left) is discussing a couple of moves with Jason; Bob was the conductor. After these shifts were completed, the two crews switched sides and assignments.

The session as a whole went well, with crews finishing in less than the average time span. More importantly, it seemed that a good time was had by everyone. That’s what all this is for, after all.

Tony Thompson 

An excellent new book

A really excellent railroad-experience book has just been published. Entitled Life Along the Tracks, it’s published by Basalt Books (an imprint of Washington State University Press). The dust jacket is shown below. The career stories are those of the Mike McLaughlin (1937–2012), assembled and brought to press by Jim Providenza. Jim also coordinated the outstanding map efforts of Dave Clemens. 

The cover photo, one of many in the book from the talented camera work of Phil Hastings, is revealing: it’s not the Overnight Express roaring down the track, or even the dispatcher, king of all he surveys. It’s ordinary railroaders, probably doing track inspection. Very much in tune with this book. 

It’s an 8.5 x 11-inch hardbound book, 242 pages long. with both a glossary and index. It’s nicely produced. I was a little disappointed that the publisher chose to use uncoated instead of coated paper, but it doesn’t greatly matter here, as the photos are really illustrations, not reference material. And about the photos: considerable effort, mostly of Jim Providenza, located and selected the many fine photos in the book, since Mike’s own photos disappeared.

Some of us in model railroading have experienced what it takes to manage a large yard. I enjoyed Mike’s comment (page 157) about how it was, back in the day: “Yard offices were a madhouse, with clerks trying to decipher train lists and yard checks made in the rain, yardmasters screaming for the train list to make up their switch lists, crew callers, janitors, and a lonely cry from the corner: “Where IS that damn car . . .’ ”  

The content is especially interesting to me because although it’s a rich variety of railroader recollections, it's not the Operating Department. Mike worked on track and signals, and late in his career even in traffic management, spread over seven railroads, including Great Northern, Denver & Rio Grande Western, and Rock Island. But to me, all of it is good reading.

I have to say a little about the superb maps by Dave Clemens. Many railroading situations involve kinda complicated geography, most of it not particularly evident to the general public. Dave has created map after map which brilliantly show exactly what the reader of the book needs to know, and little more. I will illustrate with his two maps of the railroad lines around Bellingham, Washington. First, the local tracks:

Here we see the GN passing through the area, the NP just reaching it, and the Milwaukee having a ferry slip to serve their “island branch” trackage. How does this connect to what’s a little farther out of town? Dave has shown us that too:

All in all, really a well-done, well-illustrated, fun book to read. I’m sure many modelers will have the same reaction, even if they might not get excited by the book before looking inside. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Tony Thompson 

Modeling a PFE fleet

I have posted several times about this topic, and over the years have given a number of talks about it, but continue to get questions and comments on the subject. As the principal author of the 464-page PFE book (Thompson, Church and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Signature Press, 2000), I do have resources to try and answer questions like this. And of course the book remains your primary source of information.

Although I personally model 1953, I realize that many people model other parts of the PFE era, so in the material below, will try to cover a range of years. But almost any choice of era will lead to interesting photos, like the one below (Extra 4015 East, Green River, Wyo., Sept. 3, 1955: John E Shaw photo). Which cars are these? Or to rephrase: what mix of cars should I have? And perhaps strikingly, what mix of clean and variously dirty cars should I have?

Following PFE’s dramatic inception in 1906, when E.H. Harriman ordered 6600 new refrigerator cars to create the first PFE car fleet, cars continued to be of wood-sheathed construction, including wood board roofs, until 1920. 

In that year, outside metal roofs became standard for new and rebuilt car construction, but car bodies remained wood-framed and wood-sheathed. The first all-steel cars were built in 1936. But because of the immense number of wood cars in existence in 1936, the steel cars remained a relatively small fraction of the fleet until the middle 1950s. 

As additional classes of steel cars were built, the fleet slowly began to be dominated by cars of that type, though as late as 1960, wood-sheathed cars (by now all rebuilds) remained 60 percent of the fleet. The first mechanical reefers owned by PFE were built in 1953, but even by 1962, they ware only 9 percent of the fleet. But this rose quickly as ice cars were scrapped, and by 1970 mechanical cars were 64 percent of the fleet. All these relative fleet characteristics are well documented in the PFE book.

For a single example of the kind of information in that book, below is a chart made by Dick Harley and contributed to the book (pages 440 and 441). It shows graphically and clearly the evolution of the PFE wood-car fleet over time, including rebuilding. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.) 

 For modelers of any part of North America, the size of PFE’s fleet is worth pointing out. For quite a few years, it hovered just under 40,000 cars, bigger than most railroads’ entire fleet, as you see below. This graph also shows how many cars were washed every year, and you can see it’s a significant fraction of the fleet each year, except in the depth of the Depression and during World War II, until washing was discontinued in the early 1950s. 

 I show this graph because it has a consequence for car appearance. You can’t weather PFE cars before the 1950s just on the age of the paint scheme, because of this washing. For more about washing and all that, see my earlier post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/appearance-of-pfe-reefers-part-3.html . 

I have had modelers ask me about PFE underframes. After the first car classes with a heavy and complex underframe, PFE changed to the single-beam Bettendorf design, which they continued to use into the middle 1920s. They then changed to what they called a “built-up” underframe, which was assembled from plate and angles. 

Both are shown below (you can click to enlarge if you wish). The section at right is labeled as a “40-ton” underframe, but thousands of 30-ton cars received this kind of design also, just with a little lighter section. All cars with either underframe were wood-sheathed cars. 

I guess my point is that there are considerable resources to answer questions about the prototype and, by implication, many modeling issues too. But I am always available, via this blog or privately, to try and answer questions.

Tony Thompson

Handout for “The Role of the Agent”

This is the on-line handout for a clinic entitled “The Role of the Agent.” The purpose is to provide documentation of the various published items shown in the talk, along with links to a number of blog posts which cover some points in the talk in much more detail. They are grouped below by topic area. 

My point in the clinic was to indicate that many of us enjoy trying to operate model railroads in a prototypical manner, as in the photo below (Seth Neumann at left, and Steve Van Meter, switching at Ballard on my layout). I attempted to indicate how we can go about such imitation of the prototype, choosing the specific railroad that I model, the Southern Pacific.

Print Publications

Armstrong, John H., The Railroad – What It Is, What It Does (Chapter 8, Railroad Operations), Simmons-Boardman Publishing, Omaha, 1982. [there are several subsequent editions with updates; the original is closest in time to the era I model] 

Benezra, Steve, and Phil Monat, editors, A Compendium of Model Railroad Operations, Operations Special Interest Group, Downington, PA, 2017.

Coughlin, E.W., Freight Car Distribution and Handling in the United States, Car Service Division, Association of American Railroads, Washington, 1956.

Grant, H. Roger, The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2022. 

Koester, Tony, “In search of the perfect waybill,” Model Railroader, February 2012, p. 82.

Thompson, Anthony, “Prototypical waybills for car card operation,” Railroad Model Craftsman, December 2009, pp. 71–77.  

Thompson, Tony, “Getting Real: A More Prototypical Waybill for Model Railroads,” Model Railroad Hobbyist, pp. 31–46, May 2012. 

Thompson, Tony, ”Getting Real: Operating with Prototypical Waybills,” Model Railroad Hobbyist, January 2018.  

Thompson, Tony, “Modeling Traffic on a Layout,” Model Railroad Hobbyist, September 2021.  

SP Circular 39-1, “Instructions to Station Agents”

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 2,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/sps-instruction-to-station-agents-part-2.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 3,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/12/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 4,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/12/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part_10.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 5,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/12/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part_25.html

Learning from Circular 39-1

Thompson, Tony, “Waybills, Part 88: Temporary Waybills,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/08/waybills-part-88-temporary-waybills.html

Thompson, Tony, “Waybills, Part 90: SP Form 704,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/09/waybills-part-90-sp-form-704.html

Bill Boxes

Thompson, Tony, “Bill Box,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/03/bill-box.html 

Thompson, Tony, “Modeling Bill Boxes,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/05/model-bill-boxes.html 

Salamon, Dave, N-Scale Magazine, issue for September-October 2017. 

Other Points

Thompson, Tony, “Southern Pacific’s Circular 4,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/12/southern-pacifics-circular-4.html  

Thompson, Tony, “Waybills, Part 39: SP Typography,”  https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/04/waybills-part-39-sp-typography.html

With the help of these and many other publications out there, we can hope to capture the spirit of moments like the one below, with the C&NW agent (right) at Brookings, South Dakota, exchanging a roll of waybills with the conductor on the caboose in a light snow (H.R. Grant collection, 1940).  

Tony Thompson 

Kit appreciation: Rocket Express box car

I have done several “kit appreciation” posts before, and this post is to add another one. The model I am writing about today is a resin kit from Rocket Express (specializing, as the name suggests, in Rock Island equipment). The car modeled, with kit #RI-1, is a 40-foot end-door automobile car, that is, a double-door box car. (For an example of such an appreciation post, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/09/homage-to-two-great-resin-kits.html .)  

The prototype modeled is a group of 1000 double-door cars built by the Rock Island in 1930. The first 650 cars (RI 159250–159899) had solid ends, while the second 350 cars (RI 160250–160599) had end doors. By 1952, near my modeling era, these groups still contained, respectively, 531 and 333 cars, a considerable majority of the original build. Here is a builder photo from the kit directions. 

The car kit has separate sides and ends and roof (no one-piece body here). The first step in construction is to assemble the body box, with some adjustments so everything fits snugly. Next the floor and underframe parts are added. Once all those components are assembled, the various detail parts are added in the usual way, Some areas have centering holes for the drilling of grab-iron holes.

The prototype cars had black roofs, so this is a two-color paint job. The decals are quite nice, and though the fitting of decal lettering around the posts and braces of a single-sheathed car is a little tedious, I’ve always found it an interesting challenge, and satisfying when it comes out right. For me, the key is patience, and only working as long as mental calm prevails.You can always come back to the job.

The car was weathered somewhat lightly to reflect a relatively recent repaint, then fresh paint blocks were added with decal film for placement of new reweigh and repack decals. I felt like this was a really nice project, and I always enjoy single-sheathed cars like this in which the angles of the side braces differ. Below is a view of the B end of the car, with its fixed Dreadnaught end.

Here is the other end. It is in some ways more interesting, with the end doors. Note how the running board does not extend above the raised frame of the end. 

In use on the layout, I have moved the car with a variety of cargoes. But we know from numerous Southern Pacific documents that discovery of empty double-door box cars on SP rails usually got them sent to lumber-producing areas, since loading such cars with longer lengths of timber was easier. Here is one example of this kind of waybill: 

I enjoy this car, as mentioned above, for its appearance, but also of course for the loads it can move. It’s always a welcome part of an operating session.

Tony Thompson 

My first layout

I was recently browsing through some old snapshots, and came across a group that I photographed on my first layout. That was when I lived at my parents’ home in Glendale, CA. It was simply the Model Railroader annual layout project, the Evergreen Central, published in the November and December 1953 issues. (I should mention that in an earlier post I mis-identified it as the previous year’s project, the Pine Tree Central. That error was in this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/09/thoughts-on-operation.html .)

Like most MR projects in those days, it was a very simple track plan, and very complete directions were provided for building it, down to which size wood screws and how many, how many feet of hookup wire, and what size can of walnut stain. They recommended Tru-Scale plain roadbed and Atlas track, but influenced by my days as a teen member at the Glendale Model Railroad Club, I used the Tru-Scale roadbed with milled ties. I laid the rail by hand, using Varney spikes. Below you can see some of my pencil notations on the plan, for a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood.

When built, my layout looked just like the photos in MR. An overhead view is shown below, photographed in our backyard, though the layout lived in the garage.   

I built a small cabinet for layout power sections, complete with track diagram, and a holder for the Scintilla power pack, as you see at right.

I never got past this stage, except for adding some track. But I did run trains, sometimes pretty long ones (probably my entire car roster at the time), behind  a Mantua Pacific. I also had a Model Die Casting 0-6-0 for switching.  

I collected some buildings, a Suydam ice house and deck and what I think was also a Suydam cardstock warehouse building, and added a second siding, as you can see here. The loco is the 0-6-0.

The following month, MR had a cover story on scenery for this layout, but I never did any of that part of the project, being intimidated about creating scenery.

This was fun, and of course instructive in learning a little about layouts, wiring, and so on. My dad helped me build a system of ropes and pulleys so the layout could be hoisted above the family car in the garage, and lowered down onto sawhorses when I wanted to operate. But of course it was only a few years until high school and. . . you know, cars, girls, sports . . . and the layout was no more. But I enjoyed doing as much as I did.

Tony Thompson