The 2026 Naperville meeting

 Last week the 32nd Naperville meeting, essentially a Railroad Prototype Modelers meeting or RPM, was convened at Naperville, Illinois. Founded by Martin Lofton and conducted by him and his wife Patricia for 16 years, the meetings since have been managed by several different people. It now seems established at the very nice convention facility of Northern Illinois University, still in Naperville.

As has become standard at these meetings, the Mod-U-Trak groups in HO and N scales each set up large sectional layouts. These are two separate clubs, one in each scale, and they really are not “modular” layouts; instead, they have chosen to have sections that mate with each other and thus make scenic sense as a whole. In the building lobby was the HO layout, seen here from the second floor balcony. 

 In one of the large display rooms the N scale layout was assembled, even larger than the HO layout. It was hard to photograph it to show its size, but here is a view from one corner. Beyond the layout were numerous vendor tables.

There was, as always, a model display, and this year it required a separate room. I chose a moment when not too many observers were present, and photographed about a third of the room. It was disappointing, though, that tables were not elevated for better viewing.

The clinic programs at Naperville have always been very good, particularly this year, when I never had a time slot without something I wanted to see, and often hard choices between two desirable talks. Just to choose a single example, Steve Hile gave another of his excellent freight car talks, this time about Armour reefers. That’s Steve at left, and yes, he’s wearing a “Friends of the Freight Car” shirt.

One of the clinics I enjoyed was Clark Propst describing making 1920s-style 50-foot automobile cars, starting from Roundhouse and Walthers cars. l was especially interested in an SP version, for which Clark removed the original model sides, replaced them with sheet styrene, and then built a representation of Z-bar posts and braces with two styrene strips for each rib, a wider one on top to make the flange. 

Below is a photo of the good-looking SP car, which, with a relatively short under-door stiffener and no end doors, has to be Class A-50-11. Alas, the car number lies outside that number series (SP 69380–69529), but if I know Clark, he will just correct it and move on.

All in all, a really enjoyable meeting and of course the opportunity to renew acquaintances with many long-time friends. I very much enjoyed it. And if it sounds good to you, there will be another one next year.

Tony Thompson 

Reminders of John Allen’s modeling

John Allen, as even younger modelers must know, built and publicized his Gorre & Daphetid Railroad layout (the name meant to be read as “Gory & Defeated,” a name he later regretted). It was often shown in the Model Railroader (MR) of the day, most notably in the back-cover ads for Varney products (about which more in a moment). And after John passed away, Linn Westcott of MR put together an excellent tribute book, Model Railroading with John Allen.

Awhile back, I wrote two posts about John Allen, hopefully with thoughtful considerations of his strong and weak points (one of them is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/07/what-can-you-say-about-john-allen.html ); and a second post to follow up can be found here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/07/thoughts-on-john-allen-part-2.html ). 

I’ll briefly repeat the points I made in those posts: John was a pioneer in many ways, from weathering to realistic operating practices to realistic photography (John was a professional photographer) to fully detailed scenes on the layout, when all those things were rare. Just look at layout  articles or “Trackside Photos” in MR issues in those days, for confirmation. For an example, I’ll use one his Varney ads, which began to run on the back cover of MR in June of 1952. This one is from February 1954.

This kind of photo was utterly stunning in that era. The scene is detailed, and has figures in working poses, at a time when Campbell and other figures were mostly in very wooden positions. John made them himself with wax over wire armatures. The two Varney plastic box cars were not actually in John’s operating fleet, they are just there for the ad. Modelers in those days would pore over these ads and marvel at John’s modeling.

I’ve mentioned before, in the second of the two posts linked above, that I made a model to match one of John’s stock cars that was visible in a Varney ad, the relevant portion of which is shown below. 

This GD stock car is a Varney product, little changed by John. I chose to start from a Train Miniatures kit (a better model than the Varney, and having a wood running board). This model does show up occasionally in one of my operating sessions. 

Among John’s well-known “whimsy” models was a box car with lettering intended to be amusing, in the Allen mold. John’s model was built from a Central Valley 34-ft. box car kit, and hand lettered for the Superior Detritus Company. Decals for it are available today from SPD Train (see their site at: https://3dptrain.com/products/gbc-b011 . 

I am thinking of getting a set of these decals and lettering a box car, again for those occasional appearances in an operating session. I’d also have to devise a waybill or two . . . hmm, I’m getting some ideas . . .

Tony Thompson 

The 46th annual convention of the SP Historical & Technical Society

Last weekend the SP Historical & Technical Society had its annual convention at Visalia, California. Like all organizations post-Covid, attendance was well below what it once was, but the 120-person attendance was better than last year and certainly an encouraging sign. I definitely enjoyed the meeting, but then again, I almost always do. Here’s the convention logo, with Visalia Electric power shown.

There was a good clinic program, with a number of excellent presentations. I especially enjoyed Mike Osborne’s talk about switching Gemco yard. Whether my own talk would qualify, I don’t know, but it was a repeat of a talk that I’ve given before, on modeling SP operating practices (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/01/handout-for-modeling-sp-operations.html ).  

As always at these meets, there was a large and active vendor room, thronged with browsers between talks every day. Below is a view of the room. 

The most stunning display in the model room, and the talk of the convention, was Larry Saslaw’s HO scale model of the Oakland Mole. It was difficult even to get an overall photograph of it, but this will convey some of the impact. 

In the model contest, I liked Tom Cockle’s model of an SP automat car, made from a 6-6-4 sleeper, just like the prototype, by filling multiple windows. And as was the case on the prototype, you can see indentations at each former window location. (You can click to enlarge.)

Thursday afternoon, we had a guided tour of the beautifully restored Kingsburg SP depot, superbly re-done, even to the agent’s quarters upstairs. Here is a view of the office area, with the ticket window in the distance. (See my recent post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-business-side-of-depot.html .)

Another thing the Kingsburg people have accomplished is to rescue the SP switcher, Class S-10 1238 and its 4700-gallon “sausage” tender, that had been sitting in the dirt at Fresno for years. How far they intend to go with restoration, I don’t know, but it is nice to at least see it on rails again. 

All in all, a lot of interesting things at this meeting, and I for one certainly found it fun. Whatever your prototype railroad, you might find it worthwhile to attend one of its historical societies’ conventions someday.

Tony Thompson 

 

 

The business side of the depot

At most railroad depots, several kinds of business might be done, from selling passenger tickets and checking baggage, to working with shippers and consignees regarding cars being loaded or delivered. In this post, I want to address the latter part, the freight side.

Most SP enthusiasts will know the very informative film the company made, This Is My Railroad. At one point in the film, the narrator mentions that a local agent was the railroad’s face in that town. In brief clips, the film shows an agent in shirtsleeves selling a ticket to a passenger (upper view below), and working with a freight customer (who appears to be signing a freight bill), lower view. 

We all know the passenger side, with the waiting room and ticket counter. But where is that other counter? Below is a floor plan of this part of a standard SP depot interior (from a Jean Guy Dube drawing). 

In the drawing, the waiting room and passenger ticket counter are at right. At the left side of the office, with its own outside door, is the long counter for freight business. The operator’s desk is in the bay window at drawing bottom. 

The outside of such a depot, in this case Common Standard 22, is shown in a photo from Goleta, California (Clark Bauer collection). Next to the office door is the bill box, indicated with the arrow, where waybills and other paperwork could be exchanged with crews when the agent was not on duty. 

I don’t have an interior view of a freight counter in an SP depot, but below is a good version from a Chicago & North Western depot. 

Probably the fellow with the bow tie is the agent, and the man in the background is the operator. The others are freight clerks with their ledgers. At far left is likely a customer.

This is where those Bills of Lading were signed, and waybills typed, and it’s where waybills for arriving loads supplied the information to began the writing of freight bills. And this is whee a local train crew would come to talk to the agent and find out what work they had in town.

This is what I meant in referring to the “business side” of the depot. Certainly from the Depression onward, this was the side that made significant money for the railroad. I often feel that we as modelers don’t do enough to represent how this side of railroading worked. But I keep writing, and presenting talks, to try and remedy that.

Tony Thompson 

Open-car loads of various vehicles

I have posted many times about open-car loads, and often about military vehicles. Today I’m not talking about the military ones, but about other kinds of vehicles, including rail vehicles. There was a similar post about five years ago (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/06/railroad-equipment-on-flat-cars.html ).

In that previous post, I showed one of my Scottish locomotive models, a Caledonian Railway tank engine, on a flat car. Since it has its livery from before the 1923 “Grouping,” in which fully 120 British railways were grouped into four largely regional companies, one could presume it was en route to display at a museum. I might mention that the model is OO scale, not HO, and thus larger than it should be in an HO setting.

The same can be done with my model of a Highland Railway locomotive, HR no. 2, Ben Alder. This 4-4-0 was built in 1898, to a design by then-new Locomotive Superintendent Peter Drummond, and not only survived the Grouping, becoming London Midland & Scottish 14398, but even survived the British Railways takeover of all British lines in 1948, becoming BR 54398, and continuing in service until 1953.

Below is a photo of sister locomotive HR 3, Ben Wyvis, at Perth, circa 1920, the locomotive at right (R.D. Stephen photo). The livery you see here is not the original 19th century scheme, but a simplified, solid dark green livery, with the tender simply lettered “H R.” 

My model, built from a DJH kit has the fully lined 19th century livery, thus the locomotive could only be en route to display of some form.

The locomotive plus tender are almost 60 scale feet long in HO, so rail shipping would likely be most convenient as two separate vehicles, in the manner you see below. This is an extra train, which would operate over the division at low speed to deliver the historic cargo.

Another example is a mine car being shipped to a new owner. It’s lettered for the old owner, Cove Creek Stone, and is an A-frame dump car. At the right end of the car in the photo below is a conventional hand brake; on the other end is a crank handle for the dump doors. This is an example of using different flat cars with the removable rail arrangement; this load was shown on flat car SP 140558 in the post cited in the first paragraph, above.

Note that rails have been spiked to the deck of the flat car. There certainly exist photos of rail equipment being shipped this way. What about narrow gauge equipment? I could of course make a separate, new version of what you see above, at 3-foot gauge, but I decided instead to simply add a third rail to the arrangement above, to accommodate such loads. 

Another rail vehicle that might well be shipped this way is a group of speeders. I posted a description of these models, Fairmont M-19, 3D-printed by Ken Harstine, in an earlier blog post (you can see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/07/speeders-or-are-they-motor-cars.html ). I have omitted tie-downs here because they are rather small in HO scale.

Another example is a hot-metal car, destined to the Jupiter Pump & Compressor plant in my layout town of Ballard. This model Pollock hot-metal car was described in a previous post (it can be viewed at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/10/a-pollock-hot-metal-car-part-2.html ), and it makes a good example of an exceptional load that calls for special handling. 

Each of these loads is a particularly eye-catching part of any operating session, so although I enjoy including them, I also make sure not to include them too often. They should be perceived as the unusual events that they are.

Tony Thompson 

Modeling an acid tank car

A couple months ago, I reviewed John Riddell’s fine new book, Canadian Car & Foundry, and included in the review several builder photos. They weren’t entirely chosen at random; each had some modeling interest or specific freight car history content as well. (You can read that review at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/08/an-excellent-new-freight-car-book.html .)

One of the images was a 1931 photo of a brand-new acid tank car. It was built for Consolidated Mining and Smelting Co. of Canada, headquartered at Trail, British Columbia, site of what was at one time the largest lead/zinc smelter in the world. That photo is repeated below. 

So why would a smelter company own acid tank cars? The sulfur dioxide by-product of smelting is not only environmentally damaging if released, but if recovered, can readily be converted to sulfuric acid and sold as an additional revenue stream. Cominco (as the company was often known) owned 14 of these acid cars, numbered CMSX 1–14.

I should mention that the car shown above is readily recognized as an acid tank car because of its dome. Acid cargoes were normally unloaded by suction up through the dome, rather than draining through a bottom outlet, so this is not an expansion dome. The AAR code for cars without bottom outlets, a suffix letter “A” for acid, means that this was an AAR Type TA car.

These cars are listed in the Official Railway Equipment Register as 5900-gallon capacity; those are Imperial gallons, which convert to 7085 U.S. gallons. Tangent Scale Models offered a very nice 7000-gallon  acid tank car some years back. I acquired several of them; I reviewed one at the time (see my post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-terrific-new-tank-car-model.html ). They follow an AC&F prototype, but look quite similar to the CC&F car shown above.

I knew that Black Cat Publishing (Winnipeg, Manitoba) had a decal set for this lettering scheme (set CMSX1); you can see their line of decals at this site: https://www.blackcatdecals.com/product-category/ho-decals/private-tank-cars/ . One of the Tangent models I purchased was undecorated black, for future decal application. Yes, one handrail on the dome platform needs to be replaced; I used brass wire.

This model does have a dome platform, which the CMSX cars originally did not, but some car owners did apply these in later years. I don’t know whether or how many of the CMSX cars were so modified, but here is the model photo included on the Black Cat Decals web page, with credit to Lyall Falk included. On this basis, I chose to leave the dome platform in place, though this looks more like a high-pressure valve bonnet than an acid dome.

Decal application was straightforward. Every Black Cat set I have ever used was high quality and easy to work with. Incidentally, the white diamond provided in the decal set for the side of the dome is incorrect. That diamond denotes an “approved manway,” which acid cars did not have. Here is the model, still awaiting placards and weathering (separate topics, in some ways). 

To operate this car on my layout, of course, it needs a waybill, and here is an example of what an inbound bill might look like. 

This is an interesting tank car, being as it is from western North America, and I expect it to show up from time to time in my operating sessions.

Tony Thompson 

Car Distribution

The title of this post is that of a railroad job, the person responsible for maintaining the inventory of active cars on the railroad, foreign and domestic, and fulfilling requests for empty cars. I have written two prior posts on this topic, beginning with a general description (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/12/whats-car-distributor.html ) and following up with additional information (that post is at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/06/more-about-car-distributors.html ).

Yard offices in the steam era did all kinds of paperwork, including distributing empty cars. The photo below is of the Santa Fe yard office at Amarillo, Texas in November, 1942 (John Vachon photo, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress negative LC-USW3-011438-D). The gentleman in the light Stetson is the yardmaster.

This photo depicts a modest amount of staff; doubtless not everyone is shown. But in a truly large and busy yard, such as Southern Pacific’s Taylor Yard at Los Angeles, the numbers were bigger. In a previous post about this topic (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/05/clerks-waybills-and-all-that-waybills.html ), I showed several photos of the staff at this office; one of them is below. These men are identified in the post cited.

Amongst all these people and their manifold duties is a Car Distributor. It can be an important concept to understand for layout operation to achieve realistic movement of empty cars.

And the core operations point, referring to car distribution, is “where do empty cars come from?” The prototype answer is that there is a “reservoir” yard, to which every town agent addresses requests for empties, and from which every town receives them. This is often easy to research if you have access to an organization chart or, better, a list of railroad officials. Car distributors were only in charge of reservoir yards. 

That doesn’t mean that empty cars never came from anywhere else. But the common model railroad move, of a car made empty in a town, then being used at another industry for loading, was a rare occurrence on the prototype, as several experienced railroaders have commented. The timing, and having the exact car type (and grade) that was needed, being available, was pretty unusual. 

So how was this administered? On the Southern Pacific, empty car movement was the responsibility of the Transportation section of the Operating Department. Car distribution was under the supervision of the general superintendent of transportation. Under him, Freight Car Service was the specific duty of its superintendent. These officers were located in San Francisco. 

On Southern Pacific’s Pacific Lines, the railroad west of El Paso, there were ten operating divisions. There was, in general, one Car Distributor for each division, with two exceptions. The very long Salt Lake Division had a Car Distributor at each end, Sparks, Nevada, and Ogden, Utah. And the immense Western Division shared Oakland Pier and Stockton. 

They were as follows: San Francisco (Coast Div.), Oakland Pier and Stockton (Western Div.), Sacramento (Sacramento Div.), Ogden and Sparks, (Salt Lake Div.), Dunsmuir (Shasta Div.), Portland (Portland Div.), Bakersfield (San Joaquin Div.), Los Angeles (LA Div.), Tucson (Tucson Div.), and El Paso (Rio Grande Div.). 

A good summary of the topic of SP car distribution comes from an article in the SP employee magazine, Southern Pacific Bulletin, in the issue for September 1951: 

“The car service department at San Francisco supervises the tide movement and allocation of empty freight equipment over the ten divisions of the Pacific Lines with an ever watchful eye on economic factors, consisting of maintaining minimum per diem expenses, empty freight car miles, and the flow of empty freight cars through the several gateways of Pacific Lines from the north, south and east.” 

I remember from my interviews with Malcolm (“Mac”) Gaddis, who had worked at San Luis Obispo or SLO in the early 1950s, that I asked him where empty cars came from. He answered, “Usually Los Angeles,” and when I asked how that worked, he said that most days, the afternoon train from Los Angeles, the “San Francisco Manifest,” would have a string of empties in it for SLO. That train normally left LA at 5 AM and was scheduled into SLO at 2:40 PM, though usually late.

(I learned a great deal from Mac. You can read major excerpts from my interviews with him across several posts; use “Gaddis” as the search term in the search box at the right. of this post.)

On my layout, empty cars nearly always come from Los Angeles, though occasionally from somewhere else on the division. It would be unlikely (though not impossible) for a car to arrive from another division, given the size and activity of Los Angeles.

Tony Thompson