Seasonality in reefer usage

On my layout, I have chosen to model all of 1953, in that each operating session is on the current month and day, but in 1953. So an April 13 session this year would be modeled as April 13, 1953, and a session this fall on September 15 would be September 15, 1953. One reason for this is so that I can mirror the varying crops being harvested; the area I model was in peak harvest for least one crop in every month of the year.

I have shown this crop seasonality before (see, for example, in this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/09/seasonality-of-crops-and-traffic.html ), but below is the vegetable crop chart for my modeled area, taken from the multi-page chart in the back of the PFE book (Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Signature Press, 2000), pages 442–447.  You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish. Black bars are peak harvests, gray bars off-peak harvesting.

But today’s post is not about accuracy of crops loaded, which in any case only shows up on the waybill. Instead, it is about the cars into which the crops were loaded. At the time I model, PFE had by far the largest reefer fleet in North America, around 40,000 cars. During most of the year, this fleet could handle all of the reefer needs of PFE’s two parent companies, SP and UP, and contract partner WP.

But during peak harvesting in SP, WP and UP territory, July to late September, even PFE’s fleet was inadequate. The table on page 450 in the PFE book shows this by year for virtually all of PFE’s history. In 1953, for example, PFE cars handled 73 percent of that year’s 307,000 perishable shipments in SP territory. 

To solve that problem, PFE borrowed from various other reefer fleets, heavily from American Refrigerator Transport (ART), but also from Fruit Growers Express, the BAR, and others. I’ve discussed this in more detail previously (see this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/08/foreign-reefers-in-pfe-territory.html ).

So whenever I host an operating session in the July–October period, you will see various foreign reefers being loaded at packing houses on my layout. Of course PFE cars are still the majority in that period, but the foreign cars seen then for loading are rare outside that peak harvest season. Below is a peak-season example, a loaded BAR reefer being picked up at Phelan & Taylor Produce in East Shumala on my layout.

There are other details in seasonal reefer visibility. In late February, through the end of March, strawberries are a sufficiently valuable crop to demand express reefers, and indeed such cars do show up at my Guadalupe Fruit Company for loading in that period. Shown below is an example, with 40-foot PFE Class BR-40-10 no. 909 (an upgraded InterMountain model) at left, and 50-foot Railway Express reefer REX 1227 (a Walthers wood-sheathed model) at right, both spotted for loading. The Ballard depot is behind them.

These cars are normally picked by mainline (non-streamlined) passenger trains at Shumala, and are iced before departure. In the photo below, PFE 928 (with correct Symington-Gould “XL” trucks for PFE 926–950 cars of Class BR-40-10) is being spotted by SP Alco switcher no. 1474 at the ice deck in Shumala, prior to pickup. 

These variations in the reefers that are seen on the layout during operating sessions during particular parts of the year reflect prototype information, and are aspects of layout operation that I enjoy.

Tony Thompson 

Re-trucking

Here I am talking about replacing trucks on freight or passenger cars. Sometimes a car will have been supplied with the “wrong” trucks, say arch-bar when they should have been a newer design; sometimes the sideframes are really not up to snuff appearance-wise; and sometimes they roll, as a friend used to say, “like a rock down a gutter.” Replacing them is what I call re-trucking.  

Some years ago, I posted an example of replacing trucks to get the correct prototypes, on the Red Caboose Southern Pacific HO scale stock cars. The models have very nice bodies, but were delivered with T-section trucks, an SP stock-car application for which I have found no prototype documentation or photograph. Instead, I replaced the Red Caboose truck with the truck SP actually used, the Vulcan, using the Kadee model. (See this earlier post:  https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/07/modeling-sp-stock-cars.html .) 

On the passenger side, I have sometimes replaced Rivarossi trucks with Central Valley trucks, with a gain both in car weight and in appearance. I described that as part of my long series on modeling SP passenger cars (for a description, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/06/modeling-sp-passenger-cars-part-20.html ). 

My second reason for re-trucking, poor appearance, includes such trucks as the snap-in AHM trucks. I showed my method for replacing them in an old post (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/03/replacing-snap-in-trucks.html ). The photo below shows the kind of truck I replace immediately: its coupler, snap-in attachment, poor sideframes, and terrible wheelsets all disqualify this truck for operating use.

 A common source of trucks that roll poorly is brass cars. A large proportion of sales of such models is to collectors, who often don’t care, or care much, about rolling quality. In my case, I do want to operate the models, so trucks often get replaced. This topic has come up before, as part of a larger grumble about the shortcomings of many brass cars (that post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/08/grumbling-again-about-brass-freight-cars.html ).

I don’t want to single out any particular importer or manufacturer of brass models, and the following example is just one recently encountered. I have a number of Challenger brass models of SP and PFE cars, and most roll just fine. But one of them, a model of Class R-40-26, is very much an exception. I had already had to replace all the side lettering (for why, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/05/correcting-brass-model-of-pfe-car.html ).

Fiddling with the trucks didn’t result in any improvement. Most of the prototype PFE class had American Steel Foundries A-3 “Ride Control” trucks. These were the best-selling freight trucks after World War II and many manufacturers have produced them in HO scale. I chose a pair of such trucks from my stash.

To prepare the Challenger reefer, I drilled out the metric screw holes with a no. 50 drill, tapped 2-56, and attached new HO trucks with short 2-56 brass screws. These gave a stable rolling performance and were at the correct height for the Kadee couplers already installed.

I will look forward to seeing this car in service on the layout again, now that it has been successfully re-trucked. I regret the necessity of doing so, but it’s a job that unfortunately is all too familiar with brass HO rolling stock 

Tony Thompson 

Waybills, Part 129: Reading a waybill

I know, waybills aren’t most people’s idea of reading material. What I mean is the way one deciphers information, that is, “reads,” a waybill. I know this comes up on a number of layouts which use prototypical waybills  in layout operation.

First, it’s useful to understand what is on a prototype waybill, even though most model railroad versions are simplified from the prototype, often considerably so. But of course the goal in such simplification is to retain essentials. So I’ll begin with a prototype example, which happens to be from the Long Island Railroad. You can click on the image to enlarge if you wish.

I tell people to start at the upper left corner.  Shown there is the identity of the car that is carrying the load: Southern Railway no. 262825, a 40-foot steel boxcar of 40-ton capacity. 

Next, in the area just below the car identity, are shown, at left, the destination place, and on the right, the place of origin. In fact, this division down the center of the document separates information about the shipper and consignee all the way down to the load information. Here the load is going from Bushwick, New York to Ellenburgh, New York. Bushwick is a neighborhood in the northern part of Brooklyn (New York City), and an industrial area at the time of this 1954 waybill. Ellenburg (as now spelled) is in extreme northern New York state, west of Lake Champlain and near the Canadian border.

On a model railroad, you might be modeling either of these places, making the load either inbound or  outbound; or it may be a car in a mainline train, en route between the two.

The next lines below the origin and destination line contains both the routing between the two places, and the names of the shipper and consignee. The Long Island will transfer the car to the New York Central, which in turn will hand off to the Rutland for delivery. Also shown is the shipper, Farmers Grain Co., and the consignee, Carpenter & Adams. At right note the faint image of a weight agreement stamp.

Finally, the load is shown (400 bags of spent brewer's grain, probably from making beer), along with the weight of the load (40,400 pounds) and the charges, which were probably checked by two different clerks, since the pencil check marks are different colors. Also noted is “SL&C,” which stands for “shipper load and count,” meaning that the weight agreement shown by the stamp identifies the expected weight of a bag of spent grain. That means it’s only necessary to count the bags, and multiply by the standard weight, to know the weight of the load.

Each of these elements can be included in a model railroad waybill. Here’s an example from my layout, a load moving in a quite different part of the country, but with the same elements described above being present, including the SL&C notation and a weight agreement stamp.

Waybills need not be complicated to use in model operation, and once familiar, are easy to understand.  I hope this example of “reading” a waybill is helpful.

Tony Thompson 

 

 

 

 

Kitbashing: a cautionary tale

This story has a long background. Several years ago, I happened to have a Denver & Rio Grande Western stock car spotted at the stock pen in the East Shumala area of my layout, and a visiting operator asked about it. “Well,” I said, ‘it’s kind of a long story, not entirely a happy one.” His response was that maybe I could write it up for the blog. Now I’ve gotten around to it. (Here’s the model at work; there’s a better model photo below.) 

Back in the 1980s, I had spoken to Richard Hendrickson about a variety of kitbashing projects, and he mentioned the Denver & Rio Grande Western stock cars. I can’t recall that he offered to send a photo but I found one in the Beebe and Clegg book, Rio Grande: Mainline of the Rockies (Howell-North, Berkeley, 1962), page 287. It was taken near Frazer, Colorado by Jim Ehernberger, probably in 1955. Mid-train helper is 2-8-8-2 No. 3612.

Note here that the middle of the three visible stock cars, D&RGW 36403D (D for double deck), is distinctly taller than the cars on either side of it. Moreover, that car is somewhat like the Athearn stock car in its side bracing pattern and door. But it seemed to have a conventional paneled steel roof and Dreadnaught ends. A quick check of the ORER showed that the 36400–36499 series was 40 feet long and over 14 and a half feet tall.

But a lot of the D&RGW stock car fleet by the 1950s was still 36-foot cars, most of them about a foot shorter in height than 36403D. No doubt those are the identity of the two cars flanking D&RGW 36403D. 

Now this was back in the “bad old days” when our raw material for kitbashing was heavily based on Athearn “Blue Box” products. Knowing,as I did, that the Athearn stock car, based on a Union Pacific prototype, had a diagonal-panel roof that is a mirror image of the prototype (the diagonals run the wrong way), I started with an Athearn box car, cutting out the sides but saving the straight-panel roof and Dreadnaught ends.  

I then cut the sides from an Athearn stock car,and fitted them to the box car body, adding styrene spacers to each side of the box car floor to suit the width of the Athearn ends. The Athearn running board was discarded and replaced with  scale 1 x 6-inch styrene strips, and Westerfield corner grab irons were added.

As I often did in those days with Athearn rolling stock, I added a strip of styrene 2 x 4 to widen the brake step, and added 1 x 2 styrene supports underneath. I added wire grab irons to the sides, though I left the cast-on sill steps and ladders. Here’s a view of the B end of the model.

On the sides, I carved away the Athearn cast-on letter board at the left of the door, and made new letter boards from 0,010-inch styrene strip. I also decide to add a detail I thought was a great idea at the time, a broken board in the car side. The ends of it were painted raw wood color. I now know that a livestock owner could reject such a car for loading, because of danger of injury to the stock.

 The completed model was painted black, and lettered with parts of Champ set HN-4 and some Walthers alphabet decal parts. It was then given a coat of clear flat, and weathered with my usual acrylic washes (see Reference pages linked at the top right of this post). Here’s a side view of it.

Imagine my dismay when I learned that there were several problems with this model. First, the Rio Grande built these cars in 1954 and 1955, after my 1953 modeling era. Second, most or all of them had Improved Dreadnaught ends and diagonal-panel roofs, neither of which my model has. I didn’t create separate doors for the two decks, either.

But evidently not every 36000-series car had the later ends; below is a Jim Parker photo of 39432 (this is from Jim Eager’s excellent book, Rio Grande Color Guide (Morning Sun Books, 1996). Either this is a transition end, or is simply older (you can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish). 

So I have kept this car in service on my layout, stand-in though it may be. After all, it has a lot of the prototype right. And I confess I still like it.

Tony Thompson 

My recent layout operating session

Last weekend I hosted a pair of operating sessions on my layout, which happened to be sessions no. 109 and 110 on the present layout. It was an entirely ordinary session, with things generally working well. Regular readers of this blog will know my series of posts, entitled “Trackwork wars,” most recently concentrating on the trackage between Ballard and Santa Rosalia (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/12/trackwork-wars-part-17.html ).    

Since that previous post on trackwork issues, Jim Providenza has been here again to work on the track, and the results are gratifying; crews had almost no derailments in that area of work.  

On Saturday the 28th, the crew was Jim Radkey, Jon Schmidt, Mike Stewart, and Lisa Gorrell. All had operated here multiple times before, so for them it was a session in which they could follow familiar procedures. At the beginning of the session, Mike and Lisa worked at Shumala, and Jon and Jim began work with the Santa Rosalia Local. They are shown below at Ballard, with Jim (right) conducting. 

Mike and Lisa started at Shumala, then in the second leg took the local to Ballard and Santa Rosalia. In this photo, Lisa (right) isn't really that tall; she’s on a stool to reach into the layout.

The next day, Sunday, the crew was Seth Neumann, Tom Comyns, Richard Brennan and Steve van Meter. Steve also brought along his grandson, Jackson, as an observer. Most of them are shown below at Shumala; from left, they are Tom, Jackson, Steve and Richard. 

Seth and Tom began work with the Santa Rosalia Local. They are shown below with Seth (at left) conducting. As usual, Seth took the time to prepare a detailed switch list, and was then able to work quickly and accurately. 

Richard and Steve worked the first shift at Shumala, aided by Jackson, and after the break, took their turn with the second Santa Rosalia Local of the day. Below you see Steve (at left) conducting, and Richard as the engineer at Ballard. 

We had a good session all around, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and I was gratified that some of the previously ongoing track gremlins stayed in their burrow this time.

Tony Thompson 

Cars on the layout for op sessions

This is an apparently evergreen topic, as I have posted about it a couple of times, but continue to get inquiries about it. My most recent post on the subject is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/08/cars-on-layout-for-op-session.html , from five years ago. But let me re-visit the area one more time. 

Most expressions of interest have been about choices of cars, and the related topic, how the layout car population changes or continues from session to session. There is a general pattern, that a car coming onto the layout via delivery by the Guadalupe Local is then switched to its destination industry, in that session or the following one. It then may be picked up and taken outbound in the next or next following session. 

But there are also cars that get added to the layout before a particular session, maybe by being placed directly at an industry, and then picked up in that or a subsequent session. And on occasion a car that has resided at an industry for a couple of sessions may be removed by “0-5-0” before the next session. Thus there is not a rigid or unchanging rhythm to car movements.

So what’s going on? Don’t I have a plan or a system? Well, if you have read this blog very often, you know that I would be bound to have a system. It’s just not inflexible. I always cringe a little bit at the term “play value,” but this is a good example of what we mean by it. I want each session to be interesting and varied, and to include a wide variety of freight cars. 

So if we look at the photo below, just taken today at Shumala on my layout, showing an assortment of cars being readied for an upcoming operating session, what do we see? I will come back to the details, but these seven cars include a pair of SP gondolas at right, an Associated Oil Co. tank car and a New York Central box car to their left, and behind them, box cars owned by the Rock Island, Buffalo Creek Flour, and the Cotton Belt. This does reflect an aspect of the variety I want.

Now what do I mean by “variety?” I mean prototypical variations in the car population by railroad. To me, there are two parts to this aspect. First is home-road cars; second is what railroaders call “foreign” cars, those owned by all railroads other than the home road.

There are extensive data for any railroad about home-road cars, in the form of yard and train photographs. Ideally, one hopes to also find less “snapshot” kinds of evidence, in the form of conductors’ time books, yard lists or wheel reports, though disappointingly few such documents survive. For the railroad I model, the Southern Pacific, data show home-road cars to be around 25 to 35 percent of all cars (for example, see the analysis here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/03/modeling-freight-traffic-coast-line_11.html ).

For foreign cars, we have the benefit of a very interesting idea, the Gilbert-Nelson hypothesis (which I’ve described in detail previously: see https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2010/12/choosing-model-car-fleet-2.html ). This hypothesis, well supported with data for trunk line or long-haul railroads, is that freight cars appear in proportion to their percentage in the national freight car fleet. Thus our main tool for choosing foreign cars is data for that national fleet.

My most-used version of this tool is the graph below. What it shows is fleet size for the “top 15” railroads.  This graph is for 1950, one that I have shown previously in several places, showing the size of car fleets, minus coal and ore hoppers. (For a defense of that adjustment, see this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/05/proportions-of-freight-car-fleet.html , or my article in Model Railroad Hobbyist for  December 2011).   

A few things to point about this graph. First, the five biggest fleets (other than SP) are the PRR, NYC, ATSF, Milwaukee and B&O. I try to make sure that cars from three to five of these roads participate in every operating session. Second, notice that PFE shows up here because of its fleet size; I do indeed operate a considerable number of PFE reefers, as they provided SP with its reefer needs. Rock island, with a car contained in the photo at the top of this post, is well down in this graph but obviously one of the largest freight car fleets in the U.S., and also an interchange partner with SP.

What about that Buffalo Creek car? In my era, the Buffalo Creek Railroad owned exactly 500 box cars, all leased to Buffalo Creek Flour. Isn’t that far too small a railroad for me to have one of their cars, after looking at the graph above? Here I like to quote a comment from my friend Tim O’Connor, that each “tiny” car owner individually is invisible, but collectively they rostered over 5 percent of the national fleet. So a car of a some tiny railroad really should show up occasionally. 

Beyond the intent to include about 30 percent of an operating session in SP cars, and to include cars of the “Big Five” shown above, everything else depends on the needs of shippers. I have documented previously my overall framework for determining these needs. (See that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/11/operations-demand-based-car-flow-2.html .) This forms the background for choosing car movements in any one session. If all this isn’t clear, please contact me with questions.

Tony Thompson 

SoundRail 2026

Last week was another fine return of the SoundRail operating weekend in the Seattle area (it’s named for Puget Sound). I have attended five previous SoundRails, and enjoyed every one. They continue to use their iconic logo, with Seattle’s landmark Space Needle featured. 

We began the week, as several of us from the Bay Area often do, in a “bonus session” at Joe Green’ excellent C&O layout in Sequim, Washington. It is set in 1974, is beautifully scenicked and runs perfectly. Below I show the crewman I was paired with, Mark Schutzer, with Joe standing in the background, moving our “road job” train to its destination, where we would do local switching.

The first formal session of the event found me at Bill Sornsin’s outstanding HO scale Great Northern layout, set in 1955. I landed a job I like on this layout, in the large Interbay Yard at Seattle. It’s shown below, with my fellow switchman, Seth Neumann, in the distance. The yard is large enough to have ample space for switching work, a feature not always found on model railroads. 

The second layout of the regular program that I drew was Bill Messecar’s Santa Fe layout, set on Santa Fe’s 3rd District in Southern California, involving Riverside, Corona, and Placentia, with lots of local switching. I was especially impressed with Bill’s many handsome structures. Here is just one of them, the Exchange Citrus plant at Corona. 

Finally, we wrapped up the weekend at Dale Kreutzer’s beautiful Rio Grande Southern layout, set in 1926 when the railroad had a lot of business. At one point, I was the engineer on a train with Mike Chandler conducting, and when we had a meet at Hesperus, the only siding (the house track), was quite full, necessitating a saw-by. Here you see, at left, Mike, Cal Sexsmith, and Jim Providenza watching the moves (Cal and Jim were the crew of the train we were meeting, which is passing the depot).  

As it has been for every SoundRail I have attended, it was a wonderful weekend. Lots of camaraderie, excellent layouts, and plenty of good operation. I look forward to SoundRail in every even-numbered year. 

But the real reason I report like this on an operating weekend is to encourage those who haven’t, or haven’t recently, attended one. They are a lot of fun, and I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t tried one, to seek out an event of this kind, and jump on the next chance you get.

Tony Thompson