Prairie Rail 2018, Part 2

I have already posted an abbreviated description of my experiences at the outstanding operating weekend event in Kansas City and surrounding areas in February of this year, called Prairie Rail (you can read my post at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/02/prairie-rail-2018.html ). As I mentioned in that post, there were a few really nice features on a few layouts, and I want to give them a little more space here.
     In my previous write-up, I mentioned how impressive Don Ball’s Stockton & Copperopolis layout is. Simply taking up the challenge of modeling 1895 is impressive enough. But the layout has a number of really nicely done features, and I want to show a couple of them here. First, Don has modeled a fruit shipping shed, with open sides as appropriate in California, and included stacks of shipping boxes. Readers of this blog will recall that I have put a lot of effort into the same idea, so I really admired what Don had done. Here is a shot of it (you can click to enlarge if you wish).

The boxes are just visible enough to be effective. And by the way, that vivid paint scheme on the California Fruit Express refrigerator car in the background is a well-known scheme of the 1890s, and commercial lettering was at one time available for it. Here are a couple more cars in the same paint scheme, spotted at an industry that remains to be built (and by the way, I entirely approve of indicating an industry in this way; far better for switch crews to at least envisage a structure where one is supposed to be).

     It might seem that an open-sided structure like the fruit shed in the upper photo has an unusual advantage in showing the goods being shipped. But of course one can always leave a building side open toward the layout aisle to accomplish the same thing, and Don has done that too, in the warehouse shown below, with lots of stacked sacks of grain. Notice also that including workmen in the interior really makes it come alive.

     Another really nicely done scene was one I found on Michael Borkon’s Union Pacific. It’s a scene of stock cars being given new bedding. Whenever stock was rested at an intermediate point, as required by federal law, the stock would be reloaded into a clean car with fresh bedding, not reloaded into a dirty car. Thus a resting stockyard, like this UP one in Wyoming, would have to be able to supply bedding, which could be straw or sand, as specified by the shipper. Here is Michael’s siding for the bedding of stock cars.

You can see sand, probably shoveled out of dirty cars, trucks of fresh sand, and also bales of straw, ready for use. A closer-up view, below, shows a few of the straw bales, and one of several workmen. This is great modeling because it depicts an important part of livestock shipping, yet one that is not often modeled.

     You can tell I really enjoyed seeing these layouts and having the opportunity to operate on several of them. These layout owners have just done great jobs with their modeling. That was only part of what was a great weekend!
Tony Thompson