Painting and lettering a brass tank car

In a previous post, I discussed some 1920s waybills from the Coudersport & Port Allegany Railroad, all of them for shipments of the Gray Chemical Co. of Roulette, PA. This company and the railroad that served it survived past my modeling year of 1953, so I wanted to take advantage of the fine decals for a tank car of this company, offered by K4 Decals (see their tank car range at: ttps://k4decals.com/collections/tank-car-decals ). That previous post can be found at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/08/waybills-part-116-early-prototype.html .

I dug around in my stash of tank cars, both kits and various brass cars I’ve collected, and came upon a nice Overland Models brass 8000-gallon AC&F car, catalog number 3130. It’s shown below. I don’t know for sure that the Gray Co. cars were built by AC&F, which this model represents, but decided to take a chance on that. The alternative, if the Gray cars were built by General American, would be an undecorated Tangent 8000-gallon car.

A more serious issue is that it is a typical riveted tank, but most if not all of the Gray Chemical tank cars were aluminum, and such tanks usually were all-welded aluminum, once aluminum welding was established. Before that time, though, aluminum-lined steel tanks were built. I decided the model could represent such an older car.

Obviously with a fully constructed brass model, no additional modeling was needed (with a minor exception I’ll come to). I will just show the steps I follow for painting and lettering a model like this.

My first step was to carefully wipe down the model to remove any oils, using paint thinner. I then sprayed the entire tank (above the bottom sheet) light gray. The strategy here was to paint the gray tank and not worry about overspray onto the frame, then carefully mask the upper tank that would remain gray, and spray the underframe, trucks and bottom sheet black. Here’s the first step.

Next came the masking. I have come to strongly prefer Tamiya tape for any modeling tape needs. It’s flexible and can be made to fit over projections and around corners; it sticks well and never allows paint to bleed underneath; and it comes off cleanly when you’re done without ever lifting any paint. I taped all of the tank above the bottom sheet, and left the ladders outside the tape.

The flat black was then applied, allowed to make a good start on drying, and the tape stripped off. Nearly everywhere, the separation line was sharp and correctly located. Of course, a few minutes work with a brush would correct any errors. In the photo below, you may notice that the brake wheel has been removed. It struck me as undersized, and that I should replace it. 

I wondered whether to paint the handrail black. Looking at Ed Kaminski’s fine book, Tank Cars, AC&F, 1865–1955 (Signature Press, 2003), and concentrating on tanks with light tank colors built during the 1930 to 1950s, handrails in body color, or in black, were about equally frequent.  I decided to stay with body color, but leave the ladders black. I can always hand-paint the handrails if a prototype photo surfaces showing that feature.

Next came decals. I used the nice K4 decals as provided, with many lettering groups already assembled on the decal sheet. Only issue I could mention is that the company emblem seems oversize; it barely fits on this 8000-gallon tank car, which was indeed the prototype size. An option would be to also buy an N scale sheet for a better-size emblem. Below you will also see the new, unpainted brass Cal-Scale brake wheel attached to the brake staff. (You can click on the image to enlarge.)

This completes the main tasks with this model. Kadee couplers were then applied, and the car was weathered. This was by my usual method of washes made from acrylic tube paint (see “Reference pages” at the top right corner of this post). I included some spillage on the done. Note also there is an “empty” placard on this side of the car.

Now to make some waybills for the Gray Chemical Company’s acetic acid, and this car can begin work on the layout.

Tony Thompson

SP Piggyback, Part 1: Pacific Motor Trucking

Southern Pacific introduced piggyback service, highway trailers moving on railroad cars, in 1953. As 1953 is my modeling year, I have held off from modeling what would be the earliest days of this service (later, of course, to grow to major proportions on SP and all railroads). But SP’s introductory TOFC route (TOFC =Trailer on Flat Car) was in fact the Coast Route, a very small segment of which is depicted on my layout. So I do have the era and location to model a little bit of SP piggyback.

I would like to describe both history and modeling of the early SP piggyback service, and I expect it will require several posts in a series, which is why this one is called Part 1. A strength of the SP concept for TOFC service was that they already had a healthy business in their subsidiary, Pacific Motor Trucking or PMT, which is where I will start.

[I have written before about PMT, in a three-part series in the SP Historical & Technical Society magazine Trainline, in the issues for Spring and Summer, 1995, and Winter 1996, which were issues 43, 44, and 46, so will only summarize here.]

SP began to compete in the trucking business in the Los Angeles area in the 1920s, and one of the original SP subsidiaries was the Pacific Electric Motor Trucking Company. At first, PEMT hired local draymen for the trucking, with PE providing freight houses and rail service across the LA basin, then local draymen at destination providing delivery. At that point, PEMT was acting like an express company, providing no transportation itself, but organizing and contracting for it, and providing a single bill to customers.

Once they began to offer out-of-town rail service, for example to Santa Barbara via SP, the business took off, and was soon renamed PMT in February 1930. They quickly became truck operators themselves, with original trucks and equipment painted the dark red familiar on Pacific Electric equipment. Again, this was nothing like piggyback, just package service by truck, to and from freight houses (but now in PMT equipment), and rail service using baggage cars. This soon expanded to a Los-Angeles–-San Francisco route.

As the service grew, SP decided to operate special trains and use dedicated box cars, which initially were Dark Olive Green but soon acquired the famous pre-war “Overnight” scheme of an all-black car with orange lettering and body stripe. This was discontinued as a non-essential service during World War II, but revived as soon as the war ended, still with all-black box cars but  now with an even more famous paint scheme. (photo courtesy Bruce Petty)

What made this go was PMT, still providing pick-up of packages and taking them to an SP freight house, just as in the earliest days, then to be loaded into Overnight cars, and at the other end, delivering those packages to the recipient from a freight house. In other words, it was the same door-to-door service originally conceived. It remained primarily an LA–San Francisco business, with guaranteed next-day (“overnight”) service.

Naturally PMT equipment was decorated to show the SP connection, and in the 1930s became Daylight Red and Orange, as in the GMC box truck shown below, which would have been used for in-town pickup and delivery (SP photo, courtesy Paul Koehler). In addition, PMT owned flat-bed trucks, stake trucks, tank trucks, and a wide variety of other truck equipment, used for inter-city trucking as well as the Overnight door-to-door operation. There were lots of equipment photos in my Trainline articles.

The inter-city work was mostly done with semi-trailers of conventional design, most of them with doors on the right or curb side for in-town delivery, along with end doors for freight platforms. The photo below is a 1940s publicity photo to emphasize the rail connection, shown here as a box car at a freight platform (SP photo, courtesy Steve Peery). The tractor here is a GMC, typical of SP’s long closeness with Chevrolet and GMC motor vehicles, pulling a 22-foot trailer.

Although most PMT tractors were conventional ones like that shown above, PMT did operate a fair number of cab-over tractors. Often they were Internationals, as in the photo below, which shows a 1946 Model D-500 tractor at Los Angeles (SP photo). At right is a dolly which will enable a second trailer to be attached, forming what was known as a “Western double.” The curb-side door is evident.

For a color view of these “Daylight” scheme trailers, the view below near 5th and King streets in San Francisco should suffice. This is an Alden Armstrong photo of Train 132 departing for Los Gatos; power is Class P-7 Pacific no. 2476. The side door PMT trailer is in the freight shed area, with SP’s Grocer’s Terminal building in the distance.

This gives the PMT background. I will continue in following posts with a description of the beginnings of the SP and PMT piggyback story, and of course modeling,

Tony Thompson

Forty-foot automobile cars

Many modelers think first about 50-foot cars if asked about automobile cars. (The AAR definition until the middle 1950s was that any double-door box car was an “automobile” car, regardless of whether it was equipped to carry automobiles, or was ever assigned to carry automobiles.) And indeed, the 50-foot cars were the predominant type. But there were substantial numbers of 40-foot automobile cars also. 

Initially, many of these 40-foot cars were indeed assigned to carry automobiles. But as the size of automobiles increased after World War II, more and more of the 40-foot cars were re-assigned to general merchandise service, and auto racks were removed. They were then classed as AAR XM type instead of XAR or XMR.

One interesting use of such cars in the Far West was lumber service. Indeed, the 40-foot double-door car was a preferred car for lumber service, including bundled lumber and plywood, along with loose lumber. My own modeled railroad is the Southern Pacific, which certainly had such cars, as did the Great Northern and Northern Pacific. But when cars were in short supply, cars of almost any railroad would be pressed into service, including the XMR types, which had auto racks that could be secured against car roofs for merchandise loading.

Here’s an illustration (C&O Historical Society photo at Ashland, Kentucky, about 1940), of a 40-foot automobile car loaded with lumber and being unloaded through the side door (note that only one is open).

A traffic example I found among the McCloud River Railroad papers (when working on Jeff Moore’s book, The McCloud River Railroads, Signature Press, 2016), was empty 40-foot double-door cars from Baltimore & Ohio, New York Central, Wabash, Grand Trunk Western and Pennsylvania, along with cars from Western railroads, delivered from the Great Northern for loading by the McCloud River Lumber Company. As I said, when car supply was short, railroads used whatever they could get.

On my layout, lumber is delivered on team tracks either on flat cars and gondolas (rough lumber) or in boxcars (finished lumber). Naturally I include 40-foot automobile cars for these cargoes. One example, playing off the prototype photo above, is a Pere Marquette double-door car, shown below paired with a flat car of rough lumber on the team track in my town of Ballard. (This model is a 3D-printed one-piece car by Eric Boone, as I describe awhile back: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/04/a-3-d-printed-freight-car-part-3.html .)

I of course vary the cars assigned in this service, as you see below, with a pair of cars being switched at Shumala on my layout. These two are, at left, an Accurail car, custom decorated for the CNW Historical Society, CNW 57892, and at right, an old C&BT Shops car, with upgraded details, B&O 298613. If I recall the waybills at the time these were in an operating session, the B&O car carried finished lumber and the CNW car, plywood. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.)

I shouldn’t give the impression that off-line cars are what I mainly use for finished lumber. Southern Pacific rostered a number of 40-foot double-door cars, and these too show up on my layout in forest products service. Below is SP 64015, Class A-50-13, a Sunshine resin model, on the team track in my town of Santa Rosalia, with a truck already positioned alongside for unloading of the box car.

I continue to use cars like this for loads other than automobiles, though of course auto traffic was quite an important revenue source for railroads. The point is that the cars were suitable for other cargo, too, particularly, as I mentioned, for lumber in the Far West.

Tony Thompson

Waybills, Part 117: more on the history

I have been writing about waybills, both prototype and model, for a decade or more, and the Part number in today’s title conveys that span of interest. In this post, I will take up a minor but (to me) interesting aspect of the appearance of the standard waybill. 

A background point that seems to surface from time to time is the question of when a truly “standard” waybill form emerged in use. Certainly as early as the formation of the AAR (Association of American Railroads) from its predecessor the ARA (American Railway Association) in 1934, there has been a standard form, slowly changing in minor ways over the following decades. 

And it’s equally true that a few decades earlier, at the beginning of the 20th century, there was no standard, and individual railroads’ paperwork  varied considerably. What happened in between?

The AAR was formed from the ARA in 1934, as stated, but also folded into it at that time was the  Railway Accounting Officers’ Association, previously an independent group. That group, the RAOA, had promulgated the waybill forms prior to the formation of the AAR. But until recently, I really didn’t know much about the RAOA.

I have previously, in this series of posts, often referred to the roughly annual volumes issued by the AAR Accounting Division (the successor to the RAOA), entitled Railway Accounting Rules. It was included among a variety of resources I recommended for background on model waybills (see, for example: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/02/waybills-18-resources.html ). 

Recently I came across an interesting document, a reprint of the RAOA Interline Accounting Rules book for 1922. It was scanned from and reprinted by the Cornell University Library. I bought a copy on Amazon (if you Google “Railway Accounting Rules,” it will come up, along with AAR volumes at least as late as 1985, and dating back into the 1930s).

This is a softbound book, 6 x 9 inches in size, containing a 74-page report that for the first time, spelled out mandatory rules for interline accounting, possibly including waybill forms as newly mandatory. In a forward to the document, the RAOA stated that, in the past, voluntary conformance to RAOA standards by railroads has largely been successful, but that it was time to make the rules mandatory.

The 1922 date of this document is in agreement with suggestions I’ve seen, that during the time the federal government took over direction of railroads, due to the traffic emergencies during World War I, in the form of the USRA (United States Railroad Administration), that a standard form was introduced. That form then continued after the dissolution of the USRA in March 1920.

Among the interesting discoveries in this document is the appearance of several mandatory forms of waybills, including the standard freight waybill, entitled “R.A.O.A. Standard Form 98.” Many years later, the AAR version of this form was still Form 98. And most of the information called for in this form, and its location on the form, exactly match forms 30 and 40 years later

The overall appearance of this form is certainly much like later ones, but the proportions of many of the blocks to be filled in are quite different. And I was surprised to find no perishable waybill form in this book. Evidently in 1922, procedures were in use that adapted the regular freight waybill Form 98 for use with perishables.

Incidentally, in a previous post about waybills, I showed several early 1920s bills from the Coudersport & Port Allegany Railroad (at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/08/waybills-part-116-early-prototype.html ). Noticeable on some of them was this legend in the upper right corner, just as we’d expect:

For comparison with the above waybill, below is the Form 98 from the AAR’s 1951 Railway Accounting Rules book. If you click on the form to enlarge it, you will see that in many places, dimensions are provided so that users can correctly print their own forms. But of course these dimensions were not included in printed forms.

It is also of interest to examine what waybill form may have been in use prior to 1920. I have not seen any prototype waybills from the 1900–1920 period, but have found a “sample” form, from the Freight Traffic Red Book of 1920, in its Appendix, which is shown below. This is fairly different from the RAOA Form 98, above, and the extent to which it may have been used is not known to me.

Note though that the central division between shipper and consignee information is here, as is the description of cargo at the bottom, car weighing information at right center, and car identification at the top. The identification of the company preparing the waybill, at top left, is odd in that it isn’t a preprinted name, perhaps aimed at infrequent shippers.

To go any deeper into the history of these forms might require examination of the Annual Reports of the RAOA from the ‘teens and twenties, which I don’t feel terribly motivated to do. Maybe the knowledge we have will have to rest right here.

Tony Thompson

 

The Hendrickson USRA box car, Part 2

In the preceding post, I summarized the history and background of the Georgia Railroad’s USRA box cars and introduced the partially completed model, starting from a Tichy kit, which I inherited from Richard Hendrickson (USRA = United States Railroad Administration, World War I era). In this post, I describe continuing progress on the model. Here is a link to the previous  post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/07/another-hendrickson-project.html . 

I completed the underframe that had been begun by Richard, adding the AB brake gear along with the brake rodding. I decided not to model any of the brake piping, as it would not be visible in a side view (for more on this approach, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/08/simplified-underframe-brake-gear.html ). 

Next I turned my attention to the car body. In the previous post (link in top paragraph), I mentioned that the Georgia Railroad had, during the rebuilding, replaced the side grab iron rows with ladders. But the original steel ends had been build with stiles and grab irons, and these were left in place. Below is a detail from a 1960s Wilbur C. Whittaker photo, which documents this. (You can click on the image to enlarge it, if you wish.)

For my end ladders, I did the same, drilling the stiles and adding drop grab irons. These were included in Richard’s kit box with other parts, so are likely Tichy grab irons. Below is shown the A end, before adding the placard board and sill grab irons. 

Next I turned to the car sides. In the box with other parts were some very nice resin placard and route card boards, obviously not part of the original kit, and also a brass sprue of bracket grab irons. I happen to know the history of these; Dennis Storzek had them made as investment castings, using a sprue of plastic bracket grabs as the original, and he gave a few sprues to Richard. Light flash on a few rungs was easily removed. These grab irons match those added to the prototype Georgia box car, when it received steel sides.

I installed the grab irons into drilled holes with canopy glue, and used the same glue for the placard and route card boards. Kit sill steps and ladders were placed also. Now the sides were complete.

Finishing up the addition of details, and paint and lettering, will be described in a future post.

Tony Thompson

An Athearn “Blue Box” tank car, Part 3

 This series of blog posts is about using many of the parts of an Athearn “Blue Box” tank car, with the insulated tank body, as the starting point to represent a particular prototype tank car, a Shell Chemical Company high-pressure car I showed in the previous post in the series (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/07/an-athearn-blue-box-tank-car-part-2.html ).

At the end of the previous post (just cited), I had prepared the Athearn bottom sheet part for addition of the turnbuckle hold-down of the tank bands on the car. Below is a repeat of the close-up prototype photo from the previous post (link shown above). You can see that part shielding the emergence of the tank band from under the jacket is right at the longitudinal joint in the jacket.

My intention was to make the cover shield parts, then add turnbuckles. For the cover shields, I began with an Evergreen styrene scale 8 x 8-inch strip, and drilled a #75 hole through it near the end. I then carefully cut off the approximate cube containing the hole, from the end of the strip, and in turn carefully cut the cube at a 45-degree angle. A couple of these parts are shown below. Any parts that don’t come out properly are readily replaced with better ones.

Next these parts were glued to the bottom sheet, right at its top edge (see prototype photo for location), and aligned with the bolster position, as molded into the bottom sheet. 

These are now ready for turnbuckles. The Tichy parts, no. 8021, are cored for 0.0126 wire, meaning that 0.012-inch wire will fit nicely. These need only be short lengths. I cut the wire pieces over-length, glued them into one end of the turnbuckle with canopy glue, then cut the wires to the correct length and glued the wire into the shield pieces,again with canopy glue. I did this with the bottom sheet inverted, as you see below, so that the wire ends were inserted vertically.

The bottom sheet modeling work is now completed, and as soon as work on the upper tank is finished, the two parts can be painted together. I’ll describe all that in a future post.

Tony Thompson

The Railroad — What It Is, What It Does

Many readers will recognize the title of today’s blog post as the title of a book by renowned layout designer John Armstrong. This book, The Railroad — What It Is, What It Does, was first published in 1978 (Simmons-Boardman, Omaha), and though that date is long after the steam era, the book does contain considerable information about railroad practices well back into the steam era.

Here is the front cover of the original edition (soft-bound, like nearly every subsequent printing). It is 6 x 9 inches and contains 240 pages. Notice the sub-title: “The Introduction to Railroading.” That was the purpose of the book, and a purpose it has continued to fulfill.

In a number of ways, this is a remarkable book. Its breadth and depth continue to impress me, even after using it for quite a few years as a reference. I feel quite confident in stating that no matter how much you know about any one area of railroading, you will find information here that you didn’t know.

It is important to recognize that the book was a great success for Simmons-Boardman. It has been revised several times and reprinted many times. It remains in print today, and is still given to new employees on at least two of today’s railroads to give them background. 

 I also have the Second Edition, from its fourth printing of 1988. It is not enormously changed, having been revised in 1982 from the original book (written in 1977).

And of course each successive revision has removed the oldest information and terminology, and replaced it with new, along with adding new subjects as appropriate. I mention that because today’s book is significantly larger and quite different from the 1978 original. Obviously your chosen modeling era will determine whether you want the oldest edition, or one of the later ones.

John Armstrong passed away in 2004 and thus the most recent edition did not benefit from his hand. Today there is a Fifth Edition, issued in 2008, and now grown to 406 pages. If you would like to get this book, it is available directly from Simmons-Boardman for $49.95, though on-line booksellers are offering it for higher prices in some cases. I haven’t seen this edition myself.

John had been trained as a mechanical engineer (Purdue) and worked most of his career at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in the Washington, DC area. After retirement, he was a consulting editor for Railway Age magazine for ten years. As many readers will know, he was renowned in model railroading for his layout designs and for his O-scale Canandaigua Southern layout (he was born and raised in Canandaigua, New York).

His layout design ideas have been very influential, best known probably through two of his Kalmbach books, Track Planning for Realistic Operation (Kalmbach, Milwaukee, 1963, 2nd Edition, 1976), and Creative Layout Design (Kalmbach Books, 1978). He published 76 articles in Model Railroader magazine in his lifetime, greatly extending the recognition of his ideas.

When I give talks about layout operation, or waybills, or rules of freight car handling and movement, I always show a slide of this book, and recommend it to the audience. It is the authority I rely on to make sure I am correct about any aspect of the prototype. It is clear and easily understood, even on arcane topics like switching districts or milling-in-transit waybills. If you want to understand any aspect of prototype railroading, I cannot recommend this book highly enough,

Tony Thompson

Chromite ore shipments on my layout

 I’ve written several posts in the past about chromite mining in the area I model, the Central Coast of California. The first issue for me, and for anyone modeling a specific mining area, is to find out the prototype facts. I wrote a fairly general introduction about this, emphasizing how anyone could follow the kinds of leads I followed to learn about mining history in the area I model. That post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/10/modeling-mining-in-your-locale.html. 

I then wrote about modeling suitable ore cars, and suitable loads, to represent this ore traffic, in a Part 2 of the post just cited. In that post, I showed the crushed green shale I have used to represent a disseminated chromite ore (read it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/10/modeling-mining-part-2.html ). This ore was too low of a grade to be used for refining to chromium metal or ferro-chrome alloying additives, and was typically used as a component in refractory brick.

In a third, more recent post, I repeated some of the background on chromite, and showed a few of the ore cars that I have placed in service. As I prefer to do in most of my open-top cars, the loads are removable. (See: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/10/chromite-mining-on-my-layout.html .)

I was aware that by the 1950s most chromite mining in California was “pocket” mining on a small scale. I also faced the problem that there wasn’t space on the layout to install a mine scene. Solution? Assume ore is trucked from mine to rail. Then a truck dump would be the way that ore cars would be loaded, and this is also a compact kind of industry. 

I did have minimal space alongside Bromela Road in my town of Ballard, and built up a small incline that could perhaps serve as a truck dump. The truck helps identify what it is. The dump is by no means high enough to get close to direct dumping out of trucks into a railcar, so a conveyor would be needed.

So despite its obvious limitations, this preliminary attempt does suggest the activity. Then, in an operating session, a loaded ore car alongside the “dump” looks all right. A switch crew can pick up this car and understand its origin.

I have for some time kicked around ways to make this more realistic. A low truck incline is all right, if trucks can dump into a receiving bin, which in turn is emptied via conveyor into a railcar. But the space alongside Bromela Road is terribly narrow to model all that. Another possibility would be to load the ore cars at a team track, a logical place for truckloads of ore to arrive. Most of my team tracks have ample space to model a loading scene.

Note in the above photo that I show a GS (General Service) drop-bottom gondola being loaded. In one of my interviews with Mac Gaddis, he mentioned gondolas of actual chromite, a much denser material than the disseminated ore I am modeling. (See Mac’s comments at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/01/modeling-freight-traffic-coast-line_19.html .) But either ore could be loaded on my branch.

I am still toying with the idea of kitbashing the Walthers Truck Dump kit (their number 933-4058) into something I could use at a team track. I am a firm believer in Tony Koester’s admonition, “Don’t look at the name or picture on the box, just use the parts you need to make what you want” (from his fine book, How to Kitbash Structures, Kalmbach Books, 2012). If I get sufficiently inspired to do that, I’ll report on it in a future post.

Tony Thompson

Blue flags and lockouts

The title of this post may be baffling to some readers, but it refers to track safety measures: placement of blue flags to identify when a track may not be entered, or a piece of equipment may not be moved. As it applies to tracks, this is often called “locking out” a track. By rule, such a blue flag may only be placed by an authorized employee, and when placed, can only be removed by the employee who placed it. This is of course to avoid misunderstandings about the status of the blue flag. For more about the prototype background, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/04/blue-flags.html ). 

On my own layout, I enjoyed researching prototype blue flags, and creating brass models of them, for use on the tracks on my layout that might need them. (The post describing my building of the models is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/04/blue-flags-part-2-modeling.html .) Below is a photo of one of these new blue flags in use. (It reads: Caution Tank Car Connected.)

But I soon learned that scale-size flags like these, especially with their medium-darkness color, were easy for crews to overlook, and in several operating sessions, switch crews simply drove over them. Since they are brass, they can be repaired easily, but that isn’t the point. I needed another way to make crews aware of the presence of the flags.

As part of my recent trip to the Chicago area for an operating weekend, I enjoyed another visit to Bob Hanmer’s fine layout. I wrote a few highlights from the visit, among several other layout visit descriptions (see the post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/07/an-operating-weekend-around-chicago.html ). But a really interesting point about the session at Bob’s was the process he uses for track lockouts.

As I showed in an earlier post, he devised a form which allowed a crew setting out a car, with a known time interval for the car to be “blue flagged,” to add that time to the set-out time and identify when the car could be picked up, for their own later use, or use in a following operating session. (That post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/10/blue-flag-awareness.html .) Here’s another view of Bob’s form, from my most recent visit:

Since I don’t operate with a fast clock (my layout clock is 1:1), the way Bob implemented his lockouts would not work the same way on my layout. What I initially did instead was to create a form to provide the ending time of a lockout. I showed that form and its use in a previous post (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/02/blue-flag-awareness-part-2.html ). Here’s a repeat of an illustration from that post:

The defect here is that this only identifies the ending time of a lockout (appropriate for instances when the local agent has been notified by the industry of when the car can be released). But it doesn’t capture the span of lockout times, as the Hanmer form does. 

So I gave some thought to what a Hanmer-type form could accomplish in one of my operating sessions. It could certainly add a duty to the crew setting out a car at a siding subject to lockout: they have to fill out the form with the spotting time. And of course it also can notify them when a car can be picked up, just like the form shown above.

For purposes of trying out this idea, I shamelessly copied the Hanmer form, removing its Great Northern identifier. Since I model the Southern Pacific, which on many of its forms did not include the railroad name, such as train orders, clearance cards, switch lists, telegram blanks, and many others, I decided I could use the form as-is. Here is how it looks for now.

I will include this form in future operating sessions and will see how well it works, and will experiment with both set-out and pickup requirements for crew interaction. Then I can modify the form as seems appropriate. Thanks again to Bob Hanmer for the idea.

Tony Thompson

Waybills, Part 116: early prototype examples

I have by now written quite a few posts about using prototypically-oriented waybills in model railroad operations. (For a guide to the first 100 of these, see this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/11/waybills-part-100-guide.html ). Waybill history is among the topics I’ve discussed through this series, and today I want to show some interesting prototype examples.

Original waybills of all ages are not commonly found among railroad paper, and that’s especially true for examples before, say, World War II. But this post will show several prototype waybills, copies of which were given to me by Richard Townsend, that date from the early 1920s. All are from the Coudersport & Port Allegany Railroad. 

This 39-mile railroad, located along the upper stretches of the Allegheny River in northern Pennsylvania, not far from Olean, New York, had three connections to the outside world. In Port Allegany itself, they connected with the Pennsylvania Railroad; at Ulysses, PA, with the New York Central; and at Newfield Junction, PA, with the Buffalo & Susquehanna. These connections are reflected in the waybills.

 Here is one of them, a load of lump charcoal in bulk (un-bagged), loaded into Erie 102966, a 36-foot, 40-ton box car. The shipper, as for all of these bills, was the Gray Chemical Company of Roulette, PA, located a few miles west of Coudersport. The car was to be moved to Newfield Jct. to interchange with the B&S, then onto the Erie for movement to New York and the consignee, P. McNamee Charcoal Co. of Brooklyn. Note, as was the case on many, many surviving waybills, the rate has been corrected, in this case after determining actual weight at Wellsville on the Erie.

A second example, this one with a Pennsylvania car being loaded at Roulette with lump charcoal, is destined to the Schoenling Bros., on Eggleston Avenue in Cincinnati. The car, PRR 39336, a Class X26 single-sheathed box car (the USRA design), will be interchanged with PRR at Newfield Jct. and weighed on the PRR at Olean, NY. 

A third example, showing use of a New York Central car for this same cargo, bulk charcoal from Gray at Roulette, will be interchanged to the NYC at Ulysses, PA, en route to the Taylor Chemical Co. at Cascade Mills, New York. The car, NYC 161722, was a double-sheathed 40-foot box car of 40 tons capacity. And like all these waybills, this was a copy, not the original that traveled with the car.

You may have noted that in each of these waybills, the Car Service Rules were well followed, with cars of the destination railroad being loaded for shipment.

Finally, there is a good example of a privately-owned tank car being returned using a regular freight waybill, to permit its prompt return to the owner. The tank car, SSLX 30, was one of 312 tank cars operated by Semet-Solvay at the time, and was a 6000-gallon car. It was to be interchanged to the NYC at Ulysses, PA, en route to the Solvay Process Co. in Solvay (near Syracuse), NY.

The C&PA remained independent for many years, serving its lumbering and leather tanning territory until, cut back to 26 miles length, it was purchased in 1964 to become part of the Wellsville, Addison & Galeton Railroad.

Lastly, I should mention that K4 Decals offers a decal set for a Gray Chemical 8000-gallon tank car. (You can see all their tank car decals at this link: https://k4decals.com/collections/tank-car-decals , and you can choose the scale you want.) They are nice decals, and I am considering whether to letter a tank car that way. If so, I’ll return to the topic in a future post.

Tony Thompson

Early HO scale couplers, Part 2

 In my first post on this topic, I described a number of the early couplers available in HO scale, from the Varney dummy coupler (an accurately shaped and sized coupler), to the other extreme, the Mantua loop coupler, and the good-looking but not very reliable Devore coupler. You can read that post here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/07/early-ho-couplers.html .

If you do read that post, you’ll find a discussion point by my friend Arved Grass, stating his belief that the initial Kadee metal coupler was the model MK. As I replied, that’s not true. It certainly is true that the MK coupler was the first Kadee magnetic coupler, and it was first advertised (as far as I can determine) in the December 1959 issue of Model Railroader, or MR.

But years earlier, the Kadee metal coupler head had been introduced, with a variety of coupler shanks, with model numbers from 4 to 7 (and later to 10), all called “K” couplers, not MK (probably “K” stood for Kadee). These had a straight trip pin, as you can see below (ad from page 12, October 1956 MR). I imagine the “good lookin’ ” phrase was with reference to the Mantua loops.

Or for a view of several cars with these straight pins, there is this photo (page 46, October 1957 MR):

And just to cinch the point, here is Kadee’s announcement of their new Model 10 or K-10 coupler (the same one shown above) for Athearn’s plastic freight cars, but in a very clear drawing (page 16, July 1957 MR):

In the previous post about early couplers (link in top paragraph of the present post), I had misremembered what the Kadee uncoupling ramp was like. I thought it was a converging throat to push the pins together. Actually, it was the opposite: a diamond shape that pushed the pins apart to uncouple the couplers. It could be raised electrically. Here’s a photo (page 41, May 1957 MR):

There were the familiar types K-4 and K-5 “for general use,” as the ad below says, along with several other types for specific rolling stock, up to type K-8 (ad from page 7, May 1956 MR):

But finally they did introduce the “Magna-matic” coupler, the one we have used ever since. As mentioned above, I believe this is the initial announcement in the December 1959 MR, page 25; it isn’t obvious here, but this coupler has the curved trip pin that is so familiar now.

So the straight-pin Kadees were all “K” models, and didn’t become “MK” (as shown above) until the end of 1959, when the above announcement was published. In what I hope isn’t  excessive clarity, this should now be a complete story.

Tony Thompson

More on HO automobile license plates

Every layout has at least a few vehicles on it, and from the earliest days of the 20th century in the United States, license plates have been issued to such vehicles, from almost the beginning by individual states. To me, that means that vehicles on my layout should not only have license plates, but the correct ones for the year I model, 1953. I’ve written about this before (see, for example: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/11/vehicle-license-plates-in-ho-scale.html ).

In the post just cited, I gave links to the history of California license plates (and mentioned that every state appears to have such history on line somewhere). And in a subsequent post, I showed the prototype license plate which was newly issued by California in 1951 (here’s the post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/12/era-and-locale.html ). This original license plate hangs in my layout room and I often point it out to visitors.

But that isn’t the entire story. In that era, California, like most states, only issued new metal plates every several years, and during the years in between, issued something to reflect current registration for that year. In California’s case, it was a little metal corner tag, attached with the bolt in the lower right corner of the full license plate. This covered the year of the underlying plate, “51”  in the example above, with the current year, and naturally in a contrasting color each year. For 1953, it was white, and I have an original one of these also.

For modeling purposes, one could of course start with real metal license plates and digitize them to construct HO scale images; it is easier to use the digital images from the on-line history sites. That is what I have done, as described in the post linked in the second paragraph at the top of the present post. Here’s an example of the kind of image I reduce to HO scale and print out on paper with a copy shop’s high-resolution printer:

The paper license plates are cut out and attached to vehicles, front and back, with canopy glue. So wherever a vehicle may be on my layout, as in the example below, which is on Chamisal Road in my layout town of Shumala, passing the Dolphin & Anchor tavern, it has the correct license.

I should also mention that California had a separate series of license plates for trucks, both light and heavy trucks (and they still do today), which were similar but with different numbering. I’ve written about model truck licenses previously: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/12/vehicle-license-plates-trucks.html .

I continue to occasionally acquire a new vehicle for my 1953 layout, and before it appears on the layout, it will definitely acquire a correct license plate. It’s a small detail, but one that contributes to identifying the layout’s era.

Tony Thompson