Handling MOW equipment

I’m sure it’s no surprise to regular readers of this blog that I find maintenance of way (MOW) equipment interesting and worth modeling. In fact, I’ve written a Model Railroad Hobbyist column about modeling MOW equipment of the railroad I model, Southern Pacific. You can read about it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/04/my-latest-column-in-mrh.html .

I do like to use such equipment in my layout operations, and have described how  I accomplish this for various equipment used in MOW work. That goes beyond what SP lettered as SPMW cars per se, such as ballast cars; that post can be found at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/02/operating-mow-equipment.html .

On my layout, most activity of MW cars (SP lettered them as SPMW) centers around the outfit track, which was the SP term, in my layout town of Ballard. For background, I’ve written previously about the role of an outfit track; the post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-role-of-outfit-track.html .

Though sometimes it’s empty, I usually arrange that my outfit track contains a boarding bunk car and a kitchen-commissary or dining car, to both house and feed MW forces. Sometimes there is also a domestic water car there, for crew use. Here’s an example, with the boarding bunk car in the center and the kitchen-diner, converted from an open-platform head-end car, at left. Water car at right.

The specific cars vary from time to time, for example with a different kitchen-commissary car and a more modern water car. 

But other times, some additional car type may be spotted on the outfit track, for the use of track maintenance forces, such as a  car of ballast, as you see below.

In the two photos above, the bunk cars are both converted from box cars. But as I described in a couple of earlier posts (concluding with this one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/11/small-project-sp-boarding-bunk-car-pt-2.html ), after 1950 SP began converting old 12-1 Pullman sleepers to boarding bunk cars, and such bunk cars are sometimes found on my outfit track. 

It may sound like the SPMW cars I am showing are just passive scenery. But in fact cars do move to and from the outfit track in many sessions. When these are cars like ballast cars, it’s fairly obvious how they may move. In fact I wrote an entire post about the waybills associated with these kinds of movements: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/03/waybills-part-119-operating-mow.html . 

When a boarding car is moved, however, SP had rules associated with how that might be done. So something like a bunk car being delivered at the junction of the Santa Rosalia Branch, to move to the Ballard outfit track, might look like this, on the Coast Division main line approaching Shumala:

The SP company rule for this was Rule 831 in 1953. Here is how it reads (this rule is included in the Special Instructions section of the timetable that my layout operators use): 

Operations including MW cars can be interesting, and are usually a contrast to conventional commercial shipments to or from industries on the layout. I find them a valuable enlargement of operating possibilities.

Tony Thompson