Pismo Marine, Martinez & Sons Engine

Two of my layout industries at Santa Rosalia, housed in a single building, have not really been described as to origins or for the cargoes they receive. This post addresses that.

My town of Santa Rosalia, at the end of an SP branch line, faces the Pacific Ocean. Thus it is both natural and inevitable that marine-oriented industries are located there. One of these is a fish cannery, the kitbashing of which has been described ( https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/05/kitbashing-santa-rosalia-cannery.html ).

I thought that there should be some marine service kinds of businesses, too.  The obvious example is a ship chandler, that is, a purveyor of a variety of marine equipment and supplies for boats and ships. Another possibility is some kind of ship repair; for this, I chose marine engine service and repair. It was a simple matter to make signs for both, as I’ll show below.

The structure was made from one of the buildings in a KingMill Enterprises background flat, their “Commerce Street No. 9,” just one of a series of superb products. That same flat was the source from which I created my Caslon Printing Company, which you can view at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/02/background-flats-2-kitbashing.html . Unfortunately, these fine products are no longer available new, though one sees them on eBay and elsewhere occasionally. 

This particular KingMill flat had partial building sides and a rusted sheet-metal roof, so I simply assembled it by gluing the flat segments to Foam Core Board pieces, and then adding internal reinforcements of 1/4-inch-square basswood in all corners. Add a few ventilators of different kinds from the structure details stash and it’s done. The rust along the bottom edge of the corrugated metal at right was that way on the KingMill flat. The loading dock and its roof are not three-dimensional, they were on the flat also.

The Pismo Marine Service ship chandler evidently occupies the left side of the building, above, while Martinez & Son marine engine repair is on the right. You can click on the image to enlarge if you wish.

I thought the business should look a little bigger, so I added a Tichy shed, foreground below (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/01/refining-scenery-part-5.html ). This is also a better view of the fuel oil storage tank I added. 

Cargoes can be quite varied, considering all the possibilities. I do have a pair of industrial-size diesel engines as flat car loads, which can appropriately arrive at Martinez & Son. Two waybills for boxcar loads inbound to these two businesses are shown below.

This has been a nice addition to my industries on the layout, since the kinds of loads received differ considerably from everything else. I’ve been happy with these choices. 

Tony Thompson