Bay Area Prototype Modelers 2026

As happens nearly every June, the all-day Bay Area RPM meet was just held again, this year in El Cerrito. The logo for the meeting remains the same, and I was delighted when the announcement appeared. 

There was a big crowd this year, partly magnified by the smaller quarters than in some previous years, but it was a lively and active crowd. There was also a program of talks, of which I saw two. I really liked Matthew Teixeira and Justin Leong’s talk about designing a shelf layout, with really good descriptions of alternatives considered, and how the plan was worked out, to model the Ballard Branch (originally of BNSF) in Seattle.

Walking around in the display room was, as always, interesting and fun. And I saw some really neat stuff. Pat Davis showed several Baldwin switchers in various Amador Central schemes, and gave information about how to get the decals from Precision Design Co. of Canada (email billy@pdc.ca ) . Below, these are nos. 9 and 10 in the light blue American Forest Products or Georgia Pacific scheme, and also no. 10 in the black and orange Amador Foothills scheme. 

 Some really super 3D-printed Southern Pacific towers were shown, available in both HO and N scales. These are produced by Common Standard Scale Models, which specializes in signature structures. You can visit their website at: https://www.commonstandardscalemodels.com/ . Shown below are Oakland’s 16th Street tower in both N and HO, and at right, Burbank Junction tower in N.

I also enjoyed seeing a number of gorgeous N scale freight cars with hand-painted graffiti, following prototype photos. These are from Alvin Ho, who got his aunt, an artist, to hand-paint the graffiti from photos (he said she enjoyed the challenge), then he added weathering, rust, etc. They are simply superb. Here is just one of a dozen examples.

Last but certainly not least, I enjoyed seeing a complete train by Dave Stanley, a version of Western Pacific’s Pittsburg Turn out of South Sacramento, bringing (among other things) steel coils to the US. Steel plant in Pittsburg (the plant was a facility of U.S. Steel’s Columbia-Geneva Division). WP had built some short 70-ton gondolas, 29 feet long inside, for the steel traffic, as shown here;  the models were made from cut-up cheap train-set cars purchased at swap meets. Pat Davis provided the “Roller Freight” decals.

As always, a fun day, seeing lots of friends and acquaintances, and tables and tables of interesting and well-done models. Most RPM meets are like this. If you’ve never been to one, keep your eyes open for an announcement of a meet near you, and give it a try.

Tony Thompson 

My article in the new Layout Design Journal

Those among the readers of this blog who belong to the Layout Design SIG (Special Interest Group) of NMRA will be familiar with the organization’s publication, the Layout Design Journal or LDJ (and its predecessor, Layout Design News). The newest issue of LDJ, no. 75, has just been issued, dated Second Quarter 2026.

The lead article in this issue is about my layout and its history. This had its beginning some years ago, when long-time LDJ editor Byron Henderson asked me if a track plan had ever been published for my layout, or any layout article. I replied that no track plan existed, and only part of the layout had been described in Railroad Model Craftsman in June 1990. Byron replied, “Write an article for LDJ and we’ll do a track plan — if you’ll commit to giving us your first layout article.” Sounded good to me,, so I said “Deal.” 

Well, as I said, that was some years ago. But finally I got to sketching out what I wanted to say, and ran a first draft past Byron to see if it it was what he wanted. His response was interesting: he thought it might be a better article for LDJ if I recounted my original goals for the layout I had built in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, and how and how why I changed it after moving to Berkeley in 1994. Lessons learned, in other words. So that’s how I wrote it.

Here is the cover of Issue 75,  The magazine is 8.5 x 11 inches and contains 40 pages. The top photo and drawing on the cover are from my article, designated (by Byron) as “A Layout Tale in Two Parts.” 

In the article itself, there are several drawings of what the Pittsburgh layout was like, including a sketch version of my exceptional amount of staging. Byron selected the photos for the most part, from past blog posts and other sources, and wrote all the captions. So in some ways, he should be recognized as almost a co-author in bringing this to completion.

Below is page 1 of my article. Note that now the full article title is “Compact Calif. Central Coast — Again,” with a sub-title that is sort of the name on the cover. No problem, it’s all clear. And note also the article’s division into sections, with Byron’s section titles. For the most part, I think they are excellent additions to the piece, so I’m not complaining. 

Anyone interested in obtaining a copy of the magazine issue can purchase it on their website, which is located at: www.ldsig.org/publications . 

I like what resulted from this set of interactions, and it provides a picture of my layout history more clear than my usual recollections, because I re-examined my thoughts and decisions comparing the old with the new layout, and sure enough, there definitely were lessons learned.

Now it remains to provide a broad description of the layout as it now is, including its range and types of industries, and how it is operated. I am starting work on that project now.

Tony Thompson  

Waybills, Part 131: model bill production

A recent inquiry made me realize that my ongoing method of producing waybills has never really been presented in its current form, though one could infer it from earlier published articles as well as posts in this blog. In the description below, Rather than cite previous relevant writings, I’ll present as full an account as I can.

First of all, the waybill format I adopted more than 15 years ago, closely adapted from the AAR standard waybill form, cut down for model use. It is a 2.5 x 3.5-inch format, chosen to fit into a baseball-card-collector clear plastic sleeve. The sleeves are evidently produced in large volume, and are quite cheap from on-line vendors, barely a penny each. A blank waybill looks like this: 

These blank waybills are Photoshop tiffs, and are filled out with the type tool in that application. I have made them in 1200-dpi bitmap mode for sharpness. Then to print them, I have created an InDesign template (though any layout app would work) for 8.5 x 11-inch paper, with guidelines for placing waybill images on the page (the light vertical and horizontal lines), and heavier cutting guides (only at top). At top center there is also a place to note the date printed.

 

When all nine cells on the template are filled with waybill images, and the light guide lines removed, a page ready to print looks like this. Cutting guides at top remain. These happen to be waybills for perishables, so will use the AAR-recommended pink stock. I noted this along with the printing date at the top.

When these are printed, I cut them with a rolling paper cutter (mine is an old Rodahle 51200) for clean cuts and safe handling. Each will then be paired with its appropriate Empty Car Bill (yellow, as were many prototype ones) in the plastic sleeve. I got the idea of the sleeves from the late Bill Neale’s article in the February2009 Model Railroader. 

This description should update what has been presented in past years, and clarify my process. If any part of it isn’t clear, please feel free to ask further.

Tony Thompson 

Operating sessions no. 111, 112

This past weekend I hosted two operating sessions, with the sequence numbers you see in the title today. As I always do, I rotated most of freight cars from the previous session off the layout, and rotated the same approximate number of different cars onto the layout. This always leads to differences in industries switched and thus in the character of the jobs on the layout.

I also renovated the scenery in the area of my mainline tunnel, Tunnel 12, trying to make the rockfall rubble at the foot of the rock face more realistic, along with some ground cover repair, as is visible below. This section house near the tunnel entrance was a common arrangement on Southern Pacific, probably to facilitate maintenance of the tunnel itself. 

We began on Saturday, with a crew of four consisting of Jim Radkey, Clif Linton, Tom Comyns, and Ed Slintak, all of whom had operated here before and thus had a pretty good idea of how the layout works. Below you see Ed (at left) and Clif working at Ballard; Clif was the conductor here. 

Later in the session, after crews had switched sides, Tom (at left below) and Jim were switching at Ballard. If I remember correctly, Tim was conducting at this point.

The following day, the crew comprised Seth Neumann, Richard Brennan, Lisa Gorrell, and her friend, Laura McKeenan.  Below is a photo of the whole group at Ballard, with, from left, Laura, Richard, Lisa and Seth.

Seth and Lisa began at Ballard, with Seth conducting; Lisa was the engineer.

Laura is somewhat new to operation, so the complexity in this switching layout was a challenge. Notably, after a shift at Shumala, she moved to Ballard, and she did very well in her stint as conductor, which you see her doing here with Richard (left) as engineer.

It was an interesting session, with its own challenges and problems. As so often happens, several of the challenges kept their heads down during my testing and dry run, choosing instead to appear only at the operating session. Fighting down an attack of “Host Flaw Hysteria” (for background: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/07/pressure-what-pressure.html ), I enjoyed seeing the layout being operated as I intended it to be.

Tony Thompson 

Acquiring knowledge of your era

Many serious modelers choose a specific era for layout or rolling stock modeling. Richard Hendrickson chose to model rolling stock, mostly for the Santa Fe, for October 1947. Jack Burgess’s superb layout depicts the Yosemite Valley Railroad in the third week of August, 1939, because that was the last period that the YV operated a through Pullman to El Portal, at the National Park’s entrance.

Of course many people want a looser time constraint. I can understand the person who wants, for example, to be able to model some prototype scrapped in 1965, and also to model some new equipment that arrived in 1968. That person might say “I model 1965–68.” But the danger lurking in looser constraint was well expressed once by Tony Koester, who said, “If you say that you model the 1950s, what you’re really doing is modeling 1959 badly.”

But however your choice falls out, especially if it is a period 75 years ago or more, how can you research its character, details, and style? We are all familiar with histories of railroads, locomotives and rolling stock, and likely also with histories of line changes, depot abandonments, etc., for our favorite railroad. What else do we need? What products can you include on billboards? What about clothing for the figures on you layout?

There have, over the years, been effort by various publishers to create “yearbooks,” books highlighting everything of “importance” in a particular year. (I put that word in quotation marks because one person’s importance is another person’s trivia). But certainly these books can provide some information, even if not exactly what we want.

I have such a book for my modeling year of 1953, and in fact that year is in its title. I show the title page below. This is a 6 x 9-inch hardbound book of 448 pages (Unicorn Books, New York, 1954).

To convey its coverage, I show the Contents pages below. 

This kind of source is quite general. One may also need quite specific information. For example, let’s imagine that you want to put a builder logo on a transformer load. Your first choices (in the 20th century) would be General Electric and Westinghouse. But as you may know, the Westinghouse logo changed over the years. This is a good example today of how “Google is your friend.” You will quickly find on-line sources like this one: https://1000logos.net/westinghouse-logo/ .

This would then result in a correct pre-1960 logo on a load like this one (Richard Hendrickson built this  Milwaukee model of a gun-type flat from a cut-down Roundhouse short flat car). 

Another example is advertising. Some companies have retained essentially identical graphics for decades, and these are convenient to use. National brands have the advantage of great recognizability.

Consumer products are the most commonly advertised, so showing advertising images of that kind is appropriate. A good example for a product familiar to everyone is Coca-Cola. I have a period image in the form of a billboard alongside Bromela Road on my layout (one of my interchangeable billboards; see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/04/interchangeable-billboards.html ). 

Another era-identifier is trucks and, especially, automobiles. For my 1953 layout, I have carefully avoided any later vehicle model year after that date. And of course you can reinforce the year with billboards like the one below, alongside Nipomo Street in Ballard on my layout:  

Today, the internet contains astonishing amounts of information about the history of about anything you can image. Remembering to search on historical topics to make sure you have it right is important if you are going to accurately present your modeling era.

Tony Thompson 

 

Improving my “Home Shop” form

A few years ago, I posted some comments about the Southern Pacific “Home Shop” form, a form used to direct a car for repair, which was attached to a placard board or route card board. You can read that initial post here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/02/home-shop-forms.html . 

But the form I came up with, by simply reducing the prototype form to the height of my layout waybills, had really narrow spaces between lines, making it hard to write and even harder to read. The image below is about double life size. 

The way this was used was to put it into the waybill’s sleeve, on top of the waybill, since in a sense it supersedes the car movement directions in the waybill. Here is how it would look in use.

I decided to keep most of the prototype repair form, but simply make the interline spaces bigger, and remove what wasn’t needed on the layout. The form remained 3.5 inches long, as it is above, but was widened to 2.5 inches (the width of my waybills). I moved the car identification to the top, and some lines were removed. Here is the new form: 

This form is much easier to fill out, and, I hope, to read and interpret. Here is one of them filled out. Note that the car can be moved in switching, just not put into a train.

The car in question. one of SP’s 53 ft. 6 in. flat cars, Class F-70-7, SP 140591, is shown here. The load is a Euclid scraper that I’ve posted about before (see the post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/05/vehicle-loading-on-flat-cars.html ).

 I like to be able to include variations in the usual paperwork, standard waybills and Empty Car forms, giving crews a little additional thinking to do in an operating session.

Tony Thompson 

Route cards, Part 35: still more examples

This is another post in a series about route cards, the small tags of light cardstock, typically about 3 x 5 inches, attached to freight cars to inform switchmen how to switch a car. They were attached to small tack boards, which after 1937 were 5.5 x 9 inches in size (documented in a previous post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/12/route-cards-6.html ).

 I’ve previously also shown prototype examples of these cards, along with ways to model them, and photographs of them on prototype route card boards. I’ve also shown photos of yard clerks applying these cards (see, for example: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/07/route-cards-part-18-further-examples.html ). In this post, I want to to show more prototype examples of cards, once again drawn from the Michael Litant collecction.

My first example is a classic transfer card, identifying a car to be exchanged to another railroad. In this case, it’s a Missouri Pacific card for interchange to the New York Central, most likely at St. Louis, car destination Worcester, Mass. I can’t read the contents, but the car is SP 123857, a 40-foot steel box car with a 6-foot door. This card is 3 x 5 inches.

A second card that I find interesting is this Cotton Belt card, identifying an empty car to go into Train 15 leaving East St. Louis. The car itself is not identified, presumably because  switchmen only needed to know that the car was assigned to Train 15. The card is 3.5 x 3.5 inches.

The third card in this post is a really interesting one, possibly filled out by the shipper. It’s a Northern Pacific card, and identifies Illinois Central 43473, a 50-foot double-door box car, to be exchanged to the Rock Island, and further routing is then Kansas City Southern and Louisiana & Arkansas to New Orleans. The shipper is identified as the Industrial Crating Co., and what they crated were tractors from Minneapolis-Moline, Inc. (though by the 1964 date on the card, White Motor Co. had taken over M-M). The crates are destined to Anthony Gibbs & Co,, care of W.R. Zanes at 223 Tchoupitoulas St., New Orleans. This is practically a waybill. It’s 4 x 6 inches.

The next car I will show is a Union Pacific card, clearly for transfer to the Milwaukee Road. The car is UP 166458, a 50-foot steel box car with cushioned underframe and combination doors, one sliding and one a plug door. The consignee, “BB Pr 30,” is not decipherable, though a friend offered that it might be Pier 30 somewhere. The shipper is shown as “YD” or yard, obviously meaning coming from an inbound train to whatever yard it was.  It is 3.5 x 2.75 inches in size. 

My fifth example in this group is a Santa Fe switch card, containing minimal information, but of interest for its format, unlike most route cards I have seen. It does identify the car to which it was attached, KCS 25772, a 50-foot box car with a single 9-foot door. The card is 4 x 4 inches.

Lastly, I will show an interesting card from the Kentucky & Indiana Terminal Railroad, operators of a bridge across the Ohio River near Louisville. They had a yard on the Kentucky side, which is where this card was issued, for a car destined to the Louisville & Nashville. The car’s initial is only shown as “B,” likely B&O, a user of the bridge; if so, this car, number 299138, was a 50-foot steel car with a single 8-foot door and equipped with Evans 18-belt DF loaders. The cargo appears to be rope. This card is 4 x 3 inches.

As I always comment, to me these surviving cards (out of the many millions that were once used) portray railroading in another time, and more importantly, in ways we can learn from.

Tony Thompson

Fruit Growers' Western branch

Fruit Growers Express (FGE) was a very large refrigerator car owner, serving  most railroad in the Southeast and beyond, including, for example the Pennsylvania. Also included in the “family,” as they were wont to call it, were two of the Hill lines: the Great Northern and the CB&Q. The Northern Pacific, notably, did not join. 

The two Hill lines members of FGE kept their own reporting marks (Western Fruit Express in the case of the GN, Burlington Refrigerator Express in the case of the CB&Q), and their cars retained the normal railroad emblems. Those cars were part of the FGE fleet for operating purposes, but they continued to be owned by the two railroads, not by FGE, as was the case for the rest of the fleet.

An example of these cars is this builder photo from American Car & Foundry in 1948, of a string of new WFEX cars (Richard Hendrickson collection). The lettering style is indeed that of FGE, but the cars are not labeled as FGEX, but instead are Western Fruit Express, WFEX.

The FGE fleet was essentially operated as a single unit when cars were in demand, in other words, any kind of car could be loaded anywhere, but when empty cars were in surplus, the late Bill Welch told me that GN and CB&Q cars were sent home.

I’ve always found these “Western branch” cars interesting, and yard photos on the SP and UP do show them in many cases, validating their frequent presence in the West. Accordingly, I have acquired models of several of them. Probably my favorite is a model of a WFEX car built by Bill Welch himself and passed on to me, complete with correct FGE hatch rest bars. 

Burlington’s cars were essentially the same pattern as the WFEX cars, using the FGE lettering characters but with a CB&Q emblem. Here is a Accurail model of one. 

One interesting variation in the pattern is that the CB&Q had subsidiaries (for example, the Fort Worth & Denver City — “City” was dropped in 1951), and the Colorado  & Southern, acquired in 1908. Both continued to be operated under those names. Refrigerator cars were operated by both; the C&S had 143 reefers under the CX mark in 1953, while the FW&D had 59 cars lettered FWDX.

I have an ancient Silver Streak reefer lettered CX, an assembled car I obtained at a swap meet years ago. Like many early Silver Streak models, it is about ten percent oversize, though that is not evident in most freight trains. It’s shown here at the Peerless Foods wholesale grocer on my layout.

I also have a Red Caboose model of an FWDX reefer, again an interesting variant in reefer reporting marks for an operating session. Here it’s shown on my layout at Guadalupe Fruit in Ballard. 

Each of these cars sees operating use on my layout during those peak harvest months of June through September. But the rest of the year, cars being loaded are pretty much all PFE, and you wouldn’t see these Fruit Growers “Western branch” cars in use for produce shipping.

Tony Thompson 

Writing by a railroader

From time to time in this blog, I’ve mentioned writing by railroaders, especially ones that convey what the jobs were really like. A favorite railroader author, Linda Niemann, stated that you don’t really understand the work until you’re passing signals down a long yard to the switch engine with a hand lantern at 2 AM under a steady rain. (For more about her and her work, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-appreciation-linda-niemann.html .)

The book I want to present today is by Canadian Pacific railroader Jim McLean. This was the first book of his poems, printed in 1982 by Coteau Books of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Jim’s home town and his place of work for the CP.  The cover of the 6 x 9-inch book is below. Several on-line booksellers list the book as available. Another book by him was published in  2016.

I won’t include a whole lot of his poems here, just a few I especially like. For those of us who know and enjoy Timetable & Train Order (T&TO) railroading, this one is quite enjoyable:

Another one I liked, since it has to do with switching, has an introductory explanation so you understand the lingo:

Lastly, one of his I’ve always liked, one that that tells you something about Canadian immigration, not so different from immigration anywhere, working on the railroad:

As I mentioned, this book is for sale on the internet from several used-book dealers. I know most of my readers would enjoy it if they choose to find it.

Tony Thompson 

Crop seasons on my layout

As I have mentioned numerous times in this blog, operating sessions on my layout are always treated as being on the same day on which we operate, but in 1953. Among other things, this means that the packing houses on the layout are always shipping the crops of that particular month. I introduced this background some time back (see for example my post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/09/seasonality-of-crops-and-traffic.html ). 

Recently I was asked (again) about the source of the information, and would I please put it all in one place. It’s drawn from the multi-page table on pages 442–447 in the back of the PFE book (Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Thompson, Church, and Jones, Signature Press, 2000). That table covers all of the SP, with individual growing areas for each crop. Since the area I model is what was known as the Guadalupe–Santa Maria area, I have just chosen data for that area in the tables below.

 These tables, vegetables and fruit separately,  are very useful in that they show peak harvest months in black, with off-peak or “shoulder” harvest months in gray. I usually only choose waybills for peak-month produce in setting up a session for a particular month. The one exception is all-year broccoli, which does get shipped in most sessions. But notice that at least one fruit and one vegetable is being harvested in every month of the year in the area modeled. 

The other point to be made is one about PFE in general. During the peak harvest months over the entire SP and UP systems, June through September, even PFE’s fleet of roughly 40,000 cars was not sufficient for all needs, and reefers of other owners were borrowed. Most of this activity was on SP, which often advertised how much of American produce was loaded on its lines (I’ve show these ads in a number of previous posts, including this one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/05/sps-public-advertising.html ). Here’s an example:

Roughly two-thirds of PFE’s carloadings were on SP lines, with the remainder mostly on UP, with barely five percent on Western Pacific.

In that peak season, scenes like the one below, at a packing house in my layout town of Shumala, were commonplace. American Refrigerator Transit (famously jointly owned by Missouri Pacific and Wabash) was one of the companies from which PFE borrowed extensively.

A scene like this is more relevant at the moment than during much of the year, because I have an operating session coming up later this month.. Scenes like this are, once again, going to fit the 1953 season we will be reproducing.

Tony Thompson 

Reworking a PFE car kit, Conclusion

This is the concluding post in my description of modifying the appearance of an otherwise stock Red Caboose kit for a reconditioned PFE reefer, Class R-30-9. I began with the prototype background of these cars, created during 1938–1940 from (mostly) Class R-30-12 cars built some 15 years earlier, along with some cars of Class R-30-13. 

“Reconditioning” meant a completely new superstructure, with new and upgraded insulation, but without performing work on the underframe and brake gear (other than needed repairs). In the parlance of the AAR and the IRS, in addition to PFE, this did not constitute rebuilding. But because of improved insulation and ice bunkers, they were given a new car class, R-30-9. 

In the first post of this series, I showed a prototype photo of one of these cars (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/reworking-pfe-car-kit.html ). Here is another image, this time showing a car as-reconditioned, at the Stockton, CA ice deck on July 13, 1941 (Wilbur C. Whittaker photo). It has retained the original T-section trucks, but like all the cars of 95737–98718, has new steel ice hatches. Side lettering says it was reconditioned in April 1940, so the paint is barely a year old; it was originally PFE 20028, built in July 1922.

I wanted to model a car like this. After stripping the kit lettering, airbrushing fresh Star brand paint on sides and ends, and adding steel nuts for weight (shown in that first post), I built the kit sub-assemblies of roof and underbody, as I showed in the second post, along with beginning decal lettering with Microscale set 87-501 (the second post may be found at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/reworking-pfe-car-kit-part-2.html ). 

Once the new decals had been protected with a coat of clear flat, I assembled the car body (so far without an underbody). This looks good so far.

 Next I completed work on the underbody, adding sill steps and Kadee #158 couplers, along with the kit truck frames. Wheelsets were replaced with superior ones from InterMountain. Here is the completed car, nicely retaining the black side sill of the 1950 scheme (side sills became orange in 1951). 

Next came weathering. As always with PFE, this is difficult to choose in the abstract, because of PFE’s extensive car washing (for data see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/appearance-of-pfe-reefers-part-3.html ), along with their practice, until the mid-1950s, of repainting any car with even the most minor repairs. I have chosen to apply a light degree of weathering.

The way I did the weathering was following my usual technique with washes of acrylic tube paint (for description and examples, see the Reference pages linked at the top right corner of this post). After adding a coat of clear flat, a few chalk marks, and route cards, the car looked as shown below, being switched to the ice deck in my layout town of Shumala by SP 1284, a Class S-12 0-6-0. 

This is going to be a nice addition to my PFE fleet, and it will certainly be among the cars switched at my next operating session.

Tony Thompson 

That O&W hopper

Awhile back, in the spring of 2024, I reported on an operating session, and buried in the report was commentary about a hopper load of coal sitting at Shumala on my layout, in a car from the New York, Ontario & Western Railway (reporting mark O&W). My preceding comments are in this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/04/operating-sessions-88-and-89.html . 

The group of modelers who remember this car on Mike Brock’s layout at Merritt Island, Florida must be a small one. Maybe as early as 2015, this car had been snuck onto the layout, and placed under the coal dock at Harriman on Mike’s Sherman Hill layout, by Bill Schneider. Though doubtless intended to both amuse and annoy Mike (a good friend of us all, and the originator and long-time leader of the annual January Cocoa Beach RPM), in fact I think Mike kind of liked it, and it stayed there.

I continue to advise visiting operators that some of the cars they see on the layout will have no paperwork provided (usually cars in the process of being loaded or unloaded), and therefore to leave them where they are. This includes the O&W hopper. 

But is there any way this car could believably deliver a load on my layout? One avenue for delivering a carload of coal comes from  a member of the Pittsburgh Model Railroad Club, when I was a member almost 50 years ago. His mother had worked at one time for a coal broker, whose business was obtaining loads of coal not already sold, and finding buyers for them. The loads would then be redirected to the new destination.

He told me that although most of the business was multi-car lots to larger customers, sometimes a single car would languish because it didn’t fit an immediate customer. With that in mind I pulled out a Shipper Guide to see what I could find. 

(I’ve written a number of posts about these Guides; here is a recent one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/11/waybills-part-44-shipper-guides.html . You can readily find them all by using “Shipper Guide” in the search box at upper right. You can buy any of the 23 Guides now available from Rails Unlimited at: https://railsunlimited.ribbonrail.com/Books/shippers.html .)

The one I chose is for the Chicago & Northwestern, thinking that a Chicago area broker would be about as far west as an eastern load might be redirected.  Here is that Guide cover: 

I selected  a suitable dealer, and made up the following waybill for the only industrial coal user on my layout. The load would be re-billed at origin for its new destination, treating it as a load that had not sold earlier. The bill hasn’t yet received it normal amount of pencil and pen marks by conductors en route. 

Width this kind of paperwork, the slightly famous O&W hopper can actually do work on my layout. All part of the fun, in my view.

Tony Thompson