Trackwork wars, Part 17

The ongoing saga of the track replacement at the lead to my town of Santa Rosalia continues. In the previous installment, I was satisfied with my new track right at Santa Rosalia. You can read that account at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/11/trackwork-wars-part-16.html .

With some careful adjustments of the gauge in a few places, I was able to successfully operate one of my diesel switchers back and forth, which of course is what happens in an op session. This operation was essential to verify before doing any more work on the track (note the areas with missing ties below). 

As isn’t visible above, both the MP1 switch motors were now disconnected, and since the throw bars of the new switches are located differently, obviously new “trenches” would be needed for their linkages, along with the MP1s being relocated to have the throw rods perpendicular to the track. You can see this pretty clearly below. Both motors have been “unmoored” from their previous locations. 

But before restoring the linkages, I needed to do more painting of rails, as I mentioned in the previous post (see first paragraph, above for link), and I did so, completing work on both new switches on the main line to Santa Rosalia. I also added ties where they were missing, using old surplus tie strip or individual wood ties. 

The next step was to restore the more important of the two linkages, the one at right in the photo above, which controls  the Walthers curved switch. That’s because when structures are put back in place, it is behind the storage tanks of my Richfield oil dealer, thus not accessible for manual operation. In the photo below, the new trenches are cut. 

Finally, the linkage was reconnected and the correct motion of the throwbar verified, for the Walthers switch. This may have to suffice for the upcoming op session, unless I find time to fix the scenery surfaces. But at least this part is now working.

It is frustrating to continue to work the same problems in the same area of track. Hopefully this time it will yield a more permanent result. Thanks again to Jim Providenza for his help with a major part of this effort.

Tony Thompson 

A superb new John Signor book

Continuing his remarkable series of books about the Southern Pacific, John Signor has just published the latest, this one about the San Joaquin Division. As always, the richness of photo coverage across a lot of years is very impressive. Below is the dust jacket. 

The book is published by the SP Historical & Technical Society at $90 (visit https://sphts.org/product-category/books/ ). It’s an 8.5 x 11-inch format, and is truly a large book, containing 586 pages. It has many of John’s characteristically excellent maps, of which I show a single example below pages 306 and 307). Spanning two pages, not all of it can seen in this quick scan, but it should be enough to portray the kind of information and detail in most of the maps. (You can click to enlarge.)

I counted 105 maps in the book, many from SP, including SPINS maps, but quite a number in John’s distinctive style. All of them add considerable depth to the information.

The volume is a treasury of action photos from all eras. John has freely mixed color and black-white images, wherever they logically fit. And I should mention that John has taken the opportunity to expand, revise and correct the some of the material he published years ago in his fine book, Tehachapi (Golden West Books, San Marino, 1983). One superb image from Robert Hale is shown below, depicting the westward San Joaquin Daylight at Tehachapi Loop in the early 1950s, with helper 4352 on the point. 

The book extends to the last days of the SP, and includes such latter-day information as the Palmdale Cut-off, along with many of the abandonments and dismemberments of the division. An example image from more recent times is this eastward mixed freight near Delano in the early 1970s, passing vast vineyards on the right (John Bergman photo).  The trio of SD45 locomotives is headed by SP 8834. Delivered through the late 1960s, the SD45s from EMD would dominate the SP locomotive fleet thereafter, with a total of 356 units in all. Those added up to more than 28 per cent of all the SD45s that EMD would produce. 

I confess to not being an objective reviewer, as I have long admired and greatly respected John’s books about the geography of the SP. But this one takes a back seat to none. Not only SP enthusiasts but all kinds of railfans will find innumerable facts and photos of interest. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Tony Thompson 

My Zaca Mesa winery

In my layout town of Ballard, there are two wine shippers, the larger of which is the Zaca Mesa winery. This is a large structure, made from a resin kit for a power house that I bought partly built, and then modified and completed. Here is the lid of the kit box, showing how the kit was intended to be built.

The upper photo above shows a receiving building at the right, for hopper cars of coal for the power plant. Since I wasn’t building it as a power plant, that annex was superfluous for me. I made it into the shipping building for a lemon packing business, and located it in a different town, Santa Rosalia. I modified the various openings with roll-up doors, especially the open archway on the end.

I also didn’t think the triple plain smoke stacks in the original power house kit were suitable for a winery, so replaced them with ventilators from my stash. More obviously, I changed the roof of the Magnuson building by giving it a tile roof, creating more of a California look.

In the foreground above, you can see my addition of a platform for loading tank cars (for details, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/02/tank-car-loading-platforms-part-3.html ). A close-up of the platform also shows the building sign, shamelessly copying a real Zaca Mesa winery in Santa Ynez (Santa Barbara County); here’s their website: https://www.zacamesa.com/ ), though I didn’t copy their logo or building.

Lastly, the building has some loading doors, which are useful to me as the place that cars other than tank cars (more about that in a moment) can be loaded. The third photo from the top in this post shows a Class XT car (house car body with internal tanks) being loaded at these doors. 

The role of this winery in layout operation is conveyed by a background post of mine, about wine as an industrial commodity (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/02/wine-as-industrial-commodity.html ) . There’s also an article in Model Railroad Hobbyist, in the issue for May 2023 (introduced at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/05/my-column-in-may-2023-model-railroad.html ). 

Wine grapes would be brought in from nearby vineyards, crushed and fermented, then aged to the desired degree. They can then be shipped out in bulk (in ordinary tank cars or XT cars) or packaged in bottles. As my modeling year of 1953 precedes widespread use of insulated box cars, un-iced reefers would be used for shipments of packaged wine.

I have always enjoyed having this industry on the layout, in part because it looks large enough to justify rail shipping at frequent intervals. Far too often, we model embarrassingly small industries, then regularly ship carloads to or from them. This one, at least, avoids that problem of scale.

Tony Thompson

New SP Shipper's Guide, Part 2

In the preceding post, I showed the general features of the new Southern Pacific “Shipper Guide,” for 1952. For me as an SP modeler, it's a rich trove of potential operating information. You can read that previous post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/11/a-new-sp-shippers-guide.html . In the present post, I want to illustrate specific features.

In the previous post, I showed an overall map of the Las Angeles Terminal District, with 16 zones identified. Here is an example of one of these zone maps, Part 1 of Zone 16 (Zone 16 extends to Burbank Junction, where the Coast and Valley routes diverge), on page 70. Why choose this map? It’s the literal area where I used to railfan the SP as a youngster, walking down Sonora Ave. to the tracks.  

Each siding has a number. As the Guide states, the drawings are not to scale, and do not indicate locations of switches, gates, doors or impaired clearance points. Each number of course corresponds to a user of that siding. The users are listed on an accompanying page. Shown below is page 69, the list that goes with the map above. Note that some sidings have multiple businesses on them. I remember watching the Burbank Local crew working these multiple spots. 

An important part of the new route guide is that there is considerable information about the route card number assignments, which would permit a person to operate a layout using route cards only. I earlier showed an SP listing of the meaning of its route card numbers in the Oakland and East Bay areas (that post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/05/route-cards-10-southern-pacific.html ). Below is one of four pages listing the Los Angeles tag (route card) numbers. The upper part here shows zone tags, that is, for the zones mapped as described above. Below are “road tag” listings, for outbound cars.

But even more interesting to me is a listing in the back of the guide. It contains all the industries in the guide, in alphabetical order, and tells you its track number. But in addition, it gives you the tag number (i.e. route car number) for that industry, and at the right, lists the size of the industry spot (not the siding) in cars. Here’s one of the pages.

Amazing stuff, especially for a document nearly 75 years old, containing what you’d presume was long-lost information like tag numbers. As I mentioned, you could operate a switching layout entirely with tags, if you wished. That’s what a local switch crew would have been doing. 

Tony Thompson 

A new SP Shipper’s Guide

I have often posted about the superb railroad resources represented by what are generically known as “Shipper’s Guides,” though they often have somewhat different names, such as “Directory of Industries.” The latest one is especially interesting to me, as it’s a Southern Pacific guide. I have often heard rumors about these but have never before seen one. Now Ted Schnepf (as Rails Unlimited) has produced copies of a 1952 guide for sale. See his website for purchasing info: http://railsunlimited.ribbonrail.com/.html ).

I show below the cover of the new Guide, which contains 118 pages, 8.5 x 11 inch size. I can only say that this is a phenomenal amount of information. It only covers the trackage assigned by SP to its Terminal District, but that was a lot of territory and a really huge number of industries, as I’ll show below. There were other industrial territories in the area, so this is far from all of the Los Angeles Division of the SP. 

Inside is on page 10 a map of the territory covered, from Burbank Junction in the north (where Coast and Valley routes diverged), to  South Gate to the south and Alhambra to the east. It’s shown here, though of course lettering at this size is too small to read. North is to the top of the map, and the orientation of the spine of the territory aligns with the Los Angeles River.

Note in the map that zones are marked out, from 1 to 16. Individual maps of each zone are then provided, which I will come back to. 

I was interested, in examining the map above, to compare it to the SP’s 1925 map of the same area provided in John Signor’s superb book, Los Angeles Division (SP Historical & Technical Society, Upland, CA, 2020), on pages 138 and 139. I haven’t tried to show what is in the gutter between the pages. It happens to be oriented so north is to the right of the map, and the Los Angeles River is thus approximately horizontal in this map. More importantly, Alameda Street runs horizontally across the upper part of the map.

Naturally, many of the industries and their locations are quite different between 1925 and 1952. But a similar intensity of of industrial location is evident. This was obviously a major part of SP’s industrial traffic base. Below is a photo from page 135 of Signor’s book, a 1925 aerial looking north (Spence Air photo collection, UCLA Dept. of Geography),with Alameda the dark street crossing from lower right to upper left. 

Signor points out that of the 340 industries listed on the map above, 278 of them were so located that they were switched from Alameda Street. The street contained double track, in some places triple track. One can imagine multiple switch jobs working up and down the street, dodging auto and truck traffic.

But back to the guide. This guide is a remarkable collection of specific industrial and operational information, even for the modeler of places far from Los Angeles. I will explain and illustrate some of that in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

Trackwork wars: Part 16

When last we visited this unwelcome topic (unwelcome to me, anyway), I had torn out both of the curved switches in the lead into Santa Rosalia, and Jim Providenza came over to help install a pair of new ones in their place. That was great, but we soon discovered that the first of the Peco switches into town also needed to be replaced. So I tore it out, and some nearby trackage. The state of play at that point is shown on the repeat photo below. The story is at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/09/trackwork-wars-part-15.html . 

My first step was to install a new Peco switch, along with some replacement trackage where a foot or so of the lead to the team track had been removed. The new track is shown below (compare photo above), along with the still-unsoldered feeder wire with the yellow insulation. 

I was about to solder some of the new rail joints, when it occurred to me that continuing work on the switches that were installed earlier might need adjustment of location, so I put off doing that. Then Jim Providenza came over again, with complete toolbox, to see how we could make things move ahead. I really appreciate Jim’s help with trackwork that I’m not as good at as I used to be. He of course brought his Santa Cruz Northern coffee mug. 

Most of the new switches work fine, but there continues to be a dip in the overall track. To see if it could be made better, Jim used pieces of an old Athearn kit box to shim up the track. This surprised me in that it actually did help. Here is how it looked with the cardboard from the box underneath.

This seemed to improve enough of the problems that we called it a day. I went back and soldered the feeders and some more of the track joints, inserted ties where they were missing between sections, and started painting the rail. I still use my long-time choice for this paint, Floquil Roof Brown, as I think it gives the right dark brown commonly seen on rail in the world. Then dirt “ballast” will be added. 

More testing needed, but the track  is coming back into service, and needs to be gotten ready for the next operating session. Hopefully we will have all this trackage back in full service by then!

Tony Thompson 

Using augers for operation

I know at least a few readers are saying, “what’s an auger?” I went into the prototype a few years ago, in a post showing both fixed and portable augers; that post is at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/11/unloading-covered-hoppers.html . My modeling goal at the time was to build a fixed auger to unload covered hoppers at my chemical repackaging industry, so I followed up that first post with one about modeling (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/08/unloading-covered-hoppers-part-2.html ). 

Today I want to turn to movable or portable augers. These are used at team tracks or industry tracks to unload hoppers and covered hoppers, and I’ll repeat a prototype photo (uncredited internet image) from the first of the posts cited above, to illustrate. This is a way to unload many kinds of granular or even powdery materials. 

At a modeling meeting not long after those posts in 2017 and 2018, I bought a 3D-printed portable auger model for HO scale. I’m embarrassed that I don’t remember the seller (if a reader knows, please comment at the end of this post). Here is what it looks like. It came in all gray, which is okay, except for the tires, but I remember seeing one that had an aluminum main tube, so I painted it that way. 

This of course can easily be posed at any team track or other industry to indicate unloading. One example that fits on my layout is the delivery of spent brewing malt, used for animal feed, and delivered to agricultural areas. It’s shown here at the team track in East Shumala on my layout. 

So this can be the physical implementation of actions following from the waybill below, which brought the car to this team track. 

These kinds of augers can also be used for loading; a truck would dump into the receiving bin, and the auger would transport the material into a hopper. If the area I model were suitable for growing hops, for example, the crop could be loaded in just that way. The auger will need to be elevated to reach the hatches in the covered hopper.

On model railroads, industries don’t always have a clear way to load their product into freight cars, or alternatively, to unload arriving cars. Including something like an auger can take care of that for certain cargoes, possibly to the satisfaction of the fastidious operator.

Tony Thompson