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 

Waybills, Part 125: Routing

 I have written before about the routing part of a waybill. But most of it was about reasonable routing, not actually the prototype procedure. The latter is the topic today. For the prior posts, I recommend this one (at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/05/waybills-24-routing.html ) along with a later follow-up on the same subject, which is at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/02/waybills-part-37-routing-of-loads.html .

On the prototype, the ICC approved routes, and rates for those routes. Immense numbers of official listings resulted. Here is one example of a routing book, which was issued for the Nickel Plate. This is an 8.5 x.11-inch book, and more impressively, it’s 1-3/4 inches thick, 1008 pages.  

The cover repays some attention, prominently identifying itself as Eastbound Routing Guide No. 1 (there would also have been Westbound Routing Guide books). It became effective on September 15, 1945. As you can note below, this only applies originating movements from the six states of the NKP (omitting Michigan), to destinations in 10 eastern states plus the District of Columbia. Other eastbound guides would be needed for New England and the Southeast.

The book begins with a list of participating destination railroads, and gives their abbreviations, in the destination states. This only occupies three pages. 

Second, a list of destination stations is given, occupying pages 7 to 71, completing Section 1 of the book (entitled “Stations from and to which routes apply”). Shown below is a randomly chosen page, page 19, showing destination stations in Maryland and giving each one a number. 

Next, these station numbers were grouped with routes by number, which is Section 2 of the book, pages 75 to 1000. For each railroad on which the final consignee is located, routes beyond various interchanges from NKP to final railroad are given. These are listed in groups by final-interchange railroad. In the example below, page 111, part of a larger list of approved routes via Baltimore & Ohio is shown. As an example (you can click to enlarge), route 32 is to hand the car off at Fort Wayne, Indiana, and move via PRR to DuBois, PA, where it is handed off to the B&O, which will deliver to final destination.

 Finally with all these route numbers defined for each final railroad, we can show approved routes by number, from specific groups of NKP stations. The originating NKP stations are listed by station number. There is no need to tabulate those for NKP employees, as those numbers are in every employee timetable. Each group of NKP station numbers has a corresponding list of ICC-approved route numbers to groups of destination stations on the final railroad of delivery. This of course appears impenetrable by itself (see example page 99 below). But as shown in the previous example page, each interchanged railroad listing contains the explanation of route numbers, followed by further interchange railroad(s) and junction(s).  

So how would a clerk use this book? Say you're at Frankfort, Indiana on the NKP (station 2206) and you have a shipper wanting to move a load to Frederick, Maryland, on the B&O (station 1385). The shipper in the great majority of cases chooses routing, as is their right, and they may have specified interchanging from the NKP to the B&O at Fostoria, Ohio (south of Toledo). The clerk can find on the page 111, shown above, that this is route 33. Then on page 99, above, route 33 is shown as approved between these station numbers. 

My friend Jerry Stewart, at one time a Chief Clerk in Chicago, told me that even an experienced route clerk would need plenty of patience and time, and still might not find an unapproved route anywhere east of the Mississippi. Still, routing was checked in the way just described. What about roundabout routes, deliberately chosen to lengthen the delivery time for price purposes? Routes could be strung together, but each segment still had to be an approved route. 

I am omitting a second large issue, rates. Each route had an associated rate. But I’m not going there today (for a little more on it, see this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/02/waybills-part-118-more-information.html ). Arbitrarily chosen routes could well result in higher rates. 

Does this affect how we create model waybills? By no means. Aside from the inconvenience and lack of importance of doing so, you would need a really big set of routing guides. You saw above the size of this single NKP book, and I mentioned that there were probably five or six more, just for the NKP. Imagine now a set of books for all the Class One railroads. Jerry said a complete set would fill a couple of 20-foot shelves. But I find it interesting to see how this work was done in the pre-computer age.

Tony Thompson 

 

Making a silk purse . . . Part 2

Recently I posted about making a “scenery” version of an old Athearn reefer, lettered for Fruit Growers Express, by modeling it with its doors open (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/10/making-silk-purse.html ). I had only intended to describe broadly what I was going to do, and then show the final result. But I received an email asking if I would show more of the process. Luckily, I did take a few photos during the process.

First, having removed the old ice hatches that were shown previously, I also sliced off the “hinge” bulges and the bulge for the latch bar, along with removing the clunky running board. Then I cut off the Athearn locating posts under the running board, and glued them into their roof holes. This is shown in the photo below, at left. 

Then I used Tamiya putty to fill the hinge holes and scale 1 x 6-inch styrene strip to cover the latch bar hole. Some of the running board post holes also needed putty. This step is shown at right, below, with the roof also cleaned up. 

With those steps completed, I touched up the new areas with brown. I added a Walthers white metal Ajax brake wheel (no longer produced), and turned to the underframe. I used the Athearn coupler boxes, secured with 2-56 screws, to host new Kadee no. 158 couplers, and replaced the steel-axle wheelsets in the Athearn metal sprung trucks with InterMountain wheelsets. 

Next I reattached the Athearn ice hatches, replacing two that were damaged with new Athearn parts, and installed the Plano running board with canopy glue. Lastly, I represented latch bars with scale 1 x 3-inch styrene strip. This doesn’t really look much like a real latch bar, but will suffice for this “scenery” model, following Richard Hendrickson’s dictum that this is a place where “there should be something there.” 

Now I could mask the sides and ends with Tamiya tape, and spray paint the entire roof brown, to blend everything together.  And with a coat of protective flat overall, I proceeded to weathering, following my usual method using washes of acrylic tube paint (for more on that, see the “Reference pages” linked at the top right corner of this post). 

I now added the doors, using strips of ordinary Scotch tape as hinges. This allows a choice of how widely open the modeler wants the doors to be, dependent on how strongly creased are the pieces of tape. Here is my choice. And though I don’t plan to do it, the doors can be closed, too.

The purpose of this model, as mentioned at the outset of these two posts, was to model as “scenery” a reefer with open doors at a loading dock. It’s shown below alongside the dock at Guadalupe Fruit Co. in my layout town of Ballard.

This was an interesting project, because not many of my freight cars are intended as scenery; and I learned a few things in the process. Can’t beat that.

Tony Thompson 

The AAR publicity photos

 Back in the 1950s, the AAR (Association of American Railroads) issued a set of large-format photo prints (8.5 x 11 inches) on heavy paper to schools and to the general public. I’ve never seen a complete set, though many people seem to have a few or a handful. I am told there were 60 photos total, all numbered (highest number I’ve seen personally was 55). The great majority are in fact publicity photos contributed by individual railroads. They are interesting in a number of ways, and I thought I would show a few.

The lowest numbers are very early images of different kinds (no. 4 is the famous photo of the two engines nose to nose at Promontory in 1869, with people everywhere). What I have always found amusing is that to avoid  publicizing individual railroads, whenever lettering is visible, it was replaced (sometimes a little crudely) with the legend “East & West Railroad.” It is a particularly entertaining detail when the original railroad is blindingly obvious, like this one (you can click to enlarge): 

 Similarly, a steam photo, showing filling a tender, is quite obviously a Norfolk & Western Class A 2-6-6-4, with its engine number, 1203, visible on the cab, but of course with the “East & West” name on the tender. The locale certainly looks like Roanoke Shops. 

But in many ways the more interesting views to me include the ones showing aspects of freight service. A good example is this photo showing loading of a meat refrigerator car with hanging meat. The Swift Company label is on a couple of the visible carcasses.   

Another interesting example is this view (supplied by United Fruit Company) showing a banana ship alongside barges of refrigerator cars. Two of the reefers are visibly lettered “MDT,” so in this instance the AAR did not feel compelled to replace the initials with “E&W.” The same goes for the inset photo, showing banana handling, with a Northern Refrigerator car in the background. 

Lastly, I liked this photo of a railroad stores building, with material stored outdoors, under cover but open to the air, and on interior shelving (the inset photo). This is something rarely modeled but an interesting challenge, and an “industry” that can ship and receive a wide variety of cargo.  

These are just a few of the AAR photos in the set, but should serve to show the range of interesting views that were included. And school children and others who viewed them hopefully obtained some idea of what railroading was all about. 

Tony Thompson 

Operating SP passenger trains

I’ve posted on related topics to this one several times, mostly about individual passenger cars. One informative post is about fitting cars to trains (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/05/mainline-passenger-cars-on-small-layout.html ) I also posted about an alternative to the trains mentioned below, namely the coast mail train, nos. 71 and 72, shown in this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/10/choosing-model-sp-passenger-cars.html .  

The two distinctive passenger trains of the Coast Route, on which my layout is located, were the Daylight and the overnight Lark, all-Pullman in my 1953 modeling year. As I have often commented, my layout’s staging is too short to host a 12- to 15-car version of either train, which is the size they ran in my era. That leaves two options: operate the layout during a period of the day or night when neither train would operate, or operate a conjectural second section of either train.

In 1953, both trains were normally pulled by Daylight-painted GS-4 or -5 steam engines. I have a Key brass locomotive model that represents SP GS-5 no. 4458. It’s shown here as an eastward train passing the depot at Shumala on my layout, trailed by one of the distinctive Daylight combines, SP 3302 (Soho) and a coach (SP 2401, Athearn). This is necessarily a short train, usually six cars, and would be operated as second 98. 

This combine was painted by me, including striping by my mask and spray technique (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/09/modeling-sp-passenger-cars-part-17.html ). I have repeatedly found this far easier than decal stripes, as described in the post just cited.

The other distinctive Daylight cars were the boat-tail observations, of which I have another Soho model, which I painted and lettered as SP 2952. (That would make it a Class 79-PRO-1, whereas it’s really a model of the earlier 77-PRO-1 cars.) It’s shown below on a westward train, second 99, just leaving Shumala. 

Though these Soho cars are not very detailed or exactly accurate, they certain capture the look of the SP cars. For more about these cars, see Jeff Cauthen and Don Munger’s book about Lounge, Dome and Parlor Cars, Vol. 5 in the series, Southern Pacific Passenger Cars (SP Historical & Technical Society, Upland, CA, 2012). 

The other distinctive train, as mentioned, was the Lark, and again, I can operate a short train of Lark equipment as a second section. Here too, normal power was a GS class. Below is a westward train, second 75, just crossing Chamisal Road in Shumala. This is a Coach Yard model of SP’s modernized RPOs for Lark service, trailed by Lark sleepers.

Finally,  the Lark operated for some years with boat-tail observations too. The original two cars built for the Lark were both destroyed in wrecks by the end of 1942, and thereafter SP used Pullman-operated sleeper-buffet-lounge-observation cars, numbers SP 9500 and 9501. Shown below is my model representing 9500, though it is a Balboa 77-foot observation. It’s shown on an eastward second 76, just passing the engine terminal and caboose track in Shumala.  

Occasionally the railroad president’s car operated on the Coast Division. That car for many years was named Sunset, no. 140, and was the standard Dark Olive Green color. Coach Yard offered this car in brass a few years ago. This model would be anomalous on my 1953 layout, however, because the prototype was repainted from green to Two-Tone Gray in February of 1952. The more famous Sunset was the stainless steel no. 150, built in 1955, after which no. 140 was renamed Stanford. For more on the subject, see Munger and Cauthen’s Southern Pacific Official Cars (SP H&TS, Upland, CA, 2015). The model’s shown below on an eastward train. 

These various second section versions of famous trains are fun to include in an operating session, and within limits I have the rolling stock to do it. As noted above, most of them involve compromises in accuracy of the cars, but they serve the purpose.

Tony Thompson 

Another visit to Bob Hanmer’s layout

I have operated a number of times at Bob Hanmer’s very nice layout in the Chicago area, modeling the Great Northern as well as the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range railroads. A recent report about it is at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/07/an-operating-weekend-around-chicago.html .

In that post, I mentioned my discovery that a paper manufacturer that I had chosen from Internet sources, to ship to the printing plant on my layout, Blandin Paper in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, was an industry I’d switched at Bob’s! Naturally I gave him a copy of my waybill for this, shown below. 

Bob enjoyed this little detail, and on my most recent visit, connected with this year’s Naperville meeting (which I’ve already commented upon: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/07/an-operating-weekend-around-chicago.html ), I was once again invited to operate at Bob’s, and he was pleased to show me the corresponding waybill departing his industry: 

This waybill is 4.5 x 5.5 inches in size, and many experienced operators will recognize it as a product of the Steve Karas waybill system (note that at the very bottom of the bill is a copyright notice for Steve — you may click on the image to enlarge it if you wish).  

I have long admired the products of this system, but haven’t wanted to write too much about it. Since Steve’s passing, the software has not been supported, and at the moment it’s probably not a good idea to consider adopting it. However, there is talk of the software being revived and updated, so if this is of interest, keep your ears open. 

While at the layout, I operated a couple of jobs, one of which was interesting as it was the mine turn to the Canisteo Mine, picking up loads and spotting empties at the mine’s loading spot. Our crew naturally was issued a train order for this move, as seen below (with the clearance card folded back).

It’s not a difficult job, just involves some switching moves at Canisteo. Below is a photo of the assigned mine switcher, used for local work. We didn’t use this engine, as our road engines, F7 types, did the work for our job. Note the long string of empties on the back track. 

On previous visits, I have admired how Bob has handled these ore cars, recognizing that regular loading with ore, followed by gravity unloading, during which any interior paint or rust would be scraped off, means that car interiors are neither rusty nor painted, but should have a bare metal appearance. Bob used a mask to allow painting of car after car with a nearly identical look:   

I found this a nice touch, and very much typical of the overall fine quality of this layout. Thanks again, Bob, for the invites, realistic operations, and the terrific layout.

 Tony Thompson