My column in the September Model Railroad Hobbyist

My latest column in the “Getting Real” series in Model Railroad Hobbyist or MRH, a long-running series for which this is my 32nd column, has just appeared. My subject is one that, when considering possible topics for the next column, I was surprised to find I hadn’t ever written about before. The topic is how my Southern Pacific 1953 layout is operated.

I have, to be sure, described many details of layout operation, particularly my design and use of model waybills. But this is more of a 500-foot view of the events that make up an operating session.

An example is this photo of SP Consolidation 2829, making a switching move across Nipomo Street in Ballard. Just above it in the photo is one of SP’s converted 12-1 Pullman cars, now serving as a MOW bunk car, spotted on the Ballard outfit track (this project was described in an earlier post, at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/11/small-project-sp-boarding-bunk-car.html ).

Most of the article is taken up with describing the many Southern Pacific operating documents I collected or consulted. These range from the obvious, like Rulebooks, Timetables and Special Instructions for the Division I model, to less immediately recognized paper like a Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers labor agreement, a schedule of manifest, merchandise, and perishable trains, or the “Locomotives Assigned” booklets issued quarterly by SP with divisional locomotive assignments. 

For example, here are two pages from that schedule of trains, showing at left the Coast Merchandise East or CME, familiarly known as the “Overnight,” and on the right, one of the “hot” through trains on Coast Division, the Los Angeles Manifest, symbol LA.  

A number of examples of various operating moments were included, partly to illustrate the layout, but more importantly to show the ways operating moves are carried out. One of those views showed SD&AE 103 switching at Santa Rosalia, picking up an empty tank car from the Richfield bulk oil dealer. The background of this locomotive, stationed at San Luis Obispo for years was the subject of an earlier blog post (you may view it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/03/sd-locomotives-on-sp.html ). 

The photo above also shows several of the industries at Santa Rosalia, from the Coastal Citrus packing house at photo center, to the Channel Islands Kelp Products building just visible at right (see a summary of my construction article at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/07/my-article-in-july-2022-mrh.html ), and at rear, the Pismo Marine ship chandlers.

Another example that represents quite a bit of the switching work at Shumala is this view of SP switcher 1423 making up the second Santa Rosalia Local of the day. In the background, a Warren LPG tank car is at the LPG spot of the Associated Oil Company bulk oil dealer. Just above the locomotive is the caboose track, and at right center is the yard office.

I have tried in this article to both outline the operations of the layout, and to offer illustrations. In a similar way, layout history was encompassed in my article in the Layout Design Journal magazine (you can see a summary at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/06/my-article-in-new-layout-design-journal.html ). But a real article about the physical layout and its track plan remains to be done.

Tony Thompson  

Modeling just part of an industry

There is a long-standing problem in building layouts, to achieve realistic depictions of industries. The problem is size. Many a layout contains buildings hardly larger than a boxcar , and that building is switched regularly, though a boxcar load of cargo could hardly even fit in the building. I too am guilty of this in a place or two on my layout.

The classic solution, and often a good one, is to represent any mammoth industry, steel mill or whatever, on the backdrop, as a group of flats or even just a photograph, and the switching for that industry is just a warehouse or shipping building. In such a case, the industry spur may run close to the backdrop, with just a flat photo or semi-3D building with doors. 

A good example of this kind of treatment was seen on a layout I visited during the 2023 “Great Lakes Getaway” in that year (for a description of the event, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-2023-great-lakes-getaway.html ). The backdrop, literally of a steel mill, was on John DePauw’s immense EJ&E, set in 1973. Below is a view of his Kirk Yard in Gary, Indiana, with the very suitable mill backdrop. 

The industry, of course, need not be entirely in the distance, as is suggested by the above photo, served only by a delivery track or tracks. It can also be a flat of a specific building. I made several of these from the line of excellent KingMill backdrops of buildings, and used them several times for photo backdrops, as you see here. Even with its foamcore backing, it’s less than half an inch thick.

But if the industry in question is not quite so mammoth, we can choose to model just a three-dimensional shipping building, with the rest of the industry “elsewhere” off the layout. That was the approach I used for my Wine-Growers Cooperative facility in the layout town of Ballard. I built it so it would be just a warehouse and shipping facility, with the winery that actually produced the wine somewhere away from the railroad.

This industry is really two buildings, a large brick building imagined as the new part of the facility, and an older frame building with a shingle roof, a carryover from the original facility. The warehouse is for both aging and storage.

The brick warehouse is simply a Bristol board box covered with brick paper and three loading doors.  The frame part of the building was scratchbuilt and roofed with Campbell shingles. As shown below, I made an open loading platform so that I could include a workman handling a large wine barrel. Blending wine was still shipped in barrels to some extent in my era. (Be sure to choose barrels that would fit through the four-foot swing doors of the era’s reefers!)

I think that using this structure as just a shipping building helps its credibility, as it is really too small to be a realistic winery by itself (I have modeled a more credible-size building as my Zaca Mesa winery; see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/11/my-zaca-mesa-winery.html ). As I said above, it’s one way to deal with our usual over-compression of structures.

Nearly every layout can benefit from ways to represent larger industries than we have room to model in their entirety. What I’ve show here just scratches the surface. I used to keep notes when I saw a clever or especially effective way of doing this on layout visits. It’s one of the great benefits of such visits, one of the many things a visitor can learn from the imagination and work of others.

Tony Thompson

My layout’s SP fuel and water storage

My layout, set in 1953, includes a modest engine terminal in the town of Shumala, with a turntable, two-stall roundhouse, and a sand house, along with water and oil columns for locomotive servicing. The columns, of course, are fed from storage tanks. The water is assumed to be provided by the town water system, but the fuel oil is brought in by tank car, thus there is a fuel spot to unload those cars. For more about the engine terminal itself, you may wish to look at my article in Model Railroad Hobbyist, August 2017.

The Shumala water tank is a Harriman standard design, imported years ago in brass by Overland. It’s shown below, painted black as was SP practice for steel tanks, alongside my Banta Model Works roundhouse. At the right edge of this view is the pump house for the water tank, an extra building from the Walthers oil dealer kit for McGraw Oil.

To make a storage tank for fuel oil (for SP, this was Bunker C, a viscous product that had to be heated to flow through piping to the firebox), I used an empty bottle of carpenter’s glue, with the top cut off, and with a wrapper of thin styrene with impressed rivet rows, to make a storage tank. I added a ladder to the tank top and an access hatch along with an SP medallion. The oil pump house is another building from McGraw Oil that I didn’t use with my Associated Oil model (see Model Railroad Hobbyist, March 2014).

The tank car you see above has the aluminum end stripe that SP used to designate cars assigned to diesel fuel service. In the foreground above, incidentally, is my scratchbuilt sand house, made following SP drawings for such buildings (see my article in Model Railroad Hobbyist, for January 2021).

To the right of the black fuel oil tank in the photo above is a smaller silver tank. This tank stores diesel fuel, with a clearer view of it below. I described building this tank, with color and label following an SP tank I photographed at West Oakland, in a previous blog post (you can find it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/12/adding-storage-tanks.html ). 

The car at left below, probably delivering Bunker C fuel, is at the actual unloading spot. It is a generic black SP tank car, thus not in assigned service. The car is one of my several conversions of Athearn tank cars to accurate SP models. These Athearn conversions have been described in a full article about the process at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/05/modeling-sp-tank-cars.html ).

In addition to the end stripe on tank cars in diesel fuel service, there was also an all-aluminum scheme for this service, and in the early 1950s cars in both schemes were common. Here is an example of another Athearn conversion, lettered with the decal set I designed (now available from Tichy). This is the right side of the car, which correctly lacks dome walkway and grab iron.

In addition to providing a source for the fuel and water columns in the engine servicing area, the Bunker C and diesel fuel storage tanks are destinations for loaded tank cars, adding a little more switching around the engine terminal. Here’s an example waybill. Though SP mostly bought petroleum products from Chevron, they purchased from other oil companies also.

These parts of my engine terminal have worked out well. Though simple, they complete the logic of fuel and water supply, and as mentioned, are also an unloading destination. 

Tony Thompson 

Modeling Monarch Mining

Since the earliest days of my layout I have envisioned handling ore shipments. (Probably a side effect of my professional life as a metallurgist.) There isn’t space on my layout for the mines themselves, but I can duplicate what often happened with small mines that would not justify a spur track to the mine. Instead, the ore was trucked to the nearest rail line, and dumped from trucks into rail cars.

Such dumps naturally varied widely, from the simplest platform above the rails for dump trucks to dump from, to more elaborate arrangements in which coal could be screened, waste rock removed, or simply stored awaiting a rail car. 

The simplest kind, the overhead platform for direct dumping, has been available for years in HO scale from Blair Line. Here is their photo of a completed kit: 

Beyond the simple overhead platform, varying degrees of complexity can be found. Here is an interesting prototype view of Dyco #1 Tipple in southern Ohio (Harrison County Coal Museum).  

The trucks arrive along the elevated roadway at left, and dump into a bin. A conveyor then elevates the coal to a minimal structure above the rails, which may be nothing more than a storage bin. A hopper car is spotted under the building in this photo.

So what would the loads be on my layout? I have written two previous blog posts about a specific ore that was mined in the area I model: chromite. Here’s the first article, with background on the geology and local history: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/10/modeling-mining-in-your-locale.html . I went into more detail specifically about this kind of ore in the second article, including making chromite loads for ore cars: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/10/modeling-mining-part-2.html .

The loads I’ve made are intended to represent low-grade or “disseminated” chromite ore, much different from high-grade or concentrated ore, which is dark brown or black. These distinctions are explored in the second post just cited.

 I showed my ore cars in that second post, cited above; I have used old Model Die Casting white metal kits for some of the cars, along with a Grandt Line O-scale kit for a Gilpin Tram ore car, simply with details like brake wheel, grab irons and trucks in HO scale. This looks fine in HO, though it has no prototype that I know of at this size. Comparing the two kinds of cars, it looks like the volume of the Gilpin-type cars may be around half that of the conventional 70-ton ore car.

My choice was to build a ramp for dump trucks alongside Bromela Road in my layout town of Ballard, add a portable conveyor, and then all you need is ore cars. In the photo below, today’s road engine on the Santa Rosalia Local, Alco S-4 no. 1474, is picking up a load of chromite ore.

One thing I haven’t really discussed before is the destination of such loads. Certainly the chromite of the low-grade type, which I’m modeling, was processed for use in high-temperature refractories. One possible destination, then, was Kaiser’s plant making such products. This low-grade ore was less desirable in making ferroalloys, but was used when the price was right. These two kinds of destination are shown in the examples below. 

It is fun for me to have actual mining shipments on my layout, even if it is kind of a marginal product and I didn’t get to model a mine. The chromite choice does fit the locale and the period.

Tony Thompson 

My lemon packing house

My layout is set in coastal California, and in the southern half of the state, such areas are suitable for lemon cultivation. Accordingly, I wanted to have a packing house for lemons. 

 In addition to the geographic suitability, there is an attractive traffic consequence, because lemons are harvested all year long. It is a commonplace observation that during most of the year, one can find blossoms, tiny green baby lemons, and ripe yellow lemons on lemon trees. Thus lemons are shipped year-round, rather than seasonally, as for most crops.

I described recently how I made my Zaca Mesa winery from a Magnuson kit structure (see the post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/11/my-zaca-mesa-winery.html ). I show the kit box photos below for clarity. The major part of the structure became the winery, as described in the post cited, but the smaller receiving building, at right in the upper view below, became the lemon packing building. 

This brick structure had large arch openings at each end for hopper cars of coal. Since these made no sense in my intended use, I filled both arches with doors, first filling the curved part of the arch with brick paper. Below is the east end of the building as I modified it, which faces on Corralitos Lane. Note the smear of epoxy glue from the previous owner, which I tried and failed to remove.

At the west end, facing Laguna Street in my coastal town of Santa Rosalia, I instead modeled the doorway as a roll-up door, using corrugated metal and a half-round shape for the mechanism at top. 

A view of just the building on the layout shows a side view. I again added a roll-up door in the center, perhaps as a replacement for a deteriorated wooden door. I filled one window with brick, and the doorway at the right end is open, with some field boxes visible inside, containing lemons. I also added a couple of lemons on the ground, using craft beads.  At right is a truck picking up empty field boxes.

The building is on the small side for a packing house, but lemons require little work in packing, really only washing and grading, and putting into shipping boxes. Thus I believe that the building, though small, is just about big enough for credibility. I lettered it with dry transfers.

In use, you can see the two streets on either side of the building, as well as the layout surroundings, and a reefer being loaded. Street names are shown on the fascia. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.)

I enjoy having a citrus packing house on the layout, both for California flavor and for its year-round traffic. It exchanges loaded and empty reefers in nearly every operating session on the layout, regardless of the month of the session, just as it should.

Tony Thompson

The AAR Mechanical Designations

Designations of freight cars to describe their suitability for different cargoes have a long history. The American Railway Association (ARA), predecessor of the Association of American Railroads (AAR) was printing them in the back of Official Railway Equipment Registers (ORER) at least as early as March 1923 (the oldest ORER issue I have), and they continued to be so printed at least as late as July 1970 (the newest ORER I have).

What did these listings contain? They comprise descriptions of different freight car characteristics, and two-letter or three-letter designation codes for each. Some of these are so familiar as to require no explanation, such as “XM” for ordinary box cars. Others, such as RSM, may draw a blank. That designation happens to describe a meat reefer; here is the listing for RSM, and the more general ice reefer designation, RS.

An example of such an RSM car is shown below, modeled by upgrading the ancient Varney/LifeLike plastic reefer, as I described in a series of posts (see for example this one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/05/modeling-meat-reefers-part-5.html ).

Modelers of earlier eras tend to know these codes; but modelers more recently in the hobby, or those modeling more recent eras, often give you a blank look if you refer to them. I thought it might be useful to make them available. More than a dozen years ago, I posted an introduction to this subject (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/09/aar-car-types.html ) and now am going further by making the entire listing available.

I have scanned these definitions from the back of the January 1953 ORER, made up a five-page PDF, and posted it in Google Docs for anyone to access.  You can find it at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XbupnOIXC9RVpFvPAyf-xwDX8Saz9yot/view?usp=drive_link .

A complication to keep in mind when looking at the designations is that one needs to read even the footnotes in the designation pages. An example is the flat car listing, shown below: see Note 1 at the bottom.

It is only a small note at the base of the entry, but it is essentially the new designation for bulkhead flat cars, FMS, that is described. This designation remained as a footnote for years, even as bulkhead flat cars became commonplace on mainline railroads. 

This is of interest to me because the Southern Pacific began building such cars in its own shops as early as 1949, and the SP Historical & Technical Society issued parts to add bulkheads to the accurate Red Caboose SP Class F-70-7 flat car. Subsequently Red Caboose issued ready-to-run models of these cars, using the Society bulkheads. The photo below by the late Paul Lyons illustrates one of these models.

I make use of these designations in operating my layout. They are included on waybills, as shown below, to help operators recognize cars and spot them at industries correctly when necessary, though  the AAR’s prototype waybill form did not include the AAR designations.

 So to me, the AAR designations or codes are cool, informative, prototypical, and useful. I enjoy including them in layout operations.

Tony Thompson 

My state highway facility

Among the many industries in my layout town of Ballard is a facility of the California Division of Highways, predecessor of today’s CalTrans. I chose this regional facility in part to be able to receive cement cargoes in covered hoppers. In the year I model, 1953, covered hoppers were almost entirely used for bulk cement. Many of their cargoes, familiar in later years, such as dry chemicals, grain, animal feed, and so forth, were mostly in the future in 1953. 

The cement loads are appropriate because in 1953, the Division of Highways continued to build and maintain many secondary roads and bridges in the state. The advent of freeways after 1940, usually enormous projects, had made contractors essential in major works, but local roads and highways were still the responsibility of the Division of Highways. Thus inbound cargoes of both cement and asphalt are appropriate, along with all kinds of supplies like fence and sign posts, rebar, bridge girders, lumber for concrete forms, and so on. 

I built the structure from a Rix Pikestuff kit (intended as an auto repair garage), a simple styrene kit that went together easily. It represents a cinder-block building with steel-framed windows. As I built it, it has a 3.5 x 7-inch footprint. I went online and researched the geographic districts of the Division of Highways in 1953, and found that the Central Coast area I model was in District 5.

As stated above, my primary motivation for including this industry was inbound cement loads. So the classic view you would have of this industry in most of my operating sessions is as below. That’s Nipomo Street at left.

In addition to the cement loads and other highway materials mentioned above, occasionally some work equipment may arrive. In the photo below, it’s a road grader. 

In creating waybills for this destination, I knew that cement, a heavy and not particularly expensive commodity, ordinarily does not travel far from  origin. It is easy online to research what cement plants existed in California in 1953, and I show a partial list below. I’ve omitted a few, such as the Calaveras Cement plant at San Andreas, on SP’s Kentucky House branch.

One feature of the list above is that one of the plants, Southwestern Portland Cement, was located on the Santa Fe. This provides a reason for inbound Santa Fe freight cars on my layout. Given the often-fierce rivalry between SP and Santa Fe, empty Santa Fe cars would effectively never be loaded on the SP, but of course inbound loads could well travel in them.

For waybills, there is nothing exotic about the ones for this industry. I show an example below. And in addition to the occasional Santa Fe covered hopper with such loads, I can also use T&NO, SSW, and UP cars, all of which would be available in California for loading at the plants above. 

This industry, like a number that are on my layout, was chose specifically for the loads it would receive, and has worked well in that capacity.

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  

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