Weathering the Rapido 1937 AAR box cars

I have posted two write-ups about the recently released HO scale models of the 1937 AAR box cars from Rapido. In the first of these, I showed the two Canadian box cars I received, and included photos of their prototypes (that post is at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/08/rapdios-new-1937-aar-box-cars.html ).

In a second post, I similarly showed the two U.S. box cars in my order, an Erie car and an SP car. Prototype details and lettering were shown there too. The post about them is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/08/more-of-rapidos-new-1937-aar-box-cars.html . Both had some interesting paint scheme details, as explained there

Now these cars are all modified as needed (adding the Ureco handbrake to the SP car), as well as weathered and made ready for service. All had to receive reweigh and repacking stencils appropriate for my 1953 layout era. As usual, I relied on old Sunshine decal sets for these details. Lastly, I added raoute cards and a few chalk marks.

Here is the Canadian National car. I enjoyed the model’s having an NSC end and the integral ladder-sill steps, distinctively Canadian. 

The Canadian Pacific car was handled similarly to the CN one. It’s distinctive feature is the flat-panel roof, otherwise very generically 1937 AAR design. 

Next is the Erie car, which as I mentioned in the previous post about it, has an older paint scheme, with the black door. Accordingly I weathered it more heavily than some of these  cars. 

Lastly, the SP car, with its odd mixture of era paint features (as described previously). I decided to make it look as though just the SP initials of the factory lettering had been replaced with the post-1946 spelled out road name. 

I protected that road name with Tamiya masking tape, then applied my usual acrylic weathering to roof, ends and sides (see “Reference pages” linked at to right of this post). Removing the tape, a coat of flat finish was added to protect the weathering step. 

I then added paint patches for reweigh and repack stencils, along with new light weight and load limit numbers, all from Sunshine decals. To finish, I added chalk marks and route cards. The Ureco brake wheel is visible here.  

 Here is an  overall view of the left side of the car. 

This completes an interesting model of a hold-over Class B-50-18 original black roof, and replaces in my collection an upgraded Athearn “Blue Box” model of decades ago.

Tony Thompson 

More of Rapido’s new 1937 AAR box cars

Recently I reported on two of the new 1937 AAR-design box cars in HO scale, both of them Canadian cars, as it happened (you can view that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/08/rapdios-new-1937-aar-box-cars.html ). Today I want to report on two others.

But first I have to mention the magisterial volume with phenomenal coverage of the 1937 cars, Patrick C. Wider’s monumental 384-page opus, Railway Prototype Cyclopedia, Volume 35 (Silverlake Images, 2020). I am overwhelmed every time I open it. If you’re a “freight car guy” and you don’t have it, your library is quite incomplete.

The first of the 1937 cars I want to present is an Erie car. The photo below shows the first car in an order for 200, Erie 79000–70199, built by Pullman-Standard in February 1940. It has a Viking corrugated roof, Youngstown doors, Ajax hand brake, steel grid running board, and Dreadnaught ends (Pullman photo, Biernacki collection).

The model faithfully reproduces the paint scheme, including the black roof, ends, and door. The running board is shown as unpainted. Soon after the built date of this car, Erie abandoned painting doors black, but naturally some cars so painted survived in service for years. That will be my challenge with this model, to be well-weathered original paint 13 years later, in my modeling year of 1953.  

The second car on today’s agenda is a Southern Pacific version. Like several major railroads, as soon as the AAR committee’s design features were pretty much settled in 1936, SP ordered 1750 cars from four builders, and a year later went back for 1000 more. So the “1937” design is important to the SP fleet. 

Of that initial order, 500 cars (SP 32770–33269, Class B-50-18) were built by Pullman-Standard, with an example shown below (Pullman-Standard photo). The first. 350 cars of this order had Ureco handbrakes.

Note that the initials SP here, with no periods. SP had discontinued the use of periods in reporting marks in 1931. An end view of another car of this class, at left below (Pressed Steel Car Co.), shows the five-spoke Ureco brake wheel also used on 350 of the Pullman-Standard cars. You can click on the image to enlarge it.

The model I received didn’t have this handbrake attached, but in the box was a small plastic envelope with two different handbrake assemblies, one of which was the five-spoke Ureco (at right above). I have heard some grumbles that handbrakes are not correct on some Rapido 1937 box cars; I hope these people still have the original box so they can search for such an envelope. I will replace the as-delivered handbrake with the correct Ureco.

These models have some nice details not usually included from the factory, such as a service stencil on the brake reservoir. I show an example below.

Below is the Rapido SP model. Like many and possibly all the cars of Class B-50-18, it has a black roof. But the lettering (spelled-out road name) was introduced in 1946, and in fact the car has a reweigh date of 1948. I know of no evidence that post-1946 repaints would have retained the black roof, discontinued by that time. I could of course repaint the roof. However, I can mask the road name and capacity data, and heavily weather the rest of the car, to make this a realistic paint scheme. 

Both these are nice models, and both require some judicious paint and weathering to be reasonable for my 1953 modeling year. I will return to that in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

Mishaps do happen

Some years ago, I described the creation of a stand-in version of a Southern Pacific postal-storage car, in two blog posts. The concluding one is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/08/modeling-sp-head-end-cars-part-7b.html . The goal was to produce something like the car shown below, photographed at Council Bluffs, in 1954 (Clark Bauer collection). This was an EP&SW 60-foot postal car, remodeled by SP into a postal-storage configuration. 

I approximated this car by cutting up an Athearn RPO model, to get the right overall appearance, although as I mentioned in showing the modeling process, the size and location of windows in my model don’t exactly match the photo above. The modeling work was described here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/07/modeling-sp-head-end-cars-part-7a.html . This was the finished model: 

So why is it coming up now? A derailment in a recent operating session resulted in the floor/underframe part of the model separating into two parts. That was the mishap, seen below. Obviously it wasn’t as well glued together as I thought. So what now? 

The steel weight on the right-hand section in the photo above would have been good to remove, but it evidently is well glued to the floor section of that part of the car. Instead, I cut two lengths of 1/4 x 1/8-inch styrene (Evergreen #389) and glued them to the inside rails of the sides of both parts, across the gap, using Plastruct “Plastic Weld” cement and clamping. The two sections now appear to be quite solidly joined.

I next painted the white styrene reinforcements black. At this point, the car could be re-assembled. It is now back in service, as I show below, in a passenger train behind Class P-4 Pacific SP 2402, passing the Shumala depot on my layout. 

Accidents like derailments or other kinds of things do occur, and they just have to be dealt with. I thought it might be of interest to see my method of correcting this one.

Tony Thompson 

Another passenger upgrade, Part 2

In a recent post, I described a project to upgrade a Rivarossi streamlined postal-baggage for service on my layout as an SP car. In that preceding post, I showed the paint scheme I applied, and the addition of steel nuts for weight. (That post is at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/04/another-passenger-car-upgrade.html .) 

In a number of posts about SP passenger cars, I have shown various ways of dealing with the Rivarossi trucks and couplers. Either the “Talgo”-like swivel arm on the truck can be modified to accept a Kadee box and coupler,  or the coupler arm can be removed altogether, and Kadee couplers mounted on the car body. For this car, I wanted to do the latter.

The area underneath the car end on all the Rivarossi streamlined cars has a pair of ribs, with rivet detail atop them. This area is shown in the photo below. 

I have found that sanding off these rivets, and adding a mounting pad of styrene sheet pieces can create a correct-height mounting surface (see, for example, this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/06/modeling-sp-passenger-cars-part-20.html ). But different Rivarossi car types do not have identical underbodies, so each car type requires determination of the correct amount of styrene.

In the photo below, I have already drilled and tapped a hole for a 2-56 screw in the new pad. This does raise an issue with no general answer: how close to the car end should the coupler be mounted? It’s an issue because unfortunately my passenger cars from various sources have a variety of diaphragms on them, some of minimal thickness, some with more depth. This can lead to problems in coupling some cars. 

For diaphragms, the Rivarossi models have a short extension around the end doors, but no faceplate, and no stabilizer bars (here’s background: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/06/passenger-car-diaphragms-part-3.html ). 

Below is a detail from a Bruce Heard photo, taken at Sacramento in 1962, from one of the Southern Pacific Historical & Technical Society passenger volumes; see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/07/passenger-car-diaphragms-part-4.html .

Above you can clearly see the appearance of the face plate and the stabilizer bars. These face plates had a variety of shapes, and I chose a typical Pullman shape from an assortment of Coach Yard face plates, painted them dark gray, and attached them with canopy glue. Brass wire stabilizer bars were attached and painted the same way. Finally, Pan Pastels were used to add rust to the face plate.  

This completes the car work. In service on my layout, the car might either be deadheaded anywhere in a train, or, if being worked in postal service, might well be coupled to a postal storage car at its postal end, a common practice on SP’s Coast Division mail trains (a description of my storage car is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/08/modeling-sp-head-end-cars-part-7b.html ). Such a line-up is shown here at Shumala on my layout. 

This was an interesting project to complete, so that the car can be used in service along with my other upgraded Rivarossi cars. Passenger service on my SP layout main line may be limited, but this car can contribute to it.

Tony Thompson 

Another passenger car upgrade

As I have written a number of times, my layout is primarily a branch line, with limited amounts of mainline traffic passing by on the Southern Pacific’s Coast Division main line. Since my staging cannot accommodate full-length passenger trains, I usually run second sections, or deadhead extras, to include passenger cars.  

My equipment is in some cases accurately modeled SP prototypes (as a single example, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/03/modeling-sp-passenger-cars-part-12.html , or refer to my Model Railroad Hobbyist article in the issue for October 2023), but in other cases would be better described as credible stand-ins. This is especially appropriate in a deadhead extras, moving equipment from one terminal to another, as in such cases the equipment need not match any specific train. 

This post is about upgrading one such car, a Rivarossi baggage-postal car. This is only broadly like an SP car of the same type, but could pass muster in one of my deadhead extras. The model does resemble some 1950s cars built by Pullman -Standard, such as SP Class 80-BP-60-1 (meaning baggage-postal, 60-foot postal apartment). Shown below is the “north” side of one of these cars, painted for assignment to the City of San Francisco (Pullman photo, CSRM). Note the full-width diaphragms and full skirting.

 I point out that this is the “north” side because the other side was different, with five windows in the postal apartment. Below is a photo of the “south” side, seen in COSF service at Laramie, Wyo. in August 1966 (Don Munger collection). Here skirts are almost all removed, and full-width diaphragms are gone Both prototype photos are from the essential  SPH&TS book, Southern Pacific Passenger Cars, Vol. 3: Head-end Equipment (Pasadena, 2007).

The Rivarossi car has all these general features, so I decided I could use it, even though it’s 73 feet long, not 80 feet. I began by stripping its original paint, masking and painting two-tone gray in the typical SP “pool scheme” arrangement of the mid-1950s, that is, with no train name or emblem, and lettering it with postal-baggage SP decals. 

The car number I chose to use is SP 5156. This corresponds to SP Class 70-BP-1-3, built by Standard Steel Car in 1924, a round-roof car class fairly different from the Rivarossi model. But many cars in this class were converted to regular baggage cars after World War II, including 5156, so by my modeling year of 1953, 5156 was a non-existent SP 5000-series number. My stand-in model, shown below, could use it.

Evident in this photo is that the model needed replacement of the Rivarossi horn-hook coupler arrangement, which is a kind of “Talgo” attachment to the truck. I will install Kadee couplers on the body instead. It also should have diaphragms, and like all stock Rivarossi passenger cars, has far too little weight for dependable operation. I added a pair of 5/8-11 steel nuts with canopy glue; these can be seen below before painting them black. This is the “north” side of the car.  

Next, diaphragms need to be added, and couplers installed. That and a few other tweaks will be covered in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

Night trains on Southern Pacific’s Coast Route

The title of this blog post may remind some readers of an excellent book of some years ago with a very similar title. That’s on purpose, though I will touch on only a tiny fraction of the information in that book. Its actual title was Southern Pacific Passenger Trains: Night Trains on the Coast Route, by Dennis Ryan and Joseph Shine (Four Ways West Publications, La Mirada, CA, 1986). This post draws heavily on the extensive information in that book. 

Below is an image of its dust jacket, featuring a painting by Ernie Towler. Based on a John Illman photo, it depicts the Lark in the morning near Burlingame, inbound  to San Francisco, passing the outbound Daylight, train 98. Certainly the most famous night train on the Coast was the all-Pullman streamlined  Larkn and its two-tone gray paint scheme. In this painting, the Lark’s last two sleepers and the buffet-observation car have been cut off at San Jose to form the Oakland Lark.

But almost from the beginning of passenger trains on this route, there was a companion night train on the Coast Route, intended as a less-expensive alternative to the Lark. From 1901 to 1915, it was called the SF & LA Passenger; from 1915 to 1925, the Seashore Express, equipped with both chair cars and tourist sleepers. This became trains 69 and 70 in 1926 and took the name Coaster (previously the name of a daytime train on the Coast). 

In the immediate postwar period, SP began to re-structure its passenger services on the Coast Line. The pre-war Noon Daylight trains were re-established, joining the Morning Daylight. The pair of overnight trains, the all-Pullman streamlined Lark and the heavyweight Coaster, continued, with the Coaster still perceived as the economy service.

Southern Pacific did its best to publicize the Coaster after the war, always emphasizing its relatively economical prices, both for fares and for on-board meals, as shown in this poster that appeared in depots and other public places.

Below is an image of the inbound Coaster rounding Sierra Point, just south of Bayshore Yard in the fall of 1946, with Mountain 4309 on the point (SP photo, Steve Peery collection). It’s a 13-car train today, with three baggage cars on the head end (some in use as postal storage cars). Night Trains on the Coast Route contains a typical 1946 consist: three baggage cars, five coaches, three 16-section tourist Pullmans, a 10-1-2 Pullman, and a 10 section-lounge observation (which you can see below). That open-platform observation was soon discontinued.

But a few years after the war, in late 1949, SP replaced the overnight Coaster on the Coast Line with a new all-coach train, the Starlight. The Coaster had featured heavyweight sleeping cars, many of them mostly section accommodations, and those were rapidly becoming unpopular with the traveling public. Coach travel was a little cheaper, and by using older equipment from the first Daylight trains, a much more modern train with more comfortable seating could replace the Coaster. 

On October 1, 1949, the Noon Daylight was discontinued, and the next day the Coaster was also discontinued. Starting that day day, October 2, the replacement was the Starlight, much of its equipment coming from the former Noon Daylight. Here’s a poster publicizing the new train. Fare is a little higher than that for the Coaster shown in the poster above. As noted below, the schedule left after dinner and arrived before breakfast, thus no dining car was needed (though both a coffee shop and a tavern-lounge were included).

On my own layout, set in 1953, it’s obvious that the night train other than the Lark should be the Starlight. But I have a soft spot for heavyweight equipment, especially Pullmans, and occasionally a time warp occurs and a late-running Coaster may venture across the Guadalupe Subdivision.

I have always been intrigued by the ways corporations, including railroads, choose to present themselves to the public. Posters in depots, including the two shown here, are certainly interesting examples.  

Tony Thompson 

Handout for “Modeling SP Operations”

This is the on-line handout for a clinic entitled “Modeling SP Operating Practices.” The purpose is to provide documentation of the various published items shown in the talk, along with links to a number of blog posts which cover some points in the talk in much more detail. They are grouped below by topic area.

My point in the clinic was to indicate that many of us enjoy trying to operate model railroads in a prototypical manner, as in the photo below (Pat LaTorres at left, and Ed Slintak, switching at Ballard on my layout). I attempted to indicate how we can go about such imitation of the prototype, choosing the specific railroad that I model, the Southern Pacific.

Print Publications

Armstrong, John H., The Railroad – What It Is, What It Does (Chapter 8, Railroad Operations), Simmons-Boardman Publishing, Omaha, 1982. [there are several subsequent editions with updates; the original is closest in time to the era I model] 

Coughlin, E.W., Freight Car Distribution and Handling in the United States, Car Service Division, Association of American Railroads, Washington, 1956.

Grant, H. Roger, The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2022. 

Koester, Tony, “In search of the perfect waybill,” Model Railroader, February 2012, p. 82.

Niemann, Linda, Boomer, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990.

Rehwalt, Dan, Westsider, Grizzly Press, Oakridge, OR, 2004.

Sprau, David, and Steven King, 19 East, Copy Three, Operations Special Interest Group, WoodDale, IL, 2013, 

Thompson, Anthony, “Prototypical waybills for car card operation,” Railroad Model Craftsman, December 2009, pp. 71–77.  

Thompson, Tony, “Getting Real: A More Prototypical Waybill for Model Railroads,” Model Railroad Hobbyist, pp. 31–46, May 2012. 

Thompson, Tony, ”Getting Real: Operating with Prototypical Waybills,” Model Railroad Hobbyist, January 2018.  

Thompson, Tony, “Modeling Traffic on a Layout,” Model Railroad Hobbyist, September 2021.  

SP Circular 39-1, “Instructions to Station Agents”

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 2,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/sps-instruction-to-station-agents-part-2.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 3,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/12/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 4,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/12/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part_10.html

Thompson, Tony, “SP’s Instructions to Station Agents, Part 5,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/12/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part_25.html

Learning from Circular 39-1

Thompson, Tony, “Waybills, Part 88: Temporary Waybills,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/08/waybills-part-88-temporary-waybills.html

Thompson, Tony, “Waybills, Part 90: SP Form 704,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/09/waybills-part-90-sp-form-704.html

Other Points

Thompson, Tony, “Southern Pacific’s Circular 4,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/12/southern-pacifics-circular-4.html  

Thompson, Tony, “Waybills, Part 39: SP Typography,”  https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/04/waybills-part-39-sp-typography.html

Thompson, Tony, “SD&AE Locomotives on the SP,” https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/03/sd-locomotives-on-sp.html

With the help of these and many other publications out there, we can hope to capture the spirit of moments like the one below, the operator at Vincent, California, handing up orders to eastward freight 804 (Richard Steinheimer photo).  

Tony Thompson 

Some Southern Pacific wartime posters

Back more than 30 years ago, the Bookmine bookstore in Sacramento (long gone today) acquired a huge stash of “surplus” paper materials from the Southern Pacific General Shops in Sacramento. Among them were numerous posters, that SP provided to depots and other locations where the public would see them. Of dramatic quality as well as historical interest were some about wartime security. 

The first one I’ll show is obviously from the very beginning of World War II in the United States, as is evident from the included calendar, for May 1942, presumably the month it was released for use. At that time, there was a major focus on security. I especially like the upraised, admonitory finger.  

A similar message was prepared for Pullman passengers, printed in dark blue on white. I am told these were about five inches square. Obviously the central part of the text is the same. 

The idea that casual conversations were likely to be overheard by enemy agents, prevalent at the beginning of the war, soon disappeared. Warnings about keeping information to yourself, however, did continue. 

Next  comes a poster that I know was used through much of the war (often in rotation with other wartime posters). Travel by train was heavily used by the military, not only troop movements but movement of officers and senior officials among administrative assignments too. Like the other posters, this one is 16 x 21 inches in size.

There was a prohibition of taking photos of trains generally, though some railfans did continue to photograph, often surreptitiously. I thought it was interesting that there was equal concern about photos taken from the train. And like all these posters, patriotic red, and often also blue, was the format.

I showed two of these posters in the book I did with John Signor, Southern Pacific’s Coast Line Pictorial  (Signature Press, 2000), on page 56, but in black and white. 

I have always been intrigued by the ways corporations, including railroads, choose to present themselves to the public. Posters in depots are certainly an interesting example. And the specific wartime content of these particular ones is especially interesting.

Tony Thompson 

Southern Pacific’s “Circular 4”

A core document of the Southern Pacific for many years was the Accounting Department’s Circular 4. I realize that isn't an informative name, but its actual title was List of Officers, Agencies Stations, Etc. It was re-issued every few years as things changed. Shown below is the cover of the one that was issued in 1952, the one relevant for my modeling year of 1953. Its size is 4-3/4 by 6-3/4 inches and it contains 214 pages.  

It’s a minor point, but its issuance by the Accounting Department fits with many other Circulars about rules, regulations and procedures of the railroad.  (I’ve written previously about Circular 39-1, Instructions to Station Agents; see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/sps-instructions-to-station-agents-part.html .)

What can we learn from a Circular 4? I might begin with an important division in the railroad organization, between what most of us think of as the “real railroad,” the Operating Department, and the other big segment, the Traffic Department. I show below pages 20 and 21, containing the last page of the Operating Dept. at top left, followed by three small departments, Purchasing, Real Estate, and Tax, and on the facing page, Traffic. Note also that these are revised pages, issued January 1, 1953, doubtless to reflect changes in officer positions.

I don’t have an SP organization chart. But I do know that a lot of what we model in fact stems from the work of the Traffic Dept. Most notable were the station agents. SP rarely combined the jobs of agent and operator, but instead almost always required one of each. An operator had to pass a Rule Book exam and be familiar with operating procedures; an agent, not at all, though of course agents came to know a lot of operating detail from being around it every day in smaller stations.

If you click on the image above to enlarge it, you’ll see that there was a Vice-President for System Freight Traffic (W.W. Hale), along with freight traffic managers, managers of such categories as perishable freight and merchandise traffic, General Freight Agents, and so on. This was a large and complex organization entirely separate from the Operating Department.

There was also a separate part of the Traffic Dept., System Passenger Traffic, again with a hierarchy of officials throughout the system, listed on later pages of Circular 4.

The majority of the book, 164 of the 214 pages, is taken up with a list of all stations. First they are listed in order by division. Shown below is the page of the Coast Division listing, page 119, that covers the Guadalupe Subdivision which is where my layout is located.  This is one of eight pages for this Division.

All stations are also all separately listed alphabetically by station name, so you don’t have to know on which division a station of interest may be located. And helpfully, if you had only the number of a station, you can look to see which division it is on, using a page like this, again choosing Coast Division: 

There are only some of the many tidbits of information in a Circular 4. I have often referred to the one shown above. I also consult a few others I own, with earlier or later dates, to see how things changed over time. Most railroads had publications like this, so they are worth hunting for, whatever your favorite prototype might be.

Tony Thompson 

Passenger trains on my branch line

My layout is very freight-car oriented; nearly all car movements on my fictitious branch line to Santa Rosalia, and most mainline action, are exclusively freight. When passenger equipment is operated, it is ordinarily on the main line, often a “deadhead” move balancing passenger equipment between Los Angeles and Sank Francisco. I’ve discussed this several times (for an example, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/05/mainline-passenger-cars-on-small-layout.html ). 

But there are exceptions. Regular passenger service on a branch like this would have been abandoned in the 1930s. But a passenger movement that happens occasionally on my layout is the operation of a passenger extra train, presumably an excursion and perhaps a  railfan event (though such trains were still rare in my modeling year of 1953). An example of this kind of passenger extra is the train that ran up and down the length of several branch lines, allowing fans to “collect miles,” as it was called. 

Such an excursion might operate, for example, from Los Angeles or Santa Barbara to San Luis Obispo, along the way running the length of the Lompoc Branch and return, and, why not, the Santa Rosalia Branch, before connecting with passenger schedules at San Luis for the passengers to return home northward or southward.

Approaching Shumala, then, from the south, the train might make a station stop at the Shumala depot, as you see below in a train using a former RPO as a baggage car (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/06/small-project-old-brass-sp-baggage-car.html ), trailed by a 60-foot coach. Power here is Southern Pacific Ten-wheeler 2344. 

The train has stopped with its consist clear of Chamisal Road at right, because the locomotive will cut off and run around the train on the siding. Below we see the run-around in progress, as 2344 backs down the siding past the depot. 

Then with 2344 behind the consist, the train is ready to be pushed up the branch to its destination. When it’s time to return, the locomotive would then be leading, though tender-first. The 60-foot coach here is Golden Gate Depot’s SP 1972, Class 60-C-5.

But railroaders usually preferred to have the locomotive leading the train at all times if possible. If the passenger excursion heads up the Santa Rosalia Branch with the locomotive at the front of the train, there will then have to be a run-around somewhere up on the branch, given the lack of locomotive turning facilities on the branch.

The photo below shows 2344 starting its run-around in front of the Santa Rosalia depot. In this instance, the train is coach SP 1581 (a kit-bashed Roundhouse model), Class 60-C-4, and postal storage car SP 4263, pressed into service as a baggage car for the excursion (modeling SP 4263 was described in a blot post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/07/modeling-sp-head-end-cars-part-7a.html ). 

In one instance, the excursion train had two coaches, and only ran as far as the Ballard depot, as you see below, before performing the run-around and returning to the main line at Shumala. Power again is Ten-wheeler 2344 (Precision Scale brass). 

Since ordinarily the Santa Rosalia Local freight train is alone on the branch, any such passenger train requires a whole bunch of train orders to arrange a meet at either Ballard or Santa Rosalia, and for the excursion train to return to Shumala.  

Whether the operation of such an excursion train requires turning back at Ballard, or at Santa Rosalia, the important point is the lack of turning facilities. That in turn means that turning back involves the locomotive running around the train and pulling it back to Shumala with the tender leading. This has been an interesting complication for the normally unhindered local freight train operating in the same territory. Usually that increases the fun of an operating session.

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 

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