Modeling SP passenger cars -- the “Coast Mail” train

In prior posts, I have discussed modeling the various head-end cars which ran in SP’s mail train on the Coast Line. This train, numbered 71 and 72, was officially titled in employee timetables as merely Passenger, but many employees (and railfans) called it the “Coast Mail.” I began discussing the broad topic of SP passenger car modeling, with an introductory post (at:  http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/10/choosing-model-sp-passenger-cars.html ). Then I presented some specifics, along with model photographs for a few individual cars of the Coast Mail, in a follow-up post, at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/10/modeling-sp-passenger-cars-head-end-cars.html .
     The Coach Yard has now announced the upcoming delivery of an entire Coast Mail consist of eight cars, and all cars will also be available separately, with a variety of paint and lettering options available (Dark Olive, Two-Tone Gray, Daylight, etc.). You can see the announced car descriptions at this link: http://www.thecoachyard.com/Pages/Equipment/SPCM.html . These of course will be all-brass models, no doubt with the excellent detail for which Coach Yard models are known, so they will not be cheap. Prices have not been announced as yet, but it is not too soon to reserve these cars with your favorite dealer.
     Speaking for myself, I will certainly want to choose a couple of these interesting head-end car choices, especially the 70-foot baggage-horse car which will be included. These were almost always present in the Coast Mail, judging from photos and from information in Ryan and Shine’s book, SP Passenger Trains: Vol. 1, Night Trains of the Coast Route (Four Ways West, La Mirada, CA, 1986). SP owned both 70-foot and 80-foot BH cars, and here is a chance to get a fine model of one of the short ones.
     Specific information and good photos of those cars can be found in the SPH&TS book, “Head End Equipment,” Volume 3 in the series Southern Pacific Passenger Cars (2007). Chapters 11 and 12. Like all five volumes of this series, Volume 3 is an excellent resource for modelers. Among other things, it shows that most head-end cars until the mid-1950s were painted SP’s Color No. 1 in the Common Standard No. 22 color series, named Dark Olive. It really is a dark color in indoor lighting; here is the drift card and its Bowles envelope. (I presented some background about drift cards and the Bowles Corporation in a previous post about SP colors; here is a link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/10/modeling-sp-structure-colors.html .)

     For those who already have, or are looking for, unpainted SP head-end cars, the question naturally arises as to how to duplicate SP’s Dark Olive color. There are at least three ways to go. First, several versions of Great Northern “Empire Builder Green” match well to the SP color chip. Many GN fans will tell you that this color is merely Pullman Green, but the true Pullman color lacks the brown and yellow tones of olive green, and does not match the SP chip. Second, military Olive Drab paint is often quite close to the SP chip, especially the current Floquil enamel color.
     But probably the best solution is approach number three: Star Brand paint from P-B-L, item STR-29, which is matched to the SP and UP chips for Dark Olive. I like this paint, and it goes on smoothly with an airbrush, so I would recommend applying it that way. This paint can be purchased on-line from P-B-L, at: http://www.p-b-l.com/ . To see the paint list, click on “online catalog” and then in the “Categories” window, select “paint / cement,” and scroll down to STR-29.
     I have also been asked to recommend decals for SP heavyweight equipment (and particularly the head-end cars I’ve been discussing). By far the best HO decal set in my opinion is the Thin Film set HO-160, described as being for Harriman-era cars but in fact for heavyweight cars generally, in Dulux Gold. These are normally available only through hobby dealers, but you can see the catalog at this link: http://thinfilmdecals.com/ . Here is a low-resolution scan of the decal sheet (the set contains two of these):

Much of the sheet is occupied by a fine selection of SP-appropriate Pullman car names (lower part of the sheet) but practically any other passenger car type can be lettered with this set. Do note, however, that you can really only letter one car per decal set, though you will have lots of lettering left over.
     As mentioned, the color of this lettering is Dulux Gold, which became SP’s standard lettering for Dark Olive cars in about 1936, replacing the former gold leaf. (Thus modelers of the post-1936 SP will not want to use “metallic gold” decals.) As most modelers know, this is not a metallic color, but is a paint intended to convey the tone of gold-leaf lettering. I have heard the statement that “Dulux” is a shade of gold, but actually it’s a DuPont trade name for a particular formulation of paint. All the colors in that paint line have their name prefixed by “Dulux.” Thus there would be a Dulux Daylight Orange, Dulux Daylight Red, and so on.
     I have a couple of SP head-end car bodies which need painting, and when I do that project, I will probably write a post about how it goes. Until then, the foregoing should give you enough background to get started.
Tony Thompson

The Shumala extension

I have long planned to make an extension to my town of Shumala, so that the overall arrangement of it would be kind of an L shape. This post describes the early steps in building this extension.
     There is a brown bookcase along the end wall of my layout room, with its top below the level of the layout. Accordingly, I screwed some segments of L-girder to the top of the bookcase (this would be easily reversible if ever necessary). Each riser was then raised in height with a second segment of L-girder, glued back to back with the first ones. The back-to-back arrangement maximizes access to the screw attachment points, if I ever needed to do that. To determine the final height, a correct-thickness board was placed atop the clamped pieces, and carefully leveled. Then these second pieces were glued and re-clamped, at the final height needed for these risers, while glue was still wet. Here is how it looked when done.

     I cut a piece of 3/4-inch plywood to fit this space, and checked its fit and height to make sure it was okay. I have occasionally been asked why I use 3/4-inch plywood, and I usually give Tony Koester’s response to the same question: “because I couldn’t get 1-inch plywood.” Structural stiffness is important in layout performance, and thicker plywood is an easy way to increase stiffness. Here is the new plywood piece in its place, at left.

You can see that there are a couple of irregular pieces of plywood at the right of the new board for the extension, where the main line curves away to the right. This entire area needs to receive a surface layer on which to lay track, for which I like to use Homasote or its equivalent. (“Homasote” is a trademarked name for a construction board made from recycled paper by the Homasote Company; you can learn more about them at their website, at http://www.homasote.com/products/ .)
     My next step, then, was to cut some Homasote pieces to provide the level ground surface. Some pieces were simple rectangles, but others, at the right in the photo above, had to be irregular. I made a template with a piece of newspaper, and cut and trimmed the paper until it matched the shape I wanted. I then used a utility knife to cut out the Homasote piece, following the pattern. Here is one pattern I used:

The piece cut from this pattern is shown below, in its approximate position on the track board, though not yet glued down. The mainline track is at right.

     This piece, and others, were arranged so they have joints in quite different places than the underlying plywood. (Compare the photo above to the one above the pattern, to see how this overlaps.) I glued these pieces down a couple at a time, using yellow carpenter’s glue. I generally clamp the materials when gluing Homasote to plywood, to ensure a good bond and a smooth surface. Here is some of the gluing in progress, with a generous number of clamps in use (note wood clamping pads to minimize indentation into the Homasote):

When gluing was complete, my new extension area looked like this (obviously some of the Homasote pieces were prepainted white on one side).

     Some gaps and cracks between Homasote pieces were present, and those areas were filled and roughly contoured with Sculptamold (a product of American Art Clay—you can see their entire line at their website: http://www.amaco.com/ ), including aligning the new diverging track ballast edge, as seen here. I just use a putty knife for these kinds of rough contours.

Once I have general contours with Sculptamold, I like to refine the surface with smaller tools and with a much finer-grain papier maché, widely available from taxidermist supply houses. My favorite is Brandt’s Compound, from Robert Ruozzi of Irwin, Pennsylvania.
     I will describe track arrangements, scenery, and industries for this layout extension in subsequent posts.
Tony Thompson

Visiting the area you model -- Part 2

I introduced this topic with an explanation of my belief that you can only create convincing scenery, including many details as well as your backdrops, by knowing the area you model. This applies whether you freelance or not. In my first post, I talked about photographing the area in which my imaginary towns of Santa Rosalia and Ballard are located. You can view it at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/11/visiting-area-you-model.html .
     I also visited the nearby town of Oceano on the same trip, but this time to photograph the remaining packing plants there. I knew the historic Phelan & Taylor plant was still standing, though out of business, and here is a photo from my visit last month:

I am modeling an additional Phelan & Taylor facility, which I locate in an adjoining town (Shumala), so it won’t look the same as this, but the company name is clearly set in this region. I showed a historic Phelan & Taylor box label in a previous post, at http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/06/few-words-on-packing-houses-and-produce.html .
     In addition, one sees other signage of interest, in thinking about model industries for this area. I liked this packing company name:

Like many business signs, this one is clearly the work of a sign painter, not a printed graphic, and suggests how such signs ought to look, whether or not I have a packing shed with this particular name.
     Walking along Railroad Street to the west of the SP main line (now UP, of course), I came to a suitable supporting business for all this produce packing. I had not intended to model a box company, but it would certainly fit in.

And also on Railroad Street, a short ways away, was another packing house with a good regional name. The town of Pismo Beach is a short ways north of Oceano, and much of the shoreline nearby is within Pismo State Beach (“Pismo” is derived from the Chumash Indian word “pismu,” meaning “tar;” there are oil seeps nearby).

     As I said in presenting my photos of the landscape near Guadalupe and Oceano, these photographs don’t have great significance in themselves, but I chose them to illustrate how a little looking around in the area you model can yield lots of interesting industrial names and ideas.
Tony Thompson

Visiting the area you model

Most of us have a specific area or region in mind when we build a layout, even if it is a freelanced location. And if the representation of that area is to be convincing, it has to have the “look” typical of the prototype region. I am often surprised how many modelers just start whipping down scenery on such a layout, without too much effort to analyze and interpret the prototype.
     This idea, that one should “observe and learn” from the prototype, as much for scenery as for rolling stock or structures, seems pretty obvious when you state it. But as I said, it is a far from universal approach. I first learned this from Don Cassler in Pittsburgh, when I lived there. Don is an outstanding modeler, and many scenery details on his B&O layout “ring true,” because they are based on actual prototype landscape details. My friend C.J. Riley in Pittsburgh also exemplifies this approach to layout scenery, for everything from how streams look, to vegetation patterns, to rock outcrops and more. C.J. is writing a book about this, to be entitled The Art of Illusion, which I hope reaches the market one of these days, because I always have found his scenery techniques extremely effective.
     How can one make a start on this approach? Thinking about this, I was reminded of a story told me by another friend, Ken Harrison, from when he was in the East Bay Model Engineers Society, then located in Emeryville, California (now in Richmond). Scenery builders on their layout knew Ken often visited the mountains, and thus asked him questions about vegetation, soil colors, etc. for the Sierra foothills, since part of their layout was to represent that area. Ken replied that they really ought to invest in a two-hour drive and go visit the area, rather than rely on a second-hand description. That may sound like a simple suggestion, yet it goes beyond what many modelers actually do.
     This brings me to my own layout, modeling the Central Coast of California near Santa Maria. The recent SP Society convention was in Ventura (I wrote a brief description of the model contest at the convention, in a previous post at http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/10/sp-society-convention-2012.html ). That location is south of Santa Maria, which meant that during the drive home after the meeting there could be some time to visit the Santa Maria area, particularly the areas along the SP between Guadalupe and Oceano, where most of my layout is sited. I’ll show just a selection of my photos.
     We started at Guadalupe, then drove over the Santa Maria River on Guadalupe Road (California Highway 1) to the area where my freelanced Santa Rosalia town site would be, near the end of Thornberry Road. One objective is to see what the horizon looks like. To the south, there are the Casmalia Hills, which look like this from where Santa Rosalia would be. There is a field of vegetable plants in the foreground.

     I am not sure how I will orient the backdrop at Santa Rosalia, so I also took a photo northwestwards (with another field of winter vegetables in the foreground). There is no distant feature visible here, since the Pacific Ocean shore is not far beyond the line of dunes and trees.

     Next we drove a little northward on Guadalupe Road and soon passed a precooling plant for produce. Today these produce shipments are by truck, but back in the 1950s precooling plants prepared produce for shipment by rail. This company was not located here at the time I model, but the company name is strongly regional and thus is a candidate for a layout industry name.

     At this point, Highway 1 is called the Cabrillo Highway, aligned just west of Nipomo Mesa. My layout site concept is that the Mesa could be visible from my town of Ballard, so I wanted to photograph the horizon eastward from that location. Here is a view of the western edge of the Mesa, looking in a southeasterly direction from Cienega Street, almost on the outskirts of Oceano. Again, note the row crop in the field. Any agricultural modeling I do will have to be these kinds of low-lying vegetable rows.

Next I turned to my left, so I could photograph the horizon in an approximately northeasterly direction, showing the distant grass-covered hills (the southern end of the Santa Lucia Range) and, of course, the ever-present foreground fields.

These views are taken from a location somewhat north of where I envision Ballard being located, but they do provide some horizon and foreground views. Right at the Ballard location, there are lots of eucalyptus trees, so those will have to be added to my Ballard site.
     I was also interested in the packing houses still in business (or at least still standing) in Oceano, but will cover those in a future post.
     I show these photos not for any great value they have themselves, but to illustrate the kind of observation of a locale which can determine vegetation as well as the appearance of the horizon. Modeling any geographic region will be more realistic if this kind of information can be gathered.
Tony Thompson

A new depot for Shumala -- Part 2

One of the distinctive characteristics of any railroad location was its depot. So part of creating a believable branch line of any railroad is to make sure depots are typical in style, or even are exact copies of standard depots. That was my goal in replacing the former Shumala depot, as I described in my first post on the topic. You can view it at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-new-depot-for-shumala.html .
     In that post, I mentioned that the construction process for the structure would be written up for my November column in the on-line magazine Model Railroad Hobbyist or MRH. That issue has now been published, and can be downloaded free at: http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/magazine/mrh-2012-11-nov . In the present post, I will mention a few details of that work.

     Model materials. This depot was sheathed with “rustic” or drop-lap siding, 8 inches wide. Evergreen makes a novelty siding with 0.083-inch spacing which is 7.25 inches in HO scale, close enough. The SP plan then enables one to lay out the window locations and cut them out. I also used a number of sizes of Evergreen styrene strip on this structure, as listed in the column. All the Evergreen materials can be seen in their catalog listing at:

http://www.evergreenscalemodels.com/ . 

     Good approximations of all the windows are available from Grandt Line. You can view the architectural details part of their catalog on-line at: http://www.grandtline.com/products/arch/ho/ho_scale_architectural_windows.html . And the roof was made from Pikestuff shingle material, which I think gives a realistic “snug” shingle appearance, unlike the uneven look typical of applying Campbell shingles or equivalent. I used their part no. 1015. The entire listing of the Pikestuff (Rix Products) catalog is available at: http://www.rixproducts.com/prod02.htm .

     Construction. I won’t say more about the construction process, as it was pretty fully described and illustrated in my MRH column. But there is one detail perhaps worth mentioned, which didn’t make it into the column. Though I am a firm believer in the old adage, “measure twice and cut once,” I nevertheless managed to mess up and cut the left-hand piece of the depot front wall too short. The fix? Rather than make a new, longer piece for the freight house section, since I had already cut out the door and window openings in the short piece, I just spliced on an additional piece of the Evergreen siding.
     I glued the extras piece as a butt joint, lining up the boards on the front, then, on the back of the sheet, I added a splice piece of scrap material (the piece to the left—the extra piece on the right is the freight door):                                                                                                                              

The front of the wall section now looked like this (the original wall had been prepainted before assembly):              

The joint is pretty tight, but to avoid any chance of it showing in the final model, I simply placed the downspout at this location, a trick learned from my friend C.J. Riley many years ago. Then I painted the new piece. Here is how it looked without the freight platform. Note the bill box just to the right of the bay window.

          Colors. The colors used were described in my post on this topic, at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/10/modeling-sp-structure-colors.html . Latest news from Tru-Color Paints is that they now plan to issue all three of these major SP colors, Colonial Yellow, Light Brown, and Moss Green, as additions to their line. To see their on-line catalog, you can visit them at: http://www.trucolorpaint.com/index.php?p=1_2_Paint-Products .

     This depot project has been an interesting and also satisfying piece of modeling from scratch. The availability of Grandt Line doors and windows which are similar though not identical to the SP items means that the project was pretty straightforward. The structure is now in place on my layout, including that vital bill box on the front wall.
Tony Thompson

Layout visit -- interesting industries

Last weekend I joined about 25 others for an operating meet called “Desert Ops 2012” in Phoenix, Arizona. I really enjoyed the four layouts on which I operated, all of which were switching-intensive, exactly my preference. They were these: the late Gary Gelzer’s Great Northwest Coastline, David Doiron’s Southern Pacific, Rick Watson’s Southern Pacific–Exeter (and vicinity), and the Pebble Creek Club’s Great Lakes Western. I had a great time at each of them.
     What I want to show in this post are a couple of interesting industries at David Doiron’s layout, primarily a cotton compress called Le Sueur, which had inbound and outbound tracks of a couple of kinds. He built it from the Walthers modular structure components, and though it isn’t finished, he allowed me to photograph it and describe it here.
     This first view shows the side of the building where inbound light cotton bales are unloaded (the foreground track is a team track).

     On the other side of the long building is the loading of outbound heavy (compressed) bales under a canopy, as well as a supply spot at the end of that siding, here occupied by a double-door box car. The nearer track in front of the box car is a cottonseed oil spot. The overhead bridge between the two buildings adds interest.

Finally, this third view shows the heavy-bale covered spot more clearly, with two box cars spotted. Even in an unfinished condition, this is an interesting and good-looking industry. Dave has also modeled the equipment inside the long building, with removable roofs so it can be viewed.

 I liked the overall complex and thought it was interesting and convincing.
     Behind the compress in the second and third photos above is O’Malley Hardware, a nicely done cut-off structure with three boxcar spots. Here is the building front on the track side. The opposite side has a clear plastic sheet over it, and the entire interior is detailed and open to the aisle behind it.

     This was part of the area I switched while at Dave’s layout, and it was a fun part of my job. I’ve often commented that I’ve never visited a layout that didn’t give me a couple of ideas for things I could do, and this weekend was no exception.
Tony Thompson

Upgrading old models -- not always

I have been asked if I try and upgrade all my older models. (I realize the question may have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek . . . ) The answer is certainly “no,” because a fair number get replaced by a more correct or better detailed version of the same car. For example, I used to have a stand-in model for the important D&RGW box car series, numbers 66000–67499, a single-sheathed and distinctive car that was a mainstay of the Rio Grande boxcar fleet until after World War II.
     The stand-in was a Train Miniature box car, with lots of detail shortcomings as well as inaccuracies relative to the D&RGW prototype, but with largely correct decal lettering. It really wouldn’t be possible to upgrade it without practically starting over, and I’ve sold it off. The replacement? The Westerfield kit for this car, kit no. 6453, which is accurate and very well detailed (this kit remains available from the new owner of Westerfield Models, Andrew Dahm, at his web site: http://westerfieldmodels.com/ ).

This model was built by Dennis Williams and decaled and weathered by me.
     There are other examples of cars which really are not candidates to save, as the bodies are simply too far from accurate to try and modify. One example is the old AHM six-dome tank car. The design folks who worked on this one must have started from a photo of a smaller car, and just inflated the tank part (perhaps with air pressure!) until it was large enough for their 40-foot underframe — or large enough to “look good,” as one designer for a major manufacturer once said to me. But the car is over 12,000 gallons in size and is far larger than any prototype car of this type ever found.

There is no answer for this one but to discard it. I sold off a couple of these that I had, but did keep one for my display case, where I have a collection of oddball cars that are fun to look at. These do surface at swap meets, and I can only counsel resistance to any impulse purchase.
     Another such model, and one unfortunately still very much available commercially, is the by-now very old Athearn three-dome tank car. Although not at all badly done for its era, in its detail and overall realistic look, it is again simply way oversize. Despite years of searching, no one has ever found a prototype three-dome car as big as this. Here is one of these models, with a bogus paint scheme to go with the bogus body (Union only ever painted a car with this blue and orange scheme when a car was donated to a museum).

As some readers of this blog may recall, I do use Athearn three-dome bodies as sacrifice sources of extra dome tops to increase dome height, as I showed in my post about making a correct SP tank car. (You can view it at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/05/modeling-sp-tank-cars.html .) But as an operating model? Nope.
     One more example. Back in the day when HO scale had very few tank car models of any kind, one tended to keep almost anything, just for variety. But some of those oldies are now being discarded. An example is this LifeLike tank car (a copy of an older Varney product). In past years, I added brake gear and new trucks and couplers, repainted it, and then lettered the car with decals for UTLX. And one other improvement I’ve made to cars of this heritage, the dome-top modification described in a previous post, can be viewed at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2010/12/upgrading-old-models-3.html .

     So what’s wrong with it, even with the changes I’ve already made? Long list. The vertical brake wheel stand is a very unusual arrangement; the sill steps are crude and the walkway terribly thick (and a poor representation of a metal-grid walkway); the handrail supports are crude and unprototypical; there is no side ladder on either side; the dome-top manway cover is a strange and oversize arrangement; there is a ridge along the tank top, instead of the correct double row of rivets where tank sheets overlap; the end head is an odd shape; and the rivets representing the attachment of the head to the tank are far too far apart. I could go on, but you get the idea.
     Are these defects correctible? Most are, but there are so many. And at the end of the day you would arrive at an 11,000-gallon tank car, pretty big for the steam era. I am not upgrading these Varney/LifeLike/Walthers tank car models except for a very few, kept mostly for nostalgia reasons.
     So that’s it. I definitely have had and still have models on hand, that just cannot justify being upgraded. They not only need replacement for accuracy and detailing, but at present cannot even serve in mainline trains, under my existing standards. Many are already gone; the rest will follow.
Tony Thompson