Choosing a model car fleet-9: tank cars

In the entirety of the North American freight car fleet, tank cars were about 8 percent of the total number of cars in the early 1950s. The great majority of these were in private ownership and thus primarily in lease service. That means they did not run freely and were not confiscated as empties, but would have been returned empty after unloading.
     The bulk of the privately-owned cars were the property of the “big three” leasing companies, General American (GATX), Union Tank (UTLX), and Shippers Car Line (SHPX), with other lessors such as North American (NATX) far down the list. Many individual companies owned a few tank cars, but typically a dozen to a hundred cars at most, compared to thousands owned by the leasing companies. The major exceptions were big oil companies like Sinclair, Shell, Phillips, Tidewater, and Gulf. Texaco’s cars were part of the GATX fleet by 1950 (though many still carried TCX reporting marks), and UTLX continued to provide most tank cars needed by the various “baby Standards” across the country.
     A minor fraction of the national fleet was in railroad ownership, and about three-fourths of that fraction was owned by just three railroads: ATSF, SP and UP. Both Santa Fe and UP used their cars heavily in company service, including water service. By contrast, SP only used about a quarter to a third of its tank cars in company fuel service, with the remainder available for commercial use.
     This means that SP modelers do need SP tank cars for both fuel and other cargoes. Luckily, the old Athearn single-dome tank car can be converted fairly readily into an accurate SP tank car. My article about such a conversion appeared in the SPH&TS magazine Trainline, published in issue 71, Spring 2002. For views of some recent modeling using my method, see my post entitled “Tank car projects for Cocoa Beach--3,” at http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/01/tank-car-projects-for-cocoa-beach-3.html.
     Beyond the SP cars, I see two kinds of needs for tank cars on my layout. One, of course, is to serve industries on the layout. The other is for cars which appear in mainline trains but will not have destinations on the layout.
     In the first category, tank cars for on-layout industries, I have both petroleum-product cars for bulk oil dealers (in my case, Associated, Union, Richfield, and Standard of California) and non-petroleum cars. The latter include wine cars for a winery, and chemical cars for a chemical repackaging company. Chemical repackaging may simply involve packaging of bulk material, but may also involve blending or even formulating the chemicals to be packaged. The variety of inbound cargoes thus can be considerable.
     In the mainline car category, I want to concentrate on Western car owners and industries, with a predominance of plain-Jane black cars, as was the reality in the steam era. Practically every modeler loves vivid tank car paint schemes, including me, but in the real world these were unusual, and I want to restrain myself with my fleet choices. I  already have a number of UTLX, GATX and SHPX cars in plain black paint for mainline and other use. I have only once seen a Santa Fe tank car in a photo of an SP train or yard, so am not sure whether to keep or sell the model I have. I do have a car lettered for PMEX, the Mexican national oil company, having seen such a car in a Taylor Yard photo.
     I intend to roster about four cars for each of the bulk oil dealers on my layout, meaning Associated (AOX, TWOX, TIDX), Richfield (ROX), Union (UOCX) and Standard (UTLX) cars. For some of these, I will need custom decals, artwork for which is under development. One of my dealers, Associated, is modeled as selling LPG for home use, so high-pressure LPG cars are needed there. I also have some mainline oil company cars, such as Sinclair, Continental, and Phillips.
     I need a variety of chemical cars, from ICC 103 and 104 to pressure cars, ICC 105, for my repackaging company. I’m concentrating on such Western chemical companies as Stauffer and Brea, and companies with Western plants, such as Hooker, Hercules, and Dow. Other possibilities from farther afield include DuPont, Eastman Chemical, Allied Chemical, Becco Peroxide, Warren Petroleum, and Columbia Southern. Models of some of these cars were shown in an earlier post, at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/01/tank-car-projects-for-cocoa-beach-2.html. More creative modeling is going to be needed to achieve the mix of car types I want.
     Wine cars were almost all leased cars. Modelers think first of six-compartment cars, though in fact cars with one, three and four compartments were also common. A major Western lessor of these cars was California Dispatch Line (CDLX), along with GATX, NATX and SHPX. Unfortunately, these are currently hard to model. Many of them were 6000 gallons or less, almost always jacketed, and there simply is no suitable starting point today for such cars. One option is a model from the distant past, the Thomas Trains wine car, a metal model. Here’s one of them picking up bulk wine at Ballard on my layout:

     In all, I have about ten SP tank cars and about 30 cars of other reporting marks, several of which are “unusual” cars which will only run occasionally. Probably the “plain black” part of the fleet will be enlarged in the future. I believe this will reasonably represent what is needed for my era and locale.
Tony Thompson

SP steam power in the early 1950s

As a follow-up to my post on “Choosing a 1953 locomotive roster” (here’s a link:  http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/04/choosing-1953-locomotive-roster.html), I thought it might be of interest to show information for other parts of the Southern Pacific system (Pacific Lines) to illustrate how unevenly steam and diesel locomotives were assigned across divisions, during the transition era.
     The data I show below are from the SP Locomotive Assignments brochure dated June 30, 1951, which I examined at the Library of the California State Railroad Museum (CSRM) last week. It’s among very many SP documents and records amongst their holdings. I haven’t reproduced the data for all divisions, but have chosen what I thought were the interesting parts of the information. An explanatory note: by “Diesel freight,” they meant road diesels of 5000 or less horsepower, such as the Baldwin AS-616. By “Diesel 6000 hp” they meant A-B-B-A sets of F7 units.

It is striking that the Salt Lake and Los Angeles divisions had the lion’s share of the F-unit sets, and that the three biggest California divisions had the bulk of the steam power. Diesel switchers were very unevenly assigned as well. I combined the Tucson and Rio Grande divisions because they were about equally provided with each type of power.
     In my previous post on this topic, I only wrote about the Coast Division (which had 121 steam locomotives assigned on July 1, 1952, versus the 147 listed above for June 30, 1951). I also looked ahead in time to January 1, 1953, and at that time the Coast Division actually had a few more steam engines, 124.
     One point to be drawn from these data, I suppose, is that in the transition era on the SP, how one chooses the balance between steam and diesel power, and which classes of steam or diesel engines to model, depends very strongly on the time chosen to model, and of course on the particular division.
     Now of course I realize that there are modelers who will tell you that they “model the 1950s” or even that they “model the early 1950s.” If one actually wants to model realistically (a big assumption), such a broad choice of modeling era simply isn’t an option. I made the same point in my article in Railroad Model Craftsman about reweigh dates for freight cars (for a corrected version, see http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/03/reweigh-article-from-rmc.html). And if you research a variety of eras, you will find that this conclusion can be drawn for most of them, not just for the early 1950s: a great deal was changing over a span of years, and juggling all of it simply can’t be realistic.
     There’s a philosophical point to be made here, which I’ll state briefly. I do recognize that everyone pursues their hobby in their own way, and having fun any way you want to have fun, is entirely the point of a hobby. I have no wish to criticize anyone’s choice of how to approach this or any hobby.
     But I would just take the position, well articulated by Tony Koester among others, that we can reasonably separate the hobby of “model railroading,” in which real railroad equipment, practices, places and operations are modeled, from the hobby of  “playing with model trains.” If you aim at the former hobby instead of the latter, I cannot make a stronger point than Mr. Koester has done: “You cannot hide behind the oft-heard mantra that ‘It’s my railroad, and I can do anything I want!’ No, you can’t – not if your goal is to convince the viewer, not to mention yourself, that you’ve done a credible job of depicting a specific place and time.”
     ’Nuf said.
Tony Thompson

Modeling details, SP cabooses, 1953

I was looking over my caboose fleet the other day (a mixed bag by any standard), and thought about what is and isn’t needed to model these cars accurately.
     The big picture is that the Class C-30-1 cabooses, far and away the largest class of cabooses ever on the SP, amounted to around 620 total cars, about 470 of them for Pacific Lines. Prior and subsequent wood caboose classes were considerably smaller. Among steel cabooses, the C-40-3 cupola car (185 Pacific Lines cars) and the early bay-window classes, C-30-4, -5 and -6 (135 Pacific Lines cars total) were also prominent by 1953. I’m only briefly relating the history because much more detail, and many photographs, are in my book on SP cabooses (Southern Pacific Freight Cars, Vol. 2, Cabooses, Signature Press, 2002).
     What stimulated me to examine my models more closely was one of the Walthers models of Class C-30-1, which has the curved side handrails and the body-mounted end handrails painted white, but with the end-beam handrails not white. I have never seen a photo of an SP caboose so decorated. The standard was to paint the outer part of the handrail on the end or buffer beam, along with the curved side rail, white. This is the most common arrangement seen in photos after 1948 (when the white trim was introduced). Sometimes the outer part, and sometimes all, of that body-mounted end rail is white, but it’s unusual. And the end-beam rail is always white in every photo I’ve seen of a post-1948 caboose, up into the early 1960s.
     Let me illustrate this. First, the upper left corner of the lettering diagram (the entire diagram is in the book), describing what was to be painted white.

Second, here’s a photo, taken by Al Phelps in May 1951, showing the arrangement of white handrails that the drawing describes.

     A further point relates to the presence of black roof color on wood cabooses. The cars had a structural wood roof which was covered with canvas and tarred. It was maintained with black roof cement, sometimes applied with a mop, and roofs were accordingly black until about the end of World War II. Thereafter, spray painting of older cars was usually done over the entire car, making it all “metallic” or boxcar red, and gradually causing the fleet to lose many of the black roofs. Accordingly, I have only done a few of my cars with black roofs. Those I’ve done were deliberately brush painted and none too carefully, thus giving some of the unevenness of the mopped car cement.
     Perhaps it’s obvious, but all of the all-steel cabooses had boxcar-red roofs when built and thereafter. This description of black caboose roofs applies only to wood cars.
     Car numbers: the Pacific Lines Class C-30-1 cars built during 1917-1924 were placed in the number series 586-899. Thereafter, lower numbers in the roster which had become vacant were applied to new C-30-1 cars, car numbers as low as the single digits. In all, there were 155 out of the 470 cars in this class which received re-used car numbers smaller than 586. I wanted to model at least one or two of those car numbers, in addition to the commonly-seen modeling of cars 586-899. (Incidentally, SP reserved the 900 series for inherited and non-standard cabooses. In the 1920s, it was nearly filled with former EP&SW and Arizona Eastern cars.)
     I also wanted to model an example or two of the older lettering style, with initials instead of spelled-out road name, placed lower on the car side. Cabooses with this pre-1946 lettering do show up in photos from the early 1950s. Here’s one that I did, and it also illustrates the white handrails and grimy black roof. It’s a Precision Scale brass model, which I painted and lettered.

I’ve now corrected the handrail colors on my Walthers C-30-1 car, and have added a black roof to another car to improve the balance among roof colors.
     If nothing else, a caboose fleet should be consistent within itself and with historical evidence for the various visible details. I will discuss steel SP cabooses in a future post.
Tony Thompson

Choosing a 1953 locomotive roster

My primary desire in all aspects of my layout is to reproduce actual operating practices and equipment for 1953, and many prior posts on this blog have dealt with that. Today’s post addresses steam (and to some extent diesel) locomotives as part of that goal.
     One reason I chose to model the year 1953 is that it was the last year in which steam was the predominant motive power on the Coast Line. The previous year, 1952, had seen for the first time approximately equal locomotive miles worked by steam and diesel power over the entire system (see the graph in my previous post, at:  http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/04/choosing-and-modeling-era.html). But this was a system-wide fact, and the best-performing steam locomotives had been migrating west into California and Oregon throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s as diesel power was primarily applied in desert regions of the SP. This is why steam in 1953 could be a minority of system-wide power but still dominant on the Coast Line.
     Turning now to the Coast Division, I have looked at several of the booklets issued quarterly by SP, entitled “Locomotive Assignments,” which list each division’s assigned power. Although it does not differentiate, for example on the Coast Division, between assignments in San Francisco, San Jose, Watsonville Junction, or San Luis Obispo, it still considerably narrows the entire motive power fleet.
     Reproduced below is the Coast Division page for July 1, 1952. It lists 24 diesel switchers in the topmost grouping, and 23 steam switchers (the following group). Diesel switchers included nos. 1019 (an Alco S-1), 1028-1031 (Alco S-3s), 1331-1367 and 1388-1392 (Alco S-2s), all wartime-built switchers, and also nine switchers among 1444-1461 (Baldwin S-12s), built in 1951. The only other diesels are the three 5200-series Baldwin AS-616s, and a series of EMD F7 cab units, 12 A and 12 B units. In the usual A-B-B-A formation, this is only six locomotives, but on the Coast three-unit and two-unit sets were also photographed with shorter trains, so the effective number was larger than six.

      I won’t say more here about diesel power, since I’ve pretty much already summarized my conclusions in a post about diesel locomotive chronology. It’s at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/03/modeling-diesel-locomotive-chronology.html.

     Of the 172 total locomotives listed, 121 were steam, vs. 51 diesels. Many of these steam engines were assigned in the San Francisco-San Jose commute pool, particularly the large numbers of Pacifics and Mountains. But the dominance of steam on the Coast Division at this time is clear.
     Because this divisional listing cannot identify locomotives which primarily served at one terminal or another, I have turned to roundhouse and yard photographs for approximately 1953 at San Luis Obispo, many of which were published in John Signor’s and my books about the Coast, entitled Southern Pacific’s Coast Line and Southern Pacific’s  Coast Line Pictorial, Signature Press, 1995 and 2000.
     I will just present a single example photo, a Mac Gaddis image from 1953 of the right or northern side of the San Luis roundhouse, where the smaller power was stabled in stalls 1 through 10. (In this instance, a 2-10-2 is in stall 10.)

     Here is a list of steam locomotives one sees again and again in photos taken at San Luis Obispo, some of which are visible in the photo above: Ten-wheeler 2344; Consolidations 2534, 2592, 2762, 2791, 2803, 2829, 2836, and SD&AE 103; Mikados 3251 and 3264;  and 2-10-2 “Decks” 3661, 3666, 3672, 3679, 3688, 3699, 3703, 3711, 3715. I don’t list power which often operated on through trains, arriving at San Luis directly from Los Angeles or the Bay Area and then returning, particularly Mountains, cab-forwards, and GS engines, since a wide variety of locomotive numbers of these types were seen in photos at San Luis Obispo.
     Checking my list of numbers seen in photos against the assignment sheet above will reveal a number of discrepancies. This can be for several reasons: power was only passing through San Luis at the time of a photo, rather than assigned there; power was photographed at a time different from the date of the assignment sheet above (assignments did change all the time); or power may have been temporarily assigned at San Luis, and photographed, and not ever shown in a quarterly assignment.
     I have chosen model locomotive classes, and individual locomotive numbers, from the combination of assignment sheet information and period photographs, but I do regard the photo as the ultimate authority that an engine did serve, even if briefly, at San Luis Obispo.
Tony Thompson

Modeling freight traffic: Coast Line, 1953-Part 10

Returning one more time to the conductor’s time book from the 1948-1952 period, I have looked this time at hopper cars (which wee nearly all SP ballast cars), foreign flat cars, tank cars, and some additional gondolas (not identified as beet cars). I introduced data from this time book in a prior post (http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/02/modeling-freight-traffic-coast-line.html), and have continued with subsequent posts in the same series.
     First, the flat cars. There are only five foreign cars identified. Interestingly, two were C&NW cars. The others were CB&Q, NYC, and UP. All were empty except for the Burlington car, marked as loaded with tractors. Some of the empties were destined to places like Salinas for loading (the NYC car).
     The gondolas not listed among the beet cars were interesting. (I analyzed data for cars identified as beet cars in a previous post, http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/04/modeling-freight-traffic-coast-line.html.) There was only a single tight-bottom or GB gondola, which was from Class G-50-14. All others were GS or drop-bottom cars. These were distributed as follows. There were 15 cars drawn from the 1920s Enterprise cars: six from Class G-50-9, four from -10, two from -11, and three from -12. These frequencies scale fairly well with the numbers of cars in each class. There were also four cars from the 1940s Enterprise GS gons, two each from classes G-50-15 and -18. A number were in large cuts of gondolas: ten loaded with manure for Chualar (already listed in post 8 from this series), and six empties destined San Miguel.
     Among the hoppers, six were from classes H-70-2 and -3, and one from Class H-50-6; all these are longitudinal-dumping ballast cars. There were also four covered hopper cars of class H-70-4. Most of these cars either carried sand loads, or were marked as empties for sand loading. Very interesting were two foreign hoppers, D&RGW 18371, a covered hopper, and PRR 146661, a Class Glca car of AAR class HM.
     Among the tank cars were eight SP cars, one each from classes O-50-9, -11 and -14, two from Class O-50-6, and three from O-50-13. It was interesting that some of these SP cars were empty but identified as destined to Manteca, presumably for loading.
     There were also 12 privately owned tank cars, with reporting marks AOX, CDLX, GATX, and SHPX. Information about tank cars can be hard to find, because listings in the Official Railway Equipment Registers are often superficial, but most of these cars (the five from SHPX and three from GATX) all appear to be 8000-gallon cars. Most were marked as “molasses to Spreckels,” which either means empties for molasses loading at Spreckels, or inbound molasses purchased by Spreckels to supplement their own production. I tend to think the latter is more consistent with how the time book appears to be constructed.
     There was also a single car of fuel oil to Spreckels, a 10,000-gallon car from AOX (Associated Oil Company). There were three empty CDLX cars (California Dispatch Line), all AAR class TMI (insulated but non-pressurized), which could be either ICC 103 or 104. CDLX did roster a number of asphalt cars, and these might be among them.
     Lessons learned: the SP cars in these groups very roughly scale by class sizes, indicating they were essentially randomly selected within their car types. This is what would be expected in most cases.
     There were surprisingly few foreign flat and gondola cars, which nationally are predominantly free-running cars and might be expected to show up more frequently in these data. But it should be emphasized that the conductor who wrote these data primarily worked only on local trains, and more specifically on haulers, not on through freights nor even on locals doing pickup and delivery of cars. Thus these data cannot reflect overall Coast Line traffic.
     But the cars that are identified do provide a guide to what is logical and reasonable to have in Coast Line traffic, even if they are necessarily only part of the total picture.
Tony Thompson

Small modeling project: Caswell gondola

Among the most distinctive cars in the Santa Fe freight car fleet were the Caswell gondolas. It is obvious that Santa Fe really liked this design of drop-bottom or GS gondola, as they bought class after class of them from 1905 to 1927. Moreover the cars lasted well, and photos of them exist from the 1960s. And being a distinctive prototype, they make great models.
     But this is an SP modeling blog, I hear you muttering. Indeed so, and I don’t think most SP modelers would want more than one or two of these cars; but they sure do show up in photos of SP yards and trains. Empty ones would have been returned to Santa Fe rails by the most direct connection, rather than being reloaded in SP territory, but I have photos of them loaded with both coal and sand on SP rails in California. So I wanted to add one, yep, one, to my fleet.
     Part of my motivation is that InterMountain has produced a superb model of this car design. (Just looking at one of the “ready-to-run” [or RTR] versions, with all its complexity, may make some modelers go pale when thinking about building a kit for this car.) The Caswell I purchased was in RTR form, and I immediately sat down with Richard Hendrickson’s “bible” on the subject of cars like this: Richard H. Hendrickson, Santa Fe Open-Top Cars: Flat, Gondola and Hopper Cars 1902-1959, published by the Santa Fe Railway Historical and Modeling Society, Midwest City, OK, 2009.
     I quickly found I needed to do some work on the model. I guess I could subtitle this blog, “another case where RTR is not ready,” or words to that effect. Let me explain. When delivered, the cars looked like this (a Santa Fe photo I got years ago from Frank Ellington):

This exact appearance and lettering were how my InterMountain car looked in its box, so obviously it was presented as an as-built car of 1920. But over the years, a number of things changed on these cars, most notably the lettering. In 1938, Santa Fe discontinued the use of the ampersand in their reporting mark, and in 1943 also discontinued the use of periods between the initials. Dimensional data also changed and was simplified between 1920 and the 1950s.
     In addition, in the 1930s and 1940s Santa Fe applied reinforcing members to the top chord of these cars, on the second panel from each end. So a typical car like this would look like this by my modeling year, 1953 (the photo, by Col. Chet McCoid, from the Bob’s Photo collection, was taken in Texas in 1952):

I set out to make these changes on my model. Richard’s book contains a bunch of additional examples of later lettering arrangements, which did vary somewhat among various cars, probably changing a little from year to year.
     I used an old Walthers freight car data set to letter the various dimensional data items, and a 9-scale-inch alphabet for the “ATSF” lettering. Then I used styrene strip,  scale 1 x 6-inch size, to mimic the top chord reinforcements. With lettering done and the styrene applied, here is how the model looked.

I then painted the reinforcements (white in the photo above) with boxcar red, weathered the car, and then made repaint patches over the weathering, so I could add an appropriate reweigh date and repack stencil. Anyone not familiar with reweigh dates might want to look at my recent article in Railroad Model Craftsman on reweighing, or better yet, at the corrected version presented in an earlier blog post, at http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/03/reweigh-article-from-rmc.html.
     This gives me a corrected model of a distinctive Santa Fe freight car, and one I know showed up regularly on the Coast Line. I will probably construct both a sand  load and a coal load for it.
     So why am I telling this story? Is this car that important? No. But I think the story does illustrate two important points: it’s always wise to check with the many great prototype resources out there to make sure your model is as correct as you want it to be; and RTR most definitely does not always mean “ready to put on the layout.”
Tony Thompson

Modeling freight traffic: Coast Line, 1953-Part 9

In my previous post describing the analysis I performed on box cars contained in a 1947-1952 conductor’s time book for the Coast Line (that post is:  http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/03/modeling-freight-traffic-coast-line_11.html), I listed all box cars identified and compared the patterns to those of the Gilbert-Nelson idea for free-running foreign cars like box cars. I also observed that about a third of all the box cars were home-road cars, SP and T&NO reporting marks. In the present post, I analyze further the SP and T&NO cars as to car classes.
     Cars were distributed across many classes, but some interesting patterns did emerge. First, there were some heavily represented classes. The champion was Class B-50-26, with seven cars (two of them T&NO), and next largest were classes B-50-13 with six cars (two of them were T&NO), and B-50-24 (the “Overnight” cars) with five,. Then came Class B-50-21, with four cars (two of them T&NO). Following those were classes B-50-18 and B-50-25 with three each. Classes B-50-14, -15 and -16 were each represented in the sample with two cars, and several classes had one car each. These included classes B-50-12, B-50-14, and the similar pre-war all-steel classes B-50-19, -20 and -23.
     All but one of these classes can be modeled with either styrene or resin kits. I’ll show here some examples from my own car fleet. Here’s the champion in this sample, Class B-50-26, a distinctive 12-panel box car. It’s from an InterMountain kit.

Complementing it is a pre-war box car, Class B-50-23, in an IMWX kit with some detail upgrades. This class had the rounded steel end called the “W corner post” end, named for the shape of the structural member inside the car corner.

     Not previously analyzed were 12 automobile cars, six of them in general service as AAR class XM but having original double doors; the remainder were equipped with auto racks, AAR class XMR. There was one car each from composite classes A-50-2, -4, -7, -8, and -9 (the -7 and -8 cars were T&NO), along with steel cars of classes A-50-12, -13 and -16. Noteworthy were the three cars of Class A-50-15, and these are a particular modeling challenge because today there is no straightforward way to model them. I will just show a single example of an SP automobile car, a modified Athearn car, a stand-in in several ways but offering a general likeness to Class A-50-12. The white door stripe indicates the presence of auto racks.

This analysis of the time book data did not much change my goals for SP box cars, although it was interesting to see the number of B-50-24 cars. And I still want to create models of classes B-50-16 and A-50-15! More on that later.
Tony Thompson