Modeling details, SP cabooses, 1953: Part 2

An earlier post about SP cabooses concentrated on the very numerous wood cabooses of Class C-30-1. (That post can be viewed with this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/05/modeling-details-sp-cabooses-1953.html .) The C-30-1 cars dominate my model fleet for 1953, as they did the real SP fleet in that same year. But there were also steel cabooses, both cupola and bay-window types, and in this post I want to say a little about those.
     In 1937, SP built 50 steel cupola cabooses in its own shops at Los Angeles, the first all-steel production cars (there had been a single experimental conversion of a Class C-30-1 car to an all-steel body, but it was not repeated). The new cars were assigned to Class C-40-1, and they were numbered from 1000 to 1049, the first SP cabooses with four-digit numbers. They were followed by Class C-40-3, also built at LA Shops, during 1940-1942. This was an almost identical car to C-40-1, and a much larger class, 185 cars, numbered from 1050 to 1234.
     Included in the latter class were a number of cars for T&NO, also in need of new cabooses at the time. Those cars were T&NO 400-429.
     After World War II, SP decided to adopt the bay-window style of caboose, and built no more cupola cars. The first 50 bay-window cars were purchased from American Car & Foundry, Class C-30-4, in 1947, numbered SP 1235-1269 and T&NO 500-514. They were distinguished by a smooth external roof surface. They were followed by two home-built classes, C-30-5 and C-30-6, 130 cars built by SP at the Los Angeles shops in 1949 and 1951. (Thirty of the cars were for T&NO.) Both these later classes had diagonal-panel roofs.
     As with the prior post on the C-30-1 wood cabooses, there is much more history for both the SP and T&NO cars in my book, Volume 2 in the Southern Pacific Freight Cars series, entitled Cabooses (Signature Press, 2002). The coverage there includes plenty of photos of each class.
     Here’s a model photo of a Class C-40-3 car, in this case a Precision Scale brass model (the new WrightTRAK resin kit makes a superb version of this class too).

Note the same white safety handrails (a 1948 paint standard), as described in my previous post on cabooses, are on this model. These steel cupola cars, though far less numerous than the wood cars of Class C-30-1, are nevertheless an important part of the caboose fleet. This model still needs marker lights.
     For the bay-window cars, it has to be remembered that the cars of classes C-30-4 and C-30-5 were all delivered with vermillion (bright red) ends. This was probably an experiment for visibility purposes, though I have not found any SP documents so stating. Though color images of this end treatment are rare, black and white photos clearly show the color difference. But here is one useful color photo, taken in March 1953 at what is pretty obviously the lower yard in Dunsmuir.

This color is very striking, and naturally I had to add this end color to a model:

Here again, the white handrails are an important part of the appearance. This is a Class C-30-4 car, with its distinctive roof, in brass from Precision Scale. Marker lights remain to be added.
     The red ends often lead to questions about the later orange ends. Here’s a capsule summary. The 1947 and 1949 cars were delivered with red ends, but no other cabooses seem to have received this end color. In March 1954, SP set out to test whether aluminum ends might be a good visibility paint, and that color was to be compared to the red already in service. Each division was to paint two cabooses with aluminum ends and observe performance. By that fall, it began to be concluded that aluminum was really not much better (think of it in a snowy environment), but then the suggestion was made to try Daylight Orange. It was a success. In October 1955, the orange was made standard and cabooses system-wide began to receive that new color. But of course that’s well beyond my 1953 modeling date, so I have to be content with red ends, though I have always thought the orange looks terrific.
     To sum up, most of my cabooses are wood cars of Class C-30-1. But I do have some steel cupola cars and two bay-window cars. They typify the variety present on the SP in 1953.
Tony Thompson

Waybills , Part 12: update

In my earlier post about waybill design and use (“Waybills-12,” which can be viewed at http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/09/waybills-12.html ), I included a waybill with erroneous information on it. Thanks to Jim Lancaster, who worked at Boeing and knows the area (and who commented helpfully on that post), I’ve corrected that waybill. Here is how it looks now:

The parts delivery is now via Northern Pacific, the railroad which actually did serve the Boeing plant in Renton.
     The correction of this single waybill may seem fairly trivial in the greater scheme of things, particularly for a single layout. But the information provided by Jim shows that in many cases, it can be difficult to use existing information (such as the OpSIG data base) or to find new information, and get it entirely right. The OpSIG database is an excellent starting point; so are shipper guides for the railroads, when they can be located (or if they are reprinted). Double-checking whether businesses were operating at the time you model is always wise, too. Both shipper guides and the OpSIG entries are for specific years. The history of larger businesses can be Googled; smaller ones can often be traced through library collections of telephone books. Of course, the area you model may not be near your home, and it might be necessary to travel to a town or city near the modeled area to find a good phone book collection.
     Individuals who know the area you model, and its history, are a good source too, as Jim showed in his responses to my original post. But be aware that Jim is very conscientious about information, which cannot be said about everyone you might talk to. This is definitely a situation where double-checking verbal information is a good idea.
     I have had the experience of interviewing retired railroad people, and though they are irreplaceable as sources of how and why things were done, they are typically not very reliable on facts and dates. This is not a criticism of railroaders; a historian colleague of mine said that I should expect “95 percent of factual data in oral interviews” will be wrong. Of course, it may not be as high as 95 percent in every case, but the warning is sound: be careful with facts in oral histories.
     All these worries about accuracy, you may be thinking, are readily avoided if one simply invents waybill information, or else just uses what comes to hand, without worrying if it is correct for a specific year. Of course those are options we all have. In my own case, I certainly have imaginary model industries, mostly my on-layout ones, but whenever I can, I like to use real ones. Just my personal preference, and something that often adds that “texture of realism” to waybills. My view is that in modeling, we need to insert as much realism as we can, given that so much selective compression and other compromises are unavoidable.
Tony Thompson

Waybills, Part 13

The exercise (from my point of view) of creating a waybill system for Otis McGee’s layout has been interesting for several reasons. First, it’s a different shape of waybill, as I observed in my first post on the topic (Waybills-9), so I had the opportunity to see how I might rearrange and re-space the prototype waybill elements. Second, it’s a waybill with car initial and number included (just like the prototype), thus avoiding the creation of “car sleeves” carrying that information. I made both these points in my first post about this new waybill format (at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/07/waybills-9.html).
     But perhaps the most interesting aspect is that the mental process of deciding which  bills to make, and what they should contain, is entirely different. With this new system, the thought process is centered on cars: what they can reasonably contain, and of course constraining their movements so that they plausibly travel on the Shasta Division. Among other things, this means that use of the AAR mechanical designations for cars is almost irrelevant, because the process of matching cars to loads begins with the car itself, and loads are naturally matched to the car. Probably the main use of the AAR class in this system is to help find the car in a yard or train (I’m looking for a gondola, etc.).
     In the system I use on my layout, which does have car sleeves with car initials and numbers (see, for example, the post at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/02/waybills-3.html ), the process is industry-centered: what loads would go in and out of a particular facility, including what AAR class of car would be needed. This information is on the waybill, and in matching up waybills to available cars (which have the AAR classes on the sleeve), obviously AAR class can be and should be matched.
     Car service rules come into play about equally in both systems, primarily at the level of resetting the layout for a future operating session on my layout, but entirely in the waybill creation process for Otis’s waybills.
     The end result for my layout is that I have a considerable pool of waybills for each industry, thereby providing variety and also minimizing any recognition of repetition. With the much larger freight car fleet which Otis has, and the far smaller number of switching locations (the Shasta Division is in many ways primarily a bridge route in the area Otis models), avoiding the recognition of repetition relies on the sheer size of the car fleet, and on the fact that a large majority of the freight cars are mundane boxcar red without eye-catching lettering. As Tony Koester is fond of saying, if the freight cars are pedestrian in appearance, operators can’t remember them individually and won’t notice a certain amount of repetition.
     To say it another way, I have more waybills than cars on my layout, by a big margin, and since layout operations are heavily oriented to switching, the variety of waybills is essential. On Otis’s layout, there are not many more waybills than cars (though I hope to enlarge that ratio over time), and there is less switching of individual cars, so variety comes from the size of the pool of freight cars which move over the layout.
     Of course Otis’s cars also have Empty Car Bills in addition to waybills, and these have to be chosen so they move the cars in the opposite direction to what the waybills direct (or form a triangular or more complex pattern of car movement, when multiple bills are used). I’ve thought about using “overlay” or short bills to see if a demand system for consuming empties could work. More on that later if it seems to prove practical.
     A point worth emphasizing is that all waybills and Empty Car Bills in both systems are “single purpose” paperwork, that is, they are one-sided items. A different bill needs to be brought forward in the plastic sleeve for each new car movement.
     One thing I am gaining from working on the waybills for Otis is information about through loads, that is, loads which move from staging to staging without interruption. I had not worried much about this for my layout, but now can see ways in which I can make my through cars have more varied and interesting waybills in their own right. That’s where the focus on car movement pays off.
     The advantage of confronting an entirely different layout approach to waybills is, as I’m stating, that one can appreciate different ways of thinking about the process. This can happen when operating as a guest on someone’s layout, but in that situation one ordinarily only “goes with the flow” for that layout, without necessarily understanding the ideas behind that flow. In my situation, thinking about two quite different layouts, the need to create the waybills in a different system from my own affords a much more intimate view of the reasoning behind each system.
Tony Thompson

The content of waybills, Part 2

In my previous post on the “working” content of waybills, by which I mean shippers, consignees, and cargoes (see: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/09/content-of-waybills.html ), I described some general approaches to research on these matters. In this post I give some specific examples.
     For a simple case, consider an example from the Shasta Division layout of Otis McGee. The layout includes an interchange at Mt. Shasta City with the McCloud River Railroad (MCR), which served a considerable timber harvesting area on the southern and eastern flanks of Mt. Shasta, along with sawmills in that area. Obviously, then, lumber loads should arrive at this interchange point from the MCR. From what shippers and locations did these loads originate?
     A helpful web site for this topic is the series about MCR history on Trainweb, specifically (for Otis’s modeled year of 1952) the page for 1940-1963, available at: http://www.trainweb.org/mccloudrails/History/History05.html . There we learn that the Red River Lumber Company, with a sawmill at Westwood, sold out to Fruit Growers Supply Company (FGSC) in 1944.  A part of the Sunkist family, FGSC primarily produced box shook for citrus shipping boxes, with their main mill being located at Hilt on the Siskiyou line of the SP. After 1944, FGSC also produced shook at the Westwood mill, so that is one producer on the McCloud we can use.
     (You may ask, how did I find this useful page of railroad history? I simply used Google and requested “McCloud railroad history.” For many, many things--though not all things--this kind of simple approach will yield helpful resources.)
     The other producer in the area was of course the McCloud River Lumber Company, owner of the railroad since the 1890s, and operating a very large sawmill at McCloud, which is a short distance from Mt. Shasta City. All that would end in 1963, when U.S. Plywood bought out McCloud River Lumber and ceased hauling logs by rail to McCloud, but for a 1952 modeler, that’s far off in the future. So there are at least two major lumber shippers on the McCloud in 1952, FGSC and McCloud River Lumber.
     Now the need would be for prototype paperwork of the McCloud, so that realistic waybills or other documents could be prepared. I was able to borrow from John Signor a pad of MCR switch lists, and Jeff Moore, who is near to completing a history of the McCloud, sent me a 1950-era waybill. Here’s a blank waybill in the format of the 2 inch by 4 inch bills for Otis’s layout.

The AAR number code for MCR, 466, was interestingly retained when the more recent railroad, simply named McCloud Railway Company, came along.
     Lastly, we need consignees for the lumber loads. In 1952, the building boom in southern California was in full swing, so that’s one logical destination. I’m still assembling a list of lumber receivers in that area (more on this in a moment), but one large building materials supply company was the Ward Lumber Company of Fullerton, California. Accordingly, here is a sample waybill using the information generated here:

     As I mentioned in the previous post on this topic, a strong source for both shipper and consignee information is the OpSIG database collection, and certainly many possible consignees can be identified therein. The example just given was based on recollections of someone active in the lumber business in California decades ago, but here is a second waybill, using a 1950 entry in the “West” file from OpSIG:

Also note that this waybill is from McCloud River Lumber, not FGSC. On the layout, its car will show up on the McCloud River interchange track at Mt. Shasta, to move westward (railroad direction) on the SP. Both of these waybills, incidentally, are for 40-foot double-door box cars, as would be normal for finished lumber loads. Most lumber shipped on flat cars was rough lumber.
     Another source of information on shippers and receivers is track charts, either the diagrammatic kind or scale drawings of track layouts at stations. For SP, a number of these have been shown in the SP Historical and Technical Society magazine, Trainline, for example an article on the Oakdale branch in Trainline issue 104 (Summer 2010). Shown at Oakdale (pages 16 and 17 in that magazine) is the plant of Hunt Wesson Foods, a shipper of canned foods. On that same chart is a receiver of lumber shipments, Diamond National Lumber. Either could be used for waybills. I have examined some of the station track drawings at the California State Railroad Museum for this purpose also.
     A third source is period telephone books, collections of which are in many city and town libraries. The business section, or the Yellow Pages, can be a rich source of local businesses. In general, more information would be needed to determine if they actually had sidings and were rail-served, but many businesses received shipments at the local depot’s freight platform or team track.
     It is of course not really required to use actual businesses as shippers and consignees. One can construct plausible names by free use of regional or local geographic names. In Seattle, for example, a business might be named for the county (King County), for nearby geographic features (Cascade Range, Olympic Mountains, Lake Union, Elliott Bay, Puget Sound), or for the region (Pacific, Pacific Coast, Northwest, Mt. Rainier, Columbia River), and of course for city neighborhoods (Queen Anne, Wallingford, Delridge, Ballard) or nearby towns. These kinds of names can also be readily discovered in business directories or Yellow Pages if you are not familiar with a particular area or can’t find a good map.
     Not every business bears a strongly local name. Beyond the kinds of regional and local names just described, one sees broader examples (Western, Eastern, Northern, Southern, etc.), and also the generic names used for many businesses (Acme, Allied, Amalgamated, Consolidated, General, Merchant, National, Paragon, United, Wholesale, etc.). But I still like to use actual names when I can find them.
     To me, creating plausible shipping information on model waybills is definitely part of the fun in model railroad operation.
Tony Thompson

My article in The Dispatcher’s Office

Well, the fine editorial staff at The Dispatcher’s Office magazine has done it again. Pleased as I was that my article appeared in the October 2011 issue of the magazine (pages 28-31), it is even more screwed up than the previous article of mine that they printed. The last time around, I posted a PDF version of the correct article (see it at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/01/waybills-2.html)
     Now it’s obviously time to repeat the exercise. (If you’re wondering why I keep slamming my head against this particular wall, be assured that I can’t figure it out either.) So here is a link to Google Docs for those interested in reading what I actually wrote, and the graphics that I actually supplied.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0Bz_ctrHrDz4wYjIzN2FhOGItOTE3OC00YmMxLWE0N2MtZjEzMWE5MGY5YjBm&hl=en_US

This will provide all the parts of the article, including those omitted in the editorial process (mistakenly or otherwise), has captions to the photos, shows the waybills in the correct color, and contains all the references at the end of the article, as originally provided.
     I have the greatest respect for OpSIG in general and for The Dispatcher’s Office magazine in particular, but obviously they have not served this particular author very well. Whether I will ever submit anything to them in the future remains to be seen.
Tony Thompson

AAR car types

I freely use the AAR car classification to describe car types, and a recent e-mail made me aware that there are those who either don’t know about them, or don’t entirely understand them. Accordingly, in this post I provide a brief summary. It is understandable if a modeler says “I can tell a box car from a tank car, so why on earth would I bother with all this complication?” I’ll try and answer that after describing the AAR classes (or, as they are sometimes called, AAR mechanical designations).
     In the back of most issues of the Official Railway Equipment Register or ORER are the definitions of all classes, with sketches to clarify the more complicated ones, so you can always look there to get the idea or to check a code you don’t recognize. This post is only intended as an overview.
     Most cars in general service had a terminal letter “M” as in XM, TM, SM, FM, etc. (supposedly M = merchandise).  So in the absence of other information, I would guess one of the “M” categories for a particular car. But there are exceptions. Gondola classes had a bunch of complications but the most common classes are GS for drop-bottom cars and GB for tight-bottom mill gondolas. Here is an example of the ORER sketch definition for the GS cars (there are altogether 13 sketches of different gondola classes in my 1953 ORER copy, though many of them are fairly unusual cars.)

And here is part of the GB description:

     Tank cars which were insulated with an outside jacket have an “I” after the code, such as TMI. Pressurized tank cars, with the distinctive bonnet instead of a dome, are TP and usually TPI. The ORER has a long table identifying these classes, along with the also-required ICC classifications. Thus for example, a tank car might be AAR Class TM, as well as class ICC 103, or AAR Class TPI and also class ICC 105A300. In addition to the information in the ORER, more about these tank car classifications and their cargoes is available in an appendix to Ed Kaminski’s book, Tank Cars, American Car & Foundry, 1865-1955 (Signature Press, 2003).

     Hopper cars had even more variations than gondolas (there are 15 sketches in the 1953 ORER), but for many purposes one can rely on the two most common categories: twin cross-hoppers are HM, triples are HT. “Special” cars have codes beginning with “L” and that includes covered hoppers as class LO. Depressed-center flat cars are FD and TOFC cars are FC, while most other cars are FM, including heavy-duty cars, as long as they have flat decks.
     There are a lot of box car classes. In the ORER, you will see box cars identified by a number of other codes than XM. The key to understanding these is to note whether there is an “M” in the class designation. When you see a class such as XAP for auto parts racks or XAR for automobile racks, that tells you that neither of these is usable for any other loading, which is why the “M” is missing. Also present are variations on XM, such as XMR and XME. These have “stowable” racks which can be secured out of the way and then can be used for other loading. Boxcar bodies with tanks for liquids inside are actually tank cars, and have the classification XT. 

     And by the way, even though the AAR did define any house car with double side doors as an “automobile car” in 1953, all boxcar-type house cars were classified together as various X classes, without directly distinguishing box and auto cars. Indeed, most railroads in 1953 rostered part of their double-door cars in general service and classed as XM. This is one example of why you might want to know AAR classes for your models: is that double-door car in automobile service or not? The AAR class shown in the ORER will tell you.

     I will illustrate this with an example entry from the Southern Pacific pages in the 1953 ORER. Here are lines 21 and 22 of page 442 (you may wish to click on the image to enlarge it):

This entry, like many in the ORER, shows a “main listing” with a following entry line for cars which are exceptions to the main listing. The main group here is shown as AAR class XML, cars with automobile loaders. As is commonly done, the exceptions are shown in a note at the end of the SP pages, in this case Note SS. Here it is:

The note identifies the seven cars cars in the number group which are AAR class XM and thus do not have loaders. This might affect how a model would be used, depending on which car number the model carries. So this aspect might affect your choice of car numbers when decaling a model: do you want an XM or an XML (to use this SP example) for your car fleet? 

     Ice bunker reefers were RS, and those were the most common refrigerator cars in the transition era. An RS car equipped with meat rails was Class RSM, and that would the classification of many though not all meat-packer cars. “Bunkerless” insulated cars were RB, which applies to some insulated box cars as well as to cars which carried beer or beverage cargoes. Mechanical refrigerator cars were class RP (apparently P = power generation on board).
     In making out waybills or car sleeves, I always look up any car I’m not sure about. Since the codes were essential to car usage, they are present in the ORER for every car, and often you have to look at the notes at the end of a railroad entry to find out which cars had which class, as in the example above.

     So to address the question raised at the beginning of this post (which could be paraphrased as “Why should I care?”), I would say that this is another aspect of prototypical car usage and movement. Anyone wishing the car type to match the needs of a particular load or shipper on a waybill will want to use the ORER entries to find out the actual car type corresponding to a model car number. That simply enriches the prototypical quality of your freight car operations.
     Small sideline note: I just realized that this is my 101st post. I never thought I would have very much to say, when I began this blog, and was even afraid it would be a lot of work. Instead, it’s been fun, and I’m surprised I’ve already posted 100 times. Yet another amazing facet of the Internet.

Tony Thompson 

Railroad Prototype Modelers (RPM) meets

I’ve just returned from an RPM meet (in Salem, Oregon). The Salem event was the usual kind of interesting and enjoyable occasion, and while traveling to and from the meeting, I was thinking about the entire RPM idea.
     As many know, RPM began 20 or so years ago as a kind of revolt by “modern” modelers, who felt excluded by the atmosphere of NMRA contests, not only in the sense that entries in that contest were primarily steam and transition era models, but also because prototype fidelity was not an important focus of those contests. This meant that kitbashing and redetailing, especially of diesel locomotives, would score relatively poorly under the NMRA contest system. That was a frustrating outcome, since far less prototypical models, sometimes of imaginary prototypes, could outscore a redetailed diesel model of considerable prototype accuracy.
     The very name of Railroad Prototype Modelers obviously emphasized the goal of reproducing prototype equipment and structures, but the RPM concept also largely abandoned the idea of any contest whatsoever, substituting a display mode in which modelers were free to bring many models, including incomplete and in-progress ones, and to remain with their model display to talk to others. It was an immediate success.
     As soon as the RPM idea was introduced for “modern” models, however, modelers of all eras responded enthusiastically, not only because of the importance of prototype fidelity in every era, but also because the RPM presentation involved a social dimension entirely missing, indeed explicitly discouraged, in the NMRA type of contest.
     From the outset, it has been a core tenet of RPM that there is no “organization,” no membership, no dues, no magazine, no national headquarters, and no officers. Anyone and everyone can participate if they wish. An RPM meet is typically organized and conducted by a local volunteer (or several), and admission fees are modest, usually to cover costs of using a facility for the meet.
     Today there are RPM meets all across the country, ranging from small to large. The “granddaddy” is the annual meeting at Naperville, Illinois (this year in the adjoining town of Lisle, Illinois, next month), closely followed in size and quality by the Cocoa Beach, Florida meeting in January. Both meetings attract 200 to 300 attendees. But in some ways the local, smaller meets are more important. They link up local modelers and naturally tend to present regional modeling, and of course involve far less travel for those in the locality. Many such local meets are announced on a web site, at  http://railroadprototypemodelers.com/.
     The Salem meet last weekend was a good example. There were clinic presentations, but the main action was in the large display room, where a good range of interesting models (and their builders) was available. As always, being able to talk to modelers and learn the techniques they use (and their sources of information!), while examining their models, is a benefit which would not be easily accomplished any other way. Some vendors also attended, always an additional benefit for those who need a specific product.
     Many who read this will already know the entire story. But for anyone who does not, I would strongly recommend watching for announcements of an RPM meet near you. And don’t just attend, take along a few models and be prepared to both learn from others, and maybe, just maybe, provide a bit of inspiration to someone else. I’m sure you will enjoy it. I sure do.
Tony Thompson