A train trip across Europe

In a previous post I described part of a two-week visit my wife and I made to Ireland in September. A description of the Dublin part of that visit is at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-visit-to-dublin.html . A couple of days after that trip ended, we were to start another week’s visit to Barcelona, Spain. We could of course have just gotten a plane flight from Dublin to Barcelona. But we thought we could probably do something more interesting. Here’s what we did.
     First, we did depart Dublin by air, flying across the Irish Sea almost due east to Manchester, in the center of the English Midlands. The Manchester airport has a train station literally on the airport grounds, and has frequent service to a number of nearby cities. We took one of the hourly trains further east, to York. Britain today has a number of passenger service companies using the various rail lines. We took the Trans-Pennine express service. Here is the first car of the three-car train, all diesel multiple units.

The equipment is shown in the York train shed.
     The train was nicely on time to York, giving us all afternoon to visit the National Railway Museum there, which in my view is the finest railway museum in the world. (Probably I will have more to say about NRM in a future post.) After a fine dinner at an establishment with the unlikely name of The Slug and Lettuce, we spent the night in York, and in the morning boarded a train of another company, East Coast Trains, to ride the East Cost main line to London. The train made excellent time and had only one stop before reaching Kings Cross, London. Here’s the electric loco in its East Coast gray livery, with a maroon stripe, shown in Kings Cross.

Kings Cross and the adjacent St. Pancras station have been greatly modernized and expanded, a pleasure to see for those who remember these stations as kind of dirty and run-down. We had a quick snack in the new part of St. Pancras, then boarded our Eurostar equipment for a trip through the Channel Tunnel and on to Paris. This is amazingly quick, and the Chunnel part is only 35 or 40 minutes out of a non-stop trip of over two hours. Here is Mary standing by several Eurostar trainsets at Gare du Nord in Paris. The nearest one is the one on which we had just arrived.

     As I said to Mary, the bad part of this trip plan was that we were forced to eat dinner in Paris. One of my favorite cities anywhere, the food is only part of the attraction of Paris, and we had a great meal before returning to our hotel. The hotel had been carefully chosen to be half a block from our departure station in the morning, Gare du Lyon, from which our train would leave at 7 AM.
     We had about a six-hour trip to Barcelona at TGV speeds, a marvelous way to see the French countryside, one of the loveliest landscapes anywhere. Mary had the foresight to reserve seats on the upper deck, so the view was excellent. The train doesn’t stop until far in the southwest of France, at Nimes and Narbonne, before crossing the border into Spain.
     The TGV arrives at Barcelona’s Sant Station, a fairly clunky depot, but downtown we visited a depot of the old style, Estació de França, with a classic facade and train shed. Not only that, but the train shed is built on a curve (as is York). Here’s a shot from the concourse.

     A fascinating feature of the depot is an HO scale model of the interior, showing rooms in the structure and also a variet of trains posed on the shed tracks. It is displayed in the concourse.

     We had a great week in Barcelona, a marvelous city we had not been to before, but little of it had to do with trains. We learned a lot about Catalonia and how it’s different from most of Spain, had some very good meals, and (our actual purpose in making the trip) saw a lot of the art and architecture of the city. Many think of Picasso and Miro as French artists, or maybe as Spaniards, but Catalonians are very proud that in fact both were from this region of Spain, and there are superb museums for the art of both of them. And the Art Nouveau buildings in Barcelona, probably the most numerous in any city in Europe and climaxed by many structures by Antoni Gaudi, were a real highlight for us both. A terrific trip.
Tony Thompson

My column on timetable construction

In the October 2014 issue of Model Railroad Hobbyist (MRH), my column in the ongoing, multi-columnist series, “Getting Real,” is about making a timetable for model layout use. As with all issues of MRH, the magazine is free and can be downloaded from the MRH site, http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/magazine/mrh-2014-10-oct .
     Since I model the Guadalupe Subdivision of Southern Pacific’s Coast Division in 1953, my timetable was built with the idea of looking as much like the prototype ’53 Coast Division employee timetable as possible. I used the prototype front cover, part of the back-cover map, and the correct Guadalupe Sub timetable pages (inserting my mythical junction town of Shumala). Using information from the SP booklets, “Through, Manifest, Merchandise and Perishable Freight Schedules Between Principal Points” (shown in the column), I added condensed freight train schedule and car handling information in the front of my model timetable, and using the actual Coast Division “Special Instructions” document (also shown), I placed some condensed rules in the back of my timetable.
     I should emphasize one point. The addition of rules in the back, and freight schedule information in the front, does not mimic an actual employee timetable, but does incorporate elements of prototype information from other sources, and gathers them into a single timetable for layout use. The “center spread” of the timetable does show the prototype scheduled trains and times at intermediate stations on the Subdivision.
     I also added schematic town maps to the timetable. Like some of the foregoing ideas, I discussed this idea in a previous post (you can see it at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/10/setting-up-operating-session-creating.html ), but did not go into much detail. In the column, however, I did address the construction and use of such maps. I have used two Adobe applications to make these maps, Photoshop and Illustrator, and both can do a nice job. To show one of these, here is the map for East Shumala (what my blog posts about construction have called the “Shumala Extension”). I made this one with Photoshop. You can click on the map to enlarge it.

Note that there are numbers at two of the industries for specific car spots, that there is a specific requirement for car spotting at Caslon Printing, and that surface roads are shown also for orientation.
     To give an idea of the completed document, here is the inside front cover and first (right-hand) page, shown being used at Shumala.

     All this and more is described in the column. My maps for Ballard and Santa Rosalia (towns on my branch line) are in a state of flux, because final locations have not been chosen for some industries, and there is even a little track left to lay. That’s the beauty of making digital maps: they are a lot easier to modify and update than draftsman’s masterpieces with pen and ink.
Tony Thompson

My acrylic weathering method, Part 6

This Part 6 is about car types beyond tank cars and simple house cars. Links to prior parts of this series are listed below. The first three parts described the basic method, and subsequent parts presented (and will present) specific car types or specific effects to be achieved.

Part 1: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-acrylic-weathering-method.html
Part 2: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-acrylic-weathering-method-part-2.html
Part 3: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-acrylic-weathering-method-part-3.html
Part 4: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-acrylic-weathering-method-part-4.html
Part 5: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-acrylic-weathering-method-part-5.html

     I will begin with flat cars. An earlier post about this described my method briefly, and it can be viewed at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/05/weathering-flat-car-decks.html . I won’t repeat that material here, except to point out that the decks of flat cars, being out in the weather as well as accumulating dirt and debris from some cargoes, tend to get really dark in color over time. Here is an image of a 25-year-old SP car, a Craig Bossler photo at Reading, PA:

Note also that the deck is pretty beat up. Few modelers reproduce either the dark colors or the damage to the deck. The photo above admittedly shows a car later in its life, but it does depict the direction that deck appearances are headed. And by the way, the SP did not creosote decks of its flat cars, nor did it paint them, so the color shown did not arise from those reasons.
     This means that raw “real wood decks” on model flat cars can only represent a just-installed deck, which would be a rare observation. To illustrate, on Otis McGee’s layout, which rosters about 75 SP flat cars for lumber loading, there is only one car with an unweathered deck. For these cars, I paint with acrylics, rather than use washes, although the same colors are used as shown in Part 1, link above. Shown below is a photo from my previous post on decks (link in previous paragraph) to show both “real wood” and plastic decks, as modified.

     A related problem arises with bulkhead flat cars, for which there is both a steel body and bulkhead frame, and a wood deck and bulkhead facing. This is one of the bulkhead car models, produced by the Southern Pacific Historical & Technical Society, of the 1949 home-built SP modifications to Class F-70-7 flat cars. I weathered the body with washes, the deck and facings with paint.

     Another car type that presents its own problems is the covered hopper. In the early 1950s that I model, these cars were almost entirely used in cement service. It was not long before spilled cement from the loading process accumulated on roofs and trailed down car sides. That’s shown here with some dry-brush streaking with acrylic Titanium White, about the only time I ever would use white, and even here, I  mixed in a little Neutral Gray to tone it down. There is also some brownish dirt on the car, but it is not very heavy, as this car was built in 1951 and I am modeling 1953. The model is an InterMountain product, and like nearly all of SP’s 1950s covered hoppers, has “closed” sides. You can click to enlarge.

     But despite the predominance of cement cars, there did exist covered hoppers in other service, including chemical and mineral service. Here is an example, a car leased to American Potash and Chemical, and assigned to haul the mineral trona; it’s an InterMountain model with open sides. Both these cars were weathered as house cars, that is, the roof was weathered in one session, then the sides and ends were done in a subsequent session.

     Other car types have challenges of their own, and deserve separate treatment. I will take up gondolas and hopper cars in a future post.
Tony Thompson

A visit to Dublin

This September my wife and I visited Ireland. Speaking from my perspective as a beer enthusiast, and someone who has enjoyed Guinness stout for a long time, a natural highlight was a visit to the “mother ship,” the Guinness brewery at St. James Gate, Dublin. It is an immense operation, and naturally today the work is carried out in fleets of huge stainless steel tanks. But they do have a very nice tour (for which admission is charged), showing both the historic brewing process and today’s process.
     Among the interesting features was a display of the former railroad within the brewery, with two-foot gauge track on account of tight clearances. Locomotives likewise had to be quite small, and were custom built in the brewery shops. Here is a historic photo of one of these in operation, in an image from the Guinness Archive, Dublin (used with permission),

    One example of this same type of locomotive is preserved and on display in the tour area. Here I am standing next to it, so you can see the relative size. Although rail operations came to an end in 1975, some of the track can still be seen within the brewery complex.

     Also displayed were various old warning signs from the railroad operation, some of which were entertaining as well as informative. Here are a few.

     Here is a photo of me standing by the brewery gate, just to prove we really were there. And by the way, we drank Guinness almost everywhere we went in Ireland! a great treat for me.

    The Irish railway network today is pretty modern and has fast service throughout the Republic. Here is an intercity train set, made up of diesel multiple units, ready to depart Dublin for Galway. The lighted destination sign on the train reads Gaillimh, the Gaelic word for Galway.

     All in all, we had a great visit, seeing much of the dramatic western Atlantic shore of Ireland, as well as four days in Dublin — in addition to visiting the Guinness brewery.
Tony Thompson

Waybills, Part 35: the people involved

As model railroaders, most of us are not very interested in the entire army of people who once did (and still do) much of the work of the railroad behind the scenes, as we perceive it, of the action along the tracks. But understanding waybills and how they are prepared and used requires at least a broad familiarity with the people who did the work. The same applies to other aspects of railroad operation, as I will briefly touch upon below.
     In almost every small town in America until the 1960s, an agent worked at the railroad’s depot. He or she handled paperwork of all kinds: accounting, billing, waybills, passenger tickets and reservations (if the station still had that service), but beyond the paper, and more importantly, the agent was the railroad to residents of the town. Not only in the economic life of local businesses and customers, but travel and other activities flowed through the agent. I have written several times previously about the various aspects of the waybill process, especially in a post devoted just to the role of the agent (you can read it at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/07/waybills-part-33-more-on-role-of-agent.html ). There is more on the same topic at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/04/waybills-part-32-waybill-preparation.html .
     In a depot that saw many trains, there might well be an operator also, who was the link from the dispatcher to the train crews, and transmitted orders to trains as needed. Sometimes the jobs of agent and operator were combined, though on some railroads, the two jobs were only combined occasionally.
     Many modelers will be aware of the roles of agent and operator, but most do not realize how many clerks were employed to fill out and manage paperwork. In a town of any size, there were virtual armies of railroad clerks (and almost all of them would have been men in the transition era and before). There might be clerks who only did waybilling, or only handled demurrage accounts, or only managed freight billing. Clerks might be assigned entirely to tracing shipments, making interchange reports at a junction, working directly with local industries to facilitate shipping or receiving of cargo, or a host of other duties. These clerks might work in the depot, in a yard office, or in a separate office structure in larger towns.
     The Southern Pacific photo below shows yard clerks at work, handling waybills and related paper for freight cars. It dates from 1952. You can see the sheer volume of paper that was involved.

     One duty of clerks was to check the yard. This meant checking inbound and outbound trains as they passed, to ensure that consists were as listed, and walking yard tracks to assemble a list of cars (reporting marks and numbers) in order along the track. And in an active yard, this had to be done again and again during the day.
     Other railroad tasks, such as roundhouse work, would be overseen by a foreman, supervising the boilermakers and machinists (in steam days), and the foreman would have one or several clerks to handle paperwork associated with the jobs in the shop. A stock of parts and materials was normally necessary for the machine-shop aspect of a roundhouse, and that in turn usually required a storeroom — and one or more clerks to run it.
     As modelers, we don’t want or need to model these jobs, but we need to be aware that they existed. Just to cite one example, yard offices need to be big enough for the work force of clerks that would have occupied it. Roundhouses need office space somewhere, and so on.
     In building the structures on my layout, I have tried to keep all this in mind. The roundhouse I built from a Banta Models kit (which duplicates the SP roundhouse at Port Costa, California) does include the office and storeroom space that was in the prototype. (You can see this space in the second and third photos in my final post about building this roundhouse, at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-roundhouse-for-shumala-part-5.html .)
     I also built a small yard office at Shumala, and this photo, from my previous layout, can be interpreted as the engineer walking down to the yard office (at left) to see if he can get a cup of coffee from the clerks, while the yard clerk, having walked the train, relaxes by the door. The conductor is no doubt inside, collecting his waybills for the day’s work.

     Being aware of all the jobs that had to be done on the railroad, even a small railroad, or at a small town, or even on a branch line, allows us to build realistic structures and to recognize the people behind the scenes who did the work which made the system run.
Tony Thompson

My acrylic weathering method, Part 5

In the previous four posts on this topic, I showed my materials and process, using house cars (box and refrigerator cars) in a two-part sequence, first roofs, then car sides and ends in a subsequent session. [Here is a link to the fourth post: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-acrylic-weathering-method-part-4.html .] I mentioned in an earlier post that tank cars really cannot be done with those two steps, as there is no “separate” part you can identify to weather differently from the rest of the car, as there is in roofs vs. sides. In this post I address my weathering process for tank cars.
     The overall weathering is the same, in that the model is thoroughly wetted with wet water (be generous), then a chosen amount of pigment is applied and spread evenly over the car. The draining downward of pigment, evident on any more or less vertical surface, was described and illustrated in talking about car sides, and here it is even more prominent. Suggestion: once your weathering work on house cars seems to go all right, then try a tank car.
     I usually end up holding the car with fingertips at the bolsters, as you have to weather the walkways and trucks, along with the tank and even the center sill. As with any of these methods, you will get a fair amount of acrylic pigment onto your fingers during the procedure, but it comes off easily with water and should not be a worry. You will definitely experience this with a tank car.
     Let’s look at a prototype car to illustrate the points to be pursued. This is an SP car, whose paint scheme shows it is in company fuel service. Note the spillage around and below the dome. Notice also that the entire tank is streaked vertically, as rain has washed dirt downward. (You can click on the image to enlarge.)

Also trucks are quite dirty, in a brownish color. The photo is from the Bruce Petty collection.
     Weathering a tank car fairly heavily is quite realistic, as these cars often went many years between paint jobs. Here is a Proto2000 model of a Union Oil Company tank car, which I would call “moderately” dirty.

I try to achieve some of the same dirt streaking on the tank, and dirt over the walkways, as is seen on prototype cars, that is illustrated in the detail shot below. The weathering looks uneven in the bright light used for the photo, but under layout lighting this effect is not visible.

Note that walkway and trucks are weathered too, and that a route card has been simulated with a small square of paper on the edge of the running board. On the prototype, these were often stapled or tacked to the edge of the wood running board, which is why tank cars usually did not have route card boards as such, until the advent of metal running boards. For more about route cards, you might wish to read my discussion of the use and application of them at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/11/chalk-marks-and-route-cards.html .
     A detail seen in a number of prototype photos is a strip of rust alongside the tank hold-down bands. This occurs because the tank is anchored to the underframe only at the car center, and thus expands and contracts with changing temperature by sliding longitudinally on the underframe. In a prior post about modeling a tank car (that post is available at the following link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/04/associated-oil-tank-cars-modeling.html ), I showed this rust detail. Here is a repeat of a photo from that post; the model is a modified InterMountain kit.

     A more challenging task in many cases is lightly weathering a tank car, especially with a light-colored model. This Atlas tank car model, lettered for Warren Petroleum, would be a pretty new car on my 1953 layout and thus is only weathered a bit. Again, I tried to capture the downward streaking on the tank, as well as dirtying up the “glossy new” look of the ready-to-run model.

     This then is a general summary of my approach to the separate problems of tank cars, compared to house and other cars such as open-top cars. I will return to the latter in a future post.
Tony Thompson

My acrylic weathering method, Part 4

In the previous three parts, I introduced materials and the method used, and showed how the wet application of the acrylic wash led gradually to a dry car side. (Third one at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot/2014/09/my-acrylic-weathering-method-part-3.html .) Here I take up a few finishing touches which can be added.
     Some highlighting or streaking can add to the effects of the overall wash in this method. As I have described the process so far, the pigment will have accumulated around rivets, corners, or protrusions of any kind, but if you have been careful as I described in previous posts, color will be pretty uniform. But photos of real cars often show more variation. Here are some ways to depict those variations.
     First, some cars show either light or dark dirt near ladder rungs, presumably from the boots of yardmen or brakemen. In this photo, I have used some pure black to dash on a little such color on the lower part of the ladder (pure Burnt Umber works well too). Note again here that truck side frames have been weathered too.

In the photo above, I am just turning to the door area. Around door latches, there are often dirty streaks or patches, and if the door rollers or door track have been greased, there can be dark brown or black stains in those areas. In the photo below, I am adding those, again with a little straight Umber or black.

     As dirty water drains from the roof in a rain shower, it is channeled along the top of the car side and drains preferentially from the ends of door tracks. This is an effect visible in some prototype photos. Dilute the straight pigment a little by adding water to the palette, or minimize the amount on the brush by just stroking it onto the newspaper under the work area, and then stroke downward at either or both ends of the top track, as you see here.

Note that my fingers atop the car have accumulated some paint. This comes off with water in seconds once you are done, so don’t worry about this development. Most fabrics, however, absorb the pigment, and thus are a different story, so I do try to keep from weathering my clothing.
     One other point. Sometimes the effect turns out too mild for what you had intended. It is easy to go back and add more pigment after everything is dry (sometimes I add a protective overcoat of Dullcote first). Below is a reefer having a little more dirt added to the roof (the yellow “color” is actually reflected light). But always remember that although it’s easy to add more color, it’s a lot harder to “add less,” that is, to remove pigment, unless you do so fairly soon after application. Better to work up to the desired level of dirt from the lighter end of the scale.

      Last, I like to allow all water to dry, even in crevices , behind ladders, or in other places water can hide, before adding the final Dullcote layer. That layer not only protects the acrylic pigments from scratching, but will also kill any shine, which sometimes can happen with this method. Where I live, sunshine is common all year round, and warming up in sunlight has proven a very effective drying technique.

Here you see the two cars for which I did roofs only in the session shown in the first post of this series, at right, and then at left, the two cars for which I did the car sides and ends in the second post (roofs had been done earlier).
     These details complete the overall process of my acrylic weathering technique. There is more to say about car weathering for specific car types, which I will take up in future posts, but this covers my basic method of acrylic weathering and some key details.
Tony Thompson