Layout track arrangement

I have had a number of questions about the layout video recently posted, in particular trying to understand what the track arrangement is. Making the video, we had intended to show how the staging table connects to the other side of the peninsula, but failed to include that. (The video can be accessed by this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-preliminary-layout-video.html .)
     So here is the key point: the Southern Pacific main line is simply a loop. On one side of the peninsula, it passes the town of Shumala, which is also the junction with the Santa Rosalia Branch. On the other side, it passes through the staging table, and is underneath the town of Ballard. To show it as simply as possible, here is a sketch of just the SP main.

The two points at which the track disappears from view on the Shumala side of the layout are indicated by “tunnel portal” symbols, though only one of them is actually a tunnel.
     The second part of the layout is the branch itself. It departs from Shumala, climbing up behind the ice deck, crossing the bridge over Chamisal Road, to a tunnel portal just visible on edge in this photo:

It passes through this tunnel, around the end of the peninsula, and emerges at Ballard, as you see in this photo repeated from my series on repairing the Ballard hill:

The track then continues through Ballard to the end of the branch at Santa Rosalia. Ballard is of course immediately above the staging table shown in the sketch at the top of this post. See, for example, my post from a few years ago, about my son and I putting the Ballard track board in place above the staging: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/09/ballard-2.html .
     The branch, then, is point-to-point, and has no turning facilities along it. At Shumala, however, there is a turntable with the roundhouse. The SP main line likewise has no turning capability, and trains must be staged in the desired orientation to run. This was anticipated in the layout planning, and re-railers were added to every staging track to facilitate rearrangement of trains, albeit by the good old 0-5-0 method.
     Hopefully this clarifies the layout track arrangement, really quite a simple setup, until such time as I actually draw a track plan.
Tony Thompson

A preliminary layout video

Last year a neighbor came over and wanted to see the layout. I was happy to show it, and while he was here, he used his iPhone to take about seven minutes of video, intending to show it to his dad, who is interested in model railroading. In the process, he was asking about things like DCC and sound in locomotives, so in a sense much of the conversation was about explaining fairly basic things, from the perspective of experienced model railroaders. Toward the end, you’ll hear my wife Mary joining the conversation. At that point, we were standing near the Shumala depot, which you see in this view.

     Understandably, the video is erratic in spots, just being a “walk around,” and the conversation was entirely unscripted and undirected. But my visitor did take a turn around the layout as it was in March of 2014, and you do get views of the entire layout in different parts of the video. I’m not exactly apologizing for the video, only trying to emphasize that it is only a limited representation of how I want the layout to be viewed. But it’s here, and in the absence of better video, it will do for now.
     Here is the link to the video on YouTube:

http://youtu.be/nB6g4J_sDNM

     Awhile back, I posted (see: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/02/my-layout-description.html ) a fuller layout description. That may be of interest to some viewers of the video.
     I would like to shoot and edit something more indicative of how the layout is operated, and have already experimented a little, but in the meantime this video provides a bit of a look at the layout as it was at that time. I hope you enjoy it.
Tony Thompson

Pismo Dunes Road, Part 3: Alder Street

In my initial post about this subject, I mentioned the locale and significance of Pismo Dunes Road for my layout extension at East Shumala (that post is at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/12/pismo-dunes-road-east-shumala.html ), and I followed that up by showing the installation of the styrene road (at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/01/pismo-dunes-road-part-2.html ). The problem presented at the end of that second post was the orientation of the intersecting Alder Street, which in simplest form headed straight into the backdrop. I wanted to do something about that, to minimize the problem of disguising where the road goes. This post is about trying out several ideas to do that.
     The street heads off between two buildings, but both are flats, so a direct line into the backdrop offers few means of disguise.  But if the road is curving as it passes between the buildings, its continuation beyond the layout would be partly or entirely hidden by one of the buildings, so this could help solve the backdrop-impact problem. I also wanted to try tapering the roadway somewhat, to see if I could force some perspective to the scene.
     The simplest way to try these ideas is to cut out some trial roadway shapes in paper. I just used a sheet of newsprint. My first try was to taper the width of the roadway, to try forcing perspective. Slight narrowing did not seem to do much, so I tried a greater taper (see below). This looks okay with nothing around it. But with this short distance to the backdrop, this would not look right with HO objects of familiar size nearby. The freight cars on these tracks will be full-size HO, so the strongly forced perspective will not look right when such cars are present, nor will HO highway vehicles. In this photo, the paper cutout is simply atop the original roadway.

     My next idea was to curve the roadway slightly, while also tapering it a little. Below is my trial cut-out of this paper roadway. Again, there isn’t much space to work a curve into the road, and the taper is probably excessive, for the reasons just given.

But the curve looks promising, because a tree or shrub could be placed on either side of an arrangement like this, to help obscure whether the distant roadway is visible. It is maybe just a little too tapered. So I cut out still another piece, not quite as curved nor tapered much.

But I was disappointed with this, as it seemed to me that it didn’t actually help too much to solve the problem of hiding where the road goes, even if it was the best of the modifications.
    At this point I had the idea that what is really needed is to prevent the viewer from seeing the intersection of the horizontal road with the vertical wall of the room. Maybe I could pose a truck or automobile at either of the two backdrop industries, or show an automobile pulling out from one of them.

This is just a van truck to illustrate the idea. A smaller truck might look a little better, and I will pursue that further.

     But I do need to install a road here, so I decided to use that most recent design, a modest taper and some curvature to the right. I simply trimmed each styrene roadway piece that you see above, then glued them down with canopy glue. I will show further progress on Alder Street in a future post.

     There is nothing of great significance in this series of trials, except that it shows the ways you sometimes have to try a range of ideas to select what works. That is certainly true for me in designing and building scenery. A true artist could envision all this in his or her mind, but whether it’s my engineering genes or something else, I have learned I can’t do that very effectively. I have to try something physical I can see and touch. More next time.

Tony Thompson

Photographing railroad models

I recently received a stimulating question in an email, simply asking what recommendations I would make to achieve good photographs of railroad models and layouts. I am no expert, but I have been making (or attempting to make) such photographs for a whole bunch of years, and I can at least offer a few pointers which sum up my own experience.
     Some amateurs believe, with the advent of digital cameras, and the many software applications out there which enable photo correction, manipulation and improvement, that photography is fundamentally different, and easier, today. That’s true in a number of ways, but the fundamental variables in photography have not changed at all. I will briefly summarize what they are, and how you can work with them.
     Any photographer first needs to have at least a basic understanding and command of his or her camera, since in model photography we normally exercise the camera in ways you would not usually do in photographing, say, your family picnic. Cameras do come with rather compact directions (which camera buyers often promptly lose), but in most cases that is only the most basic information. Trial and error may work, and if you pursue that course, I advise making notes so you remember what worked and what didn’t. Better is a resource you can turn back to when needed. Nowadays there are lots of after-market publications for this purpose. Here I just show one, which relates to my own Canon camera, a digital SLR (single-lens reflex). Every make of camera enjoys similar support.

This publication is by Black Dog Media (BDM) of England, publishers of a very wide variety of titles, and a broad range just on photography. It’s an 8.5 x 10-inch book, 160 pages on glossy stock, and very well produced, available on the magazine racks at Barnes & Noble and elsewhere. I recommend it.
     Now let’s turn to model photography. The biggest obstacle faced in photography of any small object or group of small objects is adequate depth of field, which means the distance within which everything is in focus. For model railroad subjects, usually that means that you have to arrange the photography so you get as much depth in focus, or near focus, as you can. There are software applications which can stitch together a series of photos, each focused at a different depth in the scene, and these can be astounding when a really deep scene is photographed, but for most photos this isn’t necessary.
     What do you do? The key is to reduce the lens aperture as small as it will go, which produces maximum depth of field. Not all conventional camera lenses will stop down terribly far, and this is one place that a macro lens can be really useful, because they often offer very small apertures (or, to use the photographic term, large f-stop numbers). On my digital Canon, I use aperture priority, and leave it set at the limit for my camera, which is f /25. That’s my first principle.
     Of course, minimum aperture size means that the light reaching the light-registering medium, whether electronic sensor or film, is also minimum per unit time, which in turn has to mean longer exposures. With most model photos, this almost automatically means that hand-held photos just can’t be adequate. I believe that if you are at all serious, a tripod or camera rest of some kind is essential. That would be my second principle.
     The third determining factor is lighting. There are two parts to this: first, pretty bright lights, to help with light delivery through your stopped-down lens, and second, uniform lighting over the whole subject. This is harder than it sounds. The human eye is so flexible with light levels, that you easily may not realize you are lighting one side of a scene more than the other side, but the camera will see it that way. The solution is to analyze the photos you take, looking for this problem, and you will soon get used to viewing your lighting with a critical eye, and reducing the size of the problem.
     In the days of film, one might need to use a 1000-watt main flood light, and one or two 500-watt fill lights (or more). Digital sensors in modern cameras are far more sensitive in low light, and today considerably less wattage is necessary. But lighting still has to be bright enough, and still has to be reasonably uniform.

    I should also mention flash. Fixed-position flash on the camera produces model photographs which usually have terribly dark shadows, and many cameras have automatic settings for flash which take over when the flash is engaged, often overriding settings such as maximum f-stop. For most kinds of model photography, then, flash is not a good idea, unless you can tilt the flash to bounce it off the ceiling.

     Today, applications like Photoshop can enable you to fix lighting variations in an image, though only within a certain range of variation. Minimizing what you will need to do in Photoshop is always a good idea.
      There are innumerable books on specific aspects of photography, and no doubt most are helpful. In this post, I will just mention one I happen to own, and have learned from. It is a 1979 book, frequently reprinted, and still readily available used (and cheap) from Amazon.com and elsewhere in the Internet. The author, Lester Lefkowitz, was a well-known close-up photographer.

This book shows a huge range of techniques, and though of course entirely about film photography, has absolutely clear and informative directions on the photographic methods to use and how they work.
     With my three fundamental principles described in this post, I believe I have covered the basics. I will give specifics about model photography, and more details, in a  future post.
Tony Thompson

Pismo Dunes Road, Part 2

In my first post about building this road, I described the East Shumala location and showed my basic construction method using sheet styrene (see it at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/12/pismo-dunes-road-east-shumala.html ) . This road is important to development of the entire East Shumala section of the layout, because it sets the front of the scenery area.
     With the styrene road shape complete, as shown in that prior post, the next step was to put a coat of primer on the styrene. I plan to use acrylic tube paints to color the road, but as these are water-based, they don’t work well on clean styrene, so a quick rattle-can primer of a dark gray color was used. My paint for this was Tamiya TS-48, “Gunship Grey,” a color I use for lots of background dark colors. I simply spread some newspaper on the garage floor and painted. Here is the road section with this done. Coverage isn’t perfect, but this is just primer.

     At that point, I also needed to refine the road shape a little bit, to blend better into the layout area where it would be placed. There is always an issue with roads which meet the backdrop, in that it is a challenge to blend the scenery and make the road not look like it crashes into a wall. At the left end of the section you see above, the road would have done just that. I simply added a partial curve at that point.
     With the roadway piece fitting well onto the layout, I glued it down with canopy glue, which I’ve found to be an excellent adhesive to attach dissimilar materials like these. (You can read my comments about canopy glue at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-few-words-in-praise-of-canopy-glue.html .) Weights were placed on the roadway while the glue set, to ensure a good bond.
     Once this was done, I used my customary fine-grained paper mache product, Brandt’s Paper Mache Compound (Brandt’s, a taxidermists’ product, is available from Robert Ruozzi of Irwin, PA) to fill any gaps on the aisle side, and to form the contours of the road shoulder. As you can see, I use an ordinary putty knife for this, and keep a plain kitchen sponge handy to wipe clean both the fascia and the road surface as I work. The paper mache was mixed in the background bowl.

Note I also filled along the fascia edge, which will be painted a color to match the Masonite, and to bring the vertical surface right up to the plane of the roadway.
     Here is a view of the entire area. The gap between Caslon Printing, at left, and Phelan & Taylor, the white packing house at center, is where Alder Street will be located. I have left a gap in the road shoulder at that approximate location, pending choice of exact alignment. I am working on a stock pen to be placed between the tracks and Pismo Dunes Road. Many stock pens along the SP were owned and operated by the railroad, which is how I will portray this one.

     Last task for this phase of the project is to get Alder Street started. I used the same 1/16-inch styrene sheet that Pismo Dunes Road was made from, and cut out the pieces to fit around the grade crossings of the two spur tracks. These styrene pieces were also primed with the Tamiya Gunship Grey paint. Here are the primed pieces, merely set in place.

But there are a couple of problems here. First, the road slams straight into the wall, a hard arrangement to disguise or hide. Second, the full-width roadway doesn’t quite look right. What to do? It would be easy to taper the roadway to force some perspective, but that won’t help with the perpendicular arrival at the wall. Something else has to be done, and I will take that up in the next post.
     Also in my next phase of this project, I will refine all the road shoulders, and paint the road, followed by application of a center line to Pismo Dunes Road. I will also carve a suggestion of drainage ditches along one side. Modelers are accustomed to the fact that rail lines are accompanied by drainage ditches, but seem not to recognize that roads, especially in the country, often have them too. But I’ll postpone describing those steps to a future post.
Tony Thompson

The overall character of your freight fleet

Many of us, certainly including me, tend to focus so much on individual freight cars that we can lose sight of the “big picture,” by which I mean the overall character of the fleet of freight cars. It’s the kind of thing you form an impression of, as soon as you walk into a layout room on a visit.
     The impression I mean is whether everything you see, specifically including the freight cars, “looks right.” What does that mean? It mostly means “era consistent,” but it also means that there are not too many “circus” or “billboard” cars, even for the 1920s, and that the balance of car types is reasonable. It may also mean car color, and that’s the sub-topic of this post.
     Some time back, in fact quite a few years ago, Rick Tipton had a short article in Model Railroader (June, 1977), entitled “Developing the freight car fleet,” page 94. Because it was in the back of that issue, probably many readers of MR even at the time didn’t really take much notice. But Rick put forth some very sound points, and MR did give him space for a nicely broad and complete article. For those with back issues, or who purchased the Kalmbach DVDs of all issues from 1934 to 2009, it's worth reading. (One important reason I bought the DVDs was to allow disposal of nearly seven feet of shelf space occupied by back issues!)
     Now I have to quickly issue a disclaimer. A fair amount of Rick’s article, fully a third of it, is a simplistic, dated, and in places simply wrong summary of what prototypes were represented by the models of the day. For example, for box cars he discussed Athearn MDC, and Train Miniature. With the immensely better models of today, practically all of that discussion is moot, and as I said, riddled with oversimplifications and errors.
     But the attraction for me, then and now, is his discussion of the impression you make with your fleet of freight cars. This part occupies about a fourth of the article. Here, Tipton emphasizes that black and boxcar red freight cars tend to be more “anonymous” in a train than cars of other colors (and of course yellow and orange reefers also qualify). In fact, his point was that trains of anonymous cars tend to look longer, a big plus on almost any layout, because you don’t perceive the train as separate cars, or notice the unusual or bright-colored ones. This is something you can readily see for yourself on any layout you visit.
     Of course, plain colors, and lots of them, among your freight cars is entirely prototypical for the transition era, but Rick’s point is that there is a further benefit, the anonymity of such cars in trains. Weathering further enhances this effect, both in dulling lettering and heralds, and also in making cars look more alike. Creating the impression that trains are longer is obviously a plus, and the fact that a viewer doesn’t focus on a vivid paint scheme, but instead perceives each car as simply a player in the scene, also appeals to me.
     I can’t claim to faithfully follow what Rick suggested, but I certainly lean in that direction. Here is a photo of Ten-wheeler 2344 switching at Shumala, which I think illustrates the general point.

The “hole” in the fascia at right is a recessed push-pull control for a turnout.
     The key phrase which Rick used is, “cars should be seen, not counted,” and of course he means that in terms of their overall impression on the layout. It’s a good observation and one I still keep in mind, more than 35 years since the article was printed.
Tony Thompson

Express refrigerator cars

Awhile back I introduced the topic of modeling the “Coast Mail” train which operated on SP’s Coast Line. You can read that introductory post at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/10/choosing-model-sp-passenger-cars.html . The train wasn’t officially called the “Coast Mail;” the real name of the train was pretty dull, just “Passenger” in the timetable, but it was widely known in the 1950s as the Coast Mail. In the present post I discuss the express reefers that sometime ran in the train.
     I know from my presentations over the years, when I describe Pacific Fruit Express operations, that many people have misconceptions about express refrigerator cars and how they are operated. Some folks are also confused about what they are used for. This post is intended to clarify those points.
     The answers on these points do depend on era. Before 1920, there were relatively few reefers specially built and equipped for service in passenger trains (which is the core of the ARA and AAR definitions of what an express refrigerator is). If equipped with ice bunkers, the commonest arrangement, these cars were classified as BR. Any freight refrigerator could be equipped for passenger service (and that was the usual procedure before 1920), but specially built cars became the norm for this service in the 1920s.
     In 1918, the four big express companies, Wells Fargo, Adams Express, American Express, and Southern Express, were combined into a single entity, American Railway Express, and many newly built BR cars were lettered for ARE, just as were baggage cars which carried express. But ARE remained a private company. In 1929, 86 railroads combined assets to purchase all the assets of ARE and create a new agency, the Railway Express Agency or REA, which was owned by the railroads. Its reporting marks were REX. Railroad baggage cars were soon relettered for REA if in express service. Express reefers, previously leased to ARE by railroads and continued under lease to REA, largely were released back to their owners in the 1930s as leases expired.
     But REA continued to direct operation of these cars, through a pool of express cars. This pool varied over the years, but typically most railroads (and PFE) did place their BR cars into pool service. This meant that REA directed operation of the cars. If a shipper needed a BR car to load, he did so through REA, not through PFE or his local railroad, though the railroad’s local agent would have handled express matters in addition to railroad matters.
     The cars remained in their original ownership (railroad or PFE), and the owners were responsible for all but minor running repairs. Financially, freight charges paid by shippers (or consignees) included a fee to REA along with mileage payments for use of the cars; the latter went to the owners, and all icing fees went to the providers of the service. The pools meant that any car in the pool could, in principle, be assigned anywhere in the country it was needed. A Santa Fe car could be loaded in Boston, a Seaboard car in Seattle, or a PFE car in Florida. But the maintenance needs of the cars meant that most of the time, they operated approximately in their home territory.
     Below is a list of the participants in the REA pool in 1953. Of the 2500-some cars in the pool, over 1600 were REX-marked cars, with a number of railroads also participating, along with PFE and also a leasing company, Chicago Freight Car Leasing, which contributed converted troop sleepers made into express reefers.

Note that several member railroads of Fruit Growers Express (PRR, SAL, ACL, NC&StL, GN) all had contributed express cars to this pool. This table, by the way, is Table 5-4 from the PFE book, page 101 (Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Thompson, Church and Jones, Signature Press, 2000).
     How should model operations reflect these details? As stated above, it was possible that pool cars from anywhere could show up in a particular location — an ACL car might be loaded in California — but more typically California BR loadings would take place in PFE or ATSF cars, and of course in REX cars.
     As most modelers know, express reefers were used for cargo which needed extremely rapid delivery, or was of especially high value, or both. One obvious cargo of that type is the first harvest of any season, whether cantaloupes, cherries, or other fruit, or something like the first salmon of the year. On the SP, cut flowers were shipped from California to the Midwest during much of the year in express reefers. Modelers can devise cargoes to fit these categories.
     My own car fleet contains mostly PFE express cars, but I do have a few non-PFE cars, which I operate sparingly. I have one REX car, which is Walthers’ version of the essentially standard car built by General American for many buyers in the 1920s. I also have an old Ambroid kit, one of my first kit-built freight cars, for a GN express reefer, and both Milwaukee and NP express reefers (note that neither was in the REA pool). For really faraway owners, I also have a brass car from NJ International for New York Central (also not an REA pool participant). Its deep side sills make it a distinctive car.
     Here is an example of an REX car being loaded at my Phelan & Taylor packing house in East Shumala. This is the Walthers model.

And similarly, here is PFE 799, recently rebuilt without the top fascia board and thus freshly repainted, shown being picked up at Coastal Citrus in Santa Rosalia. The car is a brass import from WP Car Company.

     What’s this about a PFE rebuild, you may ask. In the PFE book (reference citation above), it’s explained that these cars were built without ice hatch platforms, but received them in the early 1930s. That was about the only visible change until the 1950s, when the cars were approaching 30 years in service, which is a long time for cars with wood superstructure framing. In late 1953, rebuilding began on 83 of the cars, which received steel superstructure frames and, incidentally, new side fascia boards which were very narrow (see photo above). But most PFE express cars at that time were older cars, some fairly deteriorated. I have one model with that appearance, shown here at the head end of an eastward Coast Mail on my layout.

The model is an upgraded Athearn express reefer, with new sill steps, ice hatch platforms, and brake gear.
    I only occasionally have car requests from my packing houses for express reefers, but they make a nice change when they are needed.
Tony Thompson