Rebuilding my ocean beach

One of the features I had been pleased with on my layout in Pittsburgh was the beach scene, intended to typify some of the Southern Pacific’s seaside running between Ventura and Santa Maria, California. It also provided a distraction from the return loop on the main line, which was additionally hidden by being partly inside a large hill.
     Moving this section of the layout to California, with fascia removed, naturally was a touchy matter, since the projecting beach at the end of the peninsula was vulnerable to bumps and scrapes. So although it largely survived, it did get damaged, and in the new layout setting, certainly needed repair.
     The original water area was created with a shelf of Masonite, covered with soupy plaster to make a flat surface. That surface was then modified by adding a wave surge, using the taxidermist’s papier-maché (mentioned in a previous post: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-shumala-extension.html ), then sanding smooth, sealing with Matte Medium, and carefully painting blue-green in deeper water, shading to light green near the beach. Some dry brushing with white suggested foam along the wave top. A final coat of Gloss Medium completed the look of water.
     I suppose it’s obvious, but an ocean beach is not like the lakes or ponds many modelers have built. The water is not flat, but has wave action, and representing the ocean’s surface as flat simply won’t do. It doesn’t matter exactly what action is chosen, but some suggestion of water movement seems essential to me in modeling the ocean shore. I chose to model a small wave close to cresting.
     I don’t have a good photo of the modeled beach as it originally was, but more recently, in its damaged condition, I took a photo to show how it had ended up. (You can click to enlarge the image.) You can see that some pieces of the substructure have fallen out, and that the curve of the “water” edge no longer exactly matches the re-installed fascia.

The color of the rock, incidentally, was matched to samples of the characteristic Franciscan sedimentary formations along the central coast of California, and the tilt of the formation is also typical of the prototype.
     My first step was to repair the basic contours. I used Sculptamold for the rough work, and a fine-grained taxidermist’s material, Brandt’s Paper Mache Compound, to refine it. (Brandt’s is available from Robert Ruozzi of Irwin, PA.)  Once that was all dry, I sanded it smooth, sealed it, and was ready to paint.
     I don’t have any record of what colors I originally used, but that doesn’t matter, since I only want to (more or less) match what exists. In my repainting, I used Cerulean Blue, Light Oxide Green, Yellow Oxide and White, using the yellow very sparingly along with white to lighten the blue and green. Even in the bluest area of water, there is some green in the color. This close to shore, seawater really only looks green, but the more blue shade away from the beach is a concession to the mental image most people have, of “the blue of the sea.”
     As repainting was getting under way (you can see the overly dark blue at the outer edge, toward the left), the right side of the scene looked like this. The rocks will get more foam around them in the final version.

     The water surface, not being flat on account of the wave, is higher than the fascia edge in the center area. This makes a raised vertical edge which has to be painted to match the natural Masonite color of the fascia, as seen below. You can see the wave crest also, which looks like a gray line at this angle.

     Once the paint matching and blending had been completed for the water, I went back with Burnt Umber, lightening as needed with the white and yellow, to touch the vertical edges of papier maché which should match the fascia. (Natural tempered Masonite is usually not as dark as Burnt Umber.) The final look after painting was this, with a final coat of Gloss Medium still to come (to make the water is glossy instead of matte), and some fresh white foam highlights along the wave top and around rocks.

As usually happens, the old glossy surface had become dull with time. I gently washed it with a damp sponge, then went over the entire water area, new and old, with Gloss Medium. The final effect looks good to me.
     It is nice to have this scene restored. It doesn’t fit my layout’s geographical area very well, at least not as well as it did in the Pittsburgh version, but I have kept it anyway because I like the look, and it reminds viewers (and me) of SP’s many miles of seaside alignment in California’s Central Coast area. Now to add some bathers on the beach . . .
Tony Thompson

“Men in uniform” (railroading)

This title, “men in uniform,” refers not to uniforms such as conductors and brakemen on passenger trains wore, but the typical clothing of freight train crews, in my 1950s era. One sees it in many photos, but all too many times in model scenes, one doesn’t see it. Let me start with an example from the Bob’s Photo collection, located for me by Jerry Stewart, who also suggested it should be titled “men in uniform” (thanks, Jerry!). You can click on it to enlarge.

The location is readily identified; the cut is being shoved westward across the Los Angeles River toward LAUPT (possibly to the postal annex), on a rather foggy morning. The photo was taken from Mission Tower, and the train is on SP tracks, crossing the double track of the Santa Fe’s west bank line in the foreground. Unfortunately, the photographer is not identified.
     The two men atop the box car both wear fedoras, as was common in the late 1940s and into the 1950s for train crews. The man closest to the camera wears overalls and a denim jacket; the man behind him has on a plaid jacket which looks like wool. This is what Jerry Steward meant by referring to them as “in uniform.” These are the standard working clothes of the era.
     Note one important point. They are not wearing hard hats. Modelers of times like the 1950s often compromise by using scale figures with modern hard hats, but these were nonexistent in railroading at the time shown.
     Here is another example, with both caboose trainmen wearing overalls. The photo shows picking up orders on the fly at Burbank Junction (SP). It’s a Stanley Groff photo, which I obtained from the Rob Evans collection.

Here again, these are typical trainmen’s clothing, and the hats are a fedora and what appears to be an engineer’s cap in a solid color.
     Finally, one more photo (from Southern Pacific) of a trainman waving a highball with a lantern. In this case also, he is dressed in the common clothing of 1950s railroaders.

     The point? Your scale figures should wear clothing which matches the era. Some commercial figures are correct in this sense, but many are not, either because they are aimed at a later era, or because they represent European clothing. It’s not so true today, but 50 years ago, European and American clothing styles of working people were quite different, and many sets of scale figures are from European companies. Repainting incorrect figures, or choosing correctly dressed figures, is needed for a convincing historical appearance.
Tony Thompson

Model tank car placards – Microscale’s new decal

Recently I wrote a couple of posts about opportunities and methods to do tank car placards in model form. In particular, I described the (then forthcoming) Microscale set MC-5030, which provides placard frames (see: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/10/model-tank-car-placard-decals-update.html ). That set has now been issued and is available for sale, on line at Microscale as well as in local hobby shops.
     The final news on this is not entirely good. Although the artwork I showed in the post cited above was to be revised, in order to add a whole lot more black placard frames, in the final version there really are not all that many in black, as a fraction of the whole sheet. Here is the artwork Microscale shows:

This set is available for direct purchase at: http://www.microscale.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=MC-5030&Category_Code=NEWRLS&Product_Count=9 .
     There are 192 placard frames on this sheet, which, at four per car, means you can use these frames to do 48 cars. But only 24 of them are black, meaning only six cars can get black frames. If you are only going to add frames to a few of your tank cars which already have placards, this may be fine. But anyone who has a whole bunch of tank cars and (so far) no placard frames, is going to have to buy multiple sets. I guess the good news is that these are only $5.00 per set, not as steep as many recent Microscale sets.
     I should hasten to add that the foregoing grumbling applies only to transition-era modelers. If you model a more recent era, particularly post-1981, these frames will all be essentially useful, and can be used for highway truck Haz-Mat placards too.
     As I stated in previous posts, the ideal arrangement would be to have decals of placards with frames superimposed on them. Then only one decal need be applied to a model placard board. But pending such decals being available, the new Microscale MC-5030 set does permit one to add frames to plain placards.
Tony Thompson

Repairing the Ballard hill

My peninsula-shaped layout, the surviving part of my Pittsburgh, PA layout (see: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/03/survival-from-my-old-layout.html ) has a large hill at the outer end. This was intended to provide a reason for the tunnels through which the trackage makes its unprototypical return loop. Hiding the obvious return loops is good, and this hill also serves as a scene separator between the towns of Shumala (Jalama in Pittsburgh) and Ballard.
     An alternative to tunnels to hide the turnback loops could have been a “Bellinadrop.” Readers may be unfamiliar with that name. The feature, named for the late Jerry Bellina, is any kind of backdrop which prevents getting a view of both sides of the peninsula when standing at the end, whether you are running a train or are just an observer. To read more about this, you can consult the article by Paul Dolkos in the 2013 edition of Model Railroad Planning (Kalmbach). In my case, the large hill serves much the same purpose.
     I showed my fascia treatment of this feature in a previous post (you can see it at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/02/layout-fascia-my-approach.html ). A photo in that post shows well the narrow ocean beach at the base of the cliffs along the seashore. The overall hill size was chosen to be credible as a big-enough candidate to be tunneled (I am kind of uncomfortable with layouts which include tunnels under as little as ten feet of overburden.) Here is a look at about half of my hill.

This photo is of the EMD FT demonstrator units, from a photo feature in Railroad Model Craftsman years ago, in which these same brass diesels were shipped from city to city and photographed on many layouts, commemorating the original, national demonstrator tour of these FTs.
     When I moved the layout to California in 1994 (in a U-Haul truck), the peninsula end was one of the layout segments, and it was moved in its entirety. But I had to store it in the attic of my first house in Berkeley, and the hilltop was too high to pass through the attic access. The answer was simple: just cut off the top of the hill. It was all constructed of traditional hard-shell scenery, meaning plaster-soaked paper towels, so was easily sliced off. The sliced-off part was intended to be put back someday.
     Once the layout was moved to our new home in 2005, I got the major pieces set up and running. The truncated hill was still that way, often occasioning witty cracks from visitors about “California earthquake damage.” The last major segment to be installed was Ballard (see my description at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/09/ballard-2.html ).
     As soon as the Ballard track board was put in place, I  installed new track connections. Here is a view onto the Ballard section, looking southwestward (railroad east). The hillside and tunnel portal will cover this track right to the end of the newly added track, at about photo center. There is no fascia yet installed in this view.

An end view of the peninsula after addition of the fascia looks like this, viewing somewhat from the Shumala side, and showing the SP mainline tunnel. The top of the hill is visibly missing. A piece of screen wire can be seen along the ridgeline, temporarily in place, trying out an approach to rebuilding the hilltop.

     Walking around the end of the peninsula, the hill rises higher, and the fascia is correspondingly higher.

Here the hill remnants are not yet attached to the fascia. The view of the Ballard trackage, second photo above, was taken before this fascia was attached.
     But the hilltop is still gone, and from above Ballard, the view below, into the hill, can be obtained. You can picture the entire hilltop having been simply sliced off, in making the layout section fit where it needed to go (as I described above).

You can see the fascia of the foregoing photo curving around at left, and the tunnel portal is temporarily placed where the track enters Ballard. The tile-roof edge of the Zaca Mesa winery is at right foreground.
      The original hill construction utilized old window-screen wire, with conventional hardshell (plaster-soaked paper towels) on top of it, though not really embedded in it. The plan for reconstruction is to install another piece of screen wire in the gap, shown above, then add new hardshell. To the extent practical, I will also reconstruct what pieces remain of the old hilltop, supplemented with more hardshell and papier-maché to tie everything together. But I expect that most of the salvaged section of old hilltop will not be usable, and will simply be replaced.
     As that process goes forward, I will report on it in future posts. Neither hardshell scenery nor the fascia treatment are distinctive of themselves, but I thought the process of repairing this kind of layout structure might be of interest.
Tony Thompson

Placards for house cars — modeling

I posted some images of house car placards in my first post on this topic (you can see it at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/11/placards-for-house-cars-prototype.html ). In that post, I stated that I would try reducing the full-size prototype images to 1/87 of their size and printing them out, then seeing how they look on some freight cars. This post shows results on some of my models. You may note that all cars have chalk marks and route cards. (For more on those items, you may wish to view my post about them, which is at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/11/chalk-marks-and-route-cards.html .)
     I should begin by repeating that there have been commercial placards available from several sources. I like and have used the Jaeger cardstock placards, as well as the Sunshine decal placards, among others. This post is just to show my use of HO scale versions of the prototype placards I showed in my initial post on this topic.
     I put the “canned food” placard on an SP box car (a Sunshine model of SP Class B-50-13, built by Dennis Williams and lettered and weathered by me). On cars like this, with wood doors, there is no exact location for placards, but they were still placed onto doors. (You can click on the image to enlarge it.)

     In the early 1950s, my modeling era, paper of various kinds was coming into California from Canada in substantial quantities, so it seemed natural to place the “newsprint” placard on a Canadian box car, as you see here. This is a True Line Trains model, shown on my layout at Shumala.

     The third application I made was to use the “glass” placard, and I put it on a P&LE box car (the model is from an IMWX kit). It is seen on my layout in a local freight, crossing Nipomo Street in Ballard.

     I suppose it’s an obvious point, but use of these placards should correspond to cargoes in the cars, which in turn means creating appropriate waybills to go with the placard legends. This post isn’t about waybills, but I will probably come back to this point in a future post.
     What about when the car is empty, but the placard is glued onto the model? First of all, prototype crews rarely bothered to tear off placards during switching, so the placard might well remain on an empty car. But for me, there’s an even simpler answer. On my layout, since cars can only be seen from one side (no reversing loops), I can physically reverse the car after unloading, and there is no placard on the other side.
     These placards are an interesting addition to house cars, even if visitors do not trouble to try and read them. Should you have a lot of placards on your layout? Some situations like auto parts plants might have placards on most cars, but my impression is that such a situation is unusual. If you look at photos of trains or active yards, you see only a minority of house cars with placards like these. Still, you ought to have a few of them among your fleet, and they are quite easy to do.
Tony Thompson

Constructing Santa Rosalia – switch machines

As I’ve indicated in my previous post about the staging underneath Santa Rosalia, it is switched with twin-coil switch machines. (You can read that post at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/11/constructing-santa-rosalia-staging.html .) I have powered these (and all my present and future twin-coils) with a capacitor discharge unit. These give very positive action and can power entire ladders with a single button push, a capability I used with success on my layout in Pittsburgh.
     The particular hardware I used is from Tri-Delt Electronics. It is basically a very large capacitor, married to a 24 V transformer. The Tri-Delt instructions below show how simple the circuit is, to power switch machines.

Here is how the equipment looks, as installed under my layout near Ballard. I follow their advice and use a single wire, usually orange or red, to be the positive “switch machine common” to all machines. Then the other, negative half of the circuit, which I often make a black wire, is the control side, connecting to the switch machines themselves through push buttons, SPDT switches, etc.

     Shown below is the way I usually arrange my controls, with this set-up for each switch machine. I like the SPDT switch to indicate how the turnout is thrown. Setting that switch is followed by pushing the button located next to the switch, giving a decisive action. An operator approaching a turnout can check the panel to see if the SPDT indicates the routing he wants, and can double-check by pushing the button, even if the indication looks right.

     This is, of course, analogous to the way CTC machines are arranged: the routing or signaling is set up with levers, then everything is activated at once with a push button. In staging yards, of which I had several on my Pittsburgh layout, I had arranged a diode matrix for each, so that you could select the track you wanted with a rotary switch, then throw all the needed turnouts by pushing one button. The Tri-Delt capacitor can easily throw five twin-coil machines at once.
     I made a simple panel to control the switches for Santa Rosalia staging, using the method I’ve used before: paint a Masonite panel yellow, then use tape to lay out the desired track diagram, and overspray flat black. With that completed, and the holes drilled for the switches and buttons, it looked like this.

With this part complete, I proceeded to install switches and buttons, and wire everything. The last preparation step was to add labels, using the same procedure I used with the previous control panel I discussed (see it at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/08/electrical-wars-part-5.html ).
     I installed the panel on the Shumala side of the layout, from which mainline operations would normally be conducted. Additional pieces of Masonite fascia were applied to match adjoining layout areas. Here is how the completed installation looks. And by the way, everything worked as designed.

Note that the panel is recessed behind the plane of the general fascia. This avoids accidental switch or push-button activation (sometimes called “butt operating”).
     With this electrically-based work finished, the staging project is complete and I can proceed with construction of Santa Rosalia itself.
Tony Thompson

Placards, house cars, prototype – Part 2

My previous post on this topic brought some samples of house car placards from other modelers. (If you like, you can read that prior post at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/11/placards-for-house-cars-prototype.html .) Doug Harding and Stan Jones were kind enough to send me images of additional prototype placards from their collections, and I will show a few of them here.
     First is this intriguing placard for eggs, which I would assume was usually applied to refrigerator cars, not box cars, and has the visual interest of being diamond shaped rather than the usual rectangle. It’s from Doug Harding.

     Stan Jones sent what is presumably a temporary placard but could be an interesting addition for operations. It not only requests a reweigh of the car, but restencilling as well, and has the added interest of color. Like many of these placards, it was produced by a railroad (the Maine Central), though many prototype placards were produced by and applied by shippers.

     Next is another placard I would associate more with refrigerator cars than box cars, also from Doug Harding. Heaters were used in winter months to prevent perishables from getting too cold. Most refrigerator car owners produced such placards, intended to warn transients or inspectors from going into cars with operating heaters, which were tightly sealed and could build up carbon monoxide inside.

Doug also sent another intriguing placard, most useful for modelers of rural areas, and certainly a vivid color, indicating its priority.

Doug explained to me that corn, once dried, could expand to as much as double its volume if it got wet again, thereby bursting its container (including box cars), so the cargo had to be rushed to destination so it could be unloaded and dried. At that point, it was good for animal feed and little else. But priority was obviously important.
     Finally, Doug sent an Explosives placard from the M&StL, identical to the one shown in my post on historical hazardous placards (here’s a link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/03/tank-car-placards-prototype.html ), but a useful reminder that explosives were likely to be shipped in box cars. A model box car with this placard is entirely suitable.

     I appreciate the generosity of these modelers in sharing some additional placards. Note the variety of color, shape, and typefaces on these examples. If you want to make up some of your own placards for model use, these will give you some ideas.
Tony Thompson