Saturday, March 16, 2024

Repainting a GS-4 tender

I have an all-black Broadway Limited HO scale model of a Southern Pacific 4-8-4 locomotive, Class GS-4. That is how these engines were painted once the red and orange Daylight paint scheme began to be removed in the early 1950s. But as I received it, the model is lettered in the pre-1946 lettering scheme, with the road name as “Southern Pacific Lines” in relatively small lettering (9 inches tall) and with a small, lower number on the back of the tender. 

Here is a view of one such prototype GS-4 locomotive, taken at Glendale on November 24, 1943. Locomotive 4431 is at the head end of No. 71, the “Coast Mail” and has been repainted black under wartime conditions (Fred A. Stindt photo, courtesy Bob Church). It’s interesting that the tender lettering is located high on the car side, where it had been in the Daylight scheme.

There are not many good photos of the backs of tenders, but the nearly identical SP tender class applied to the GS-6 locomotives were well photographed  by Guy L. Dunscomb at Oakland in March of 1947 (Arnold Menke collection). The small road number beneath the back-up light is evident.

The Broadway Limited model has these characteristics, as you can see below. But for my operating year of 1953, I definitely have to re-letter the tender. Few SP locomotives retained the pre-1946 lettering past the summer of 1947. The problem now is to research what new lettering to apply.

As I think most SP enthusiasts know, in 1946 SP replaced the scheme just shown with a dramatic increase in size of tender lettering (to 20 inches in height) and discontinued the word “Lines.” Details of the 1946 paint and lettering are contained in the Southern Pacific Painting and Lettering Guide, “Locomotives and Passenger Cars,” revised edition (J.A. Cauthen and J.R. Signor, SPH&TS, Upland, CA, 2019). Views of post-1946 locomotives in black paint are numerous, usually including tenders, as shown below (Bob Church collection).

Tender end numbers were enlarged also, and relocated above the back-up light. But it’s surprisingly hard to find an end photo of a black GS-4 tender in post-1946 lettering. Even Arnold Menke’s outstanding chapter on tenders in Bob Church’s Daylight engine book doesn’t have one (Robert J. Church, Southern Pacific Daylight Locomotives, Signature Press, Berkeley and Wilton, CA, 2004). 

But one of my favorite Don Sims photos does capture exactly that. Here we see GS-4 4448 at Bakersfield, just cut off from the San Joaquin Daylight after its run eastward down the valley. A set of F7 freight diesels will take the train over the Tehachapi. The end lettering is very clear.

This is how I will be re-lettering my GS-4 tender, as I will show in a future post.

Tony Thompson

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

REA express reefers, Part 2

In the first post on this topic, I briefly summarized the history of the Railway Express Agency or REA, and showed examples of some of the cars in their fleet, emphasizing the era that I model, 1953. I also showed a table of the REA pool participants, including Pacific Fruit Express. You can view that post at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/03/express-reefers-from-rea.html .

I now want to turn to models of some of these cars, and a description of how I are use these cars in operating my layout. When the layout is operated, the calendar day involved, say May 15, is treated as that day in 1953, and appropriate crops for that day are moved from the six packing houses on the layout whether or not express cars are involved. The most prominent use of those cars is late winter and early spring, when the California strawberry crop first comes in, but these cars also come into use with the first harvest of any previously unavailable crop.

So when a visitor sees a steel car, REX 6220 (an Atlas model), alongside the Guadalupe Fruit Company loading dock in my layout town of Ballard, they can be sure some new crop is being shipped. This car is from the 1947–48 order of 500 cars, REX 6100–6599. In the previous post (see link in first paragraph, above), there is a photo of a prototype car, REX 6164, from this group.

Likewise, seeing an REX car at the icing dock in my town of Ballard, signifies the same thing about crops. as with REX 1227 in the photo below (a Walthers model), though since Guadalupe Fruit has no pre-cooling capability, this car might be receiving a pre-icing, to fill the ice bunkers prior to loading, or an initial icing, filling the bunkers to the top on a departing loaded car.

But of course, looking at the table of the REA pool in the preceding post (see link in first paragraph, above), express reefers of other ownership are certainly possible, particularly PFE express cars. I’ve described those cars in a previous post (see it at:  https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/01/pfe-express-refrigerators.html ). 

Another prominent member of the REA pool was Great Northern, actually contributing more cars to the REA pool in 1953 than PFE. As it happens, I have an ancient Ambroid kit-built version of a GN wood-sheathed car. Here it’s shown being readied for pickup by a passenger extra on my layout at Shumala.

And of course there might also be express cars of any other railroad, whether or not in the REA pool list, including New York Central. I inherited a nice NYC express reefer, NYC 5943, from Richard Hendrickson (brass, New Jersey International), as you see here, with its distinctive deep side sills. In 1953, NYC had 272 of its original 275 cars like this still in service, numbered NYC 5800–6074.

Although I don’t often load express reefers at the packing houses on my layout, except at those short stretches of harvest season(s) for which they are appropriate, they do show up in mainline passenger trains. Among other things, they carried dairy products and fresh flowers along SP’s Coast Route throughout much of the calendar year. So though PFE is the likeliest reporting mark to show up on an express reefer on my layout, REA and other express cars certainly show up too.

Tony Thompson

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Rescuing an Athearn metal tank car

Some years ago at a swap meet, I happened to spot a derelict Athearn metal tank car, with a badly broken underframe. But it looked fairly good in the surviving parts, and it was a Southern Pacific lettering scheme. I knew that this Athearn model had been designed exactly from the SP prototype cars, and I was intrigued with the challenge, so after some hesitation, I bought it (the seller, seeing me hesitate, said “You can have it for four bucks”). 

Here are a couple of views of the car as I received it. First, a top view, showing the overall model, and the two broken-off ends of the underframe. This reveals a weakness in this Athearn kit design: the coupler boxes are only attached to the rest of the car by the running boards, which in this case have broken. Note the nice two-rung sill steps at each corner. These should be salvaged and re-used.

The modeler who had done the assembly to this point had done a good job, including painting the tank ends and dome the correct Colonial Yellow color (available in model form; see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/10/modeling-sp-structure-colors.html ), but the dome walks and tank bands should have been this color too, as should the bottom course of the tank (a separate, unpainted part in the Athearn kit). Here is a view from below.

As it happens, I had earlier acquired a copy of the original Athearn instructions for assembly of this model, so could readily see how to proceed in repairing and/or rebuilding it. These instructions are shown below, dated 1950. You can click on the image to enlarge it, if it’s hard to read.

In addition, I inherited from Richard Hendrickson a whole box of Athearn metal tank car underframe parts, most of them for the 10,000-gallon car that Athearn in those days called a “Shorty,” but also a few of the full-size frames for the SP cars. Shown below are a few of these parts. At top are the two cast metal bolster-tank saddle parts, and between them, a sheet-metal channel for the center sill. The bolsters slide onto this sill. Below that is a one-piece running board-end sill-coupler box casting, and below it, a center anchor casting at left, and a pair of cross-ties at right. Below that is an assembled but badly damaged complete underframe, showing the weakness of the cast running-board part.

The next challenge was to decide how to “rescue” this model, or whether that was even possible. Since I had a full set of underframe parts, I could just replace the broken underframe of the model that came to me. But if you consult the assembly directions above, Step 3, you will see that the tank assembly process includes screwing the tank end shells to the underframe. I didn’t really want to disassemble the entire model, then have to repeat that.

A second possibility was to re-attach the broken-off underframe parts, and replace any missing segments. Since these would be butt joints, they wouldn’t come close to being strong enough. But I could overlay the entire running board with thin sheet brass (K&S Engineering offers 0.005-inch sheet, item #250), glued down with canopy glue. Certainly it would be strong enough in tension., when pulled by the couplers in a train.

But other problems with the brittleness of the old, broken underframe led me to choose replacing just the running board-end sill-coupler box part (second from the top in the view above). But since the bolster-saddle parts were riveted to the running board, the replacement running board needs to be divided to fit around the bolsters. The cuts could then by spliced by that sheet brass, glued underneath.

I decided to pursue the latter procedure, and preparatory to doing so, removed all of the remnants of the original running-board-end sill-coupler box parts. This also had the advantage of fully exposing the tank’s bottom sheet, which should be the body color, Colonial Yellow.

It has been interesting to examine one of these Athearn metal tank cars, along with its kit directions, and understand how they were made, as well as discovering how I could “rescue” this model. I will pursue re-assembly and painting in a future post.

Tony Thompson

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Express reefers from REA

The Railway Express Agency, or REA, was an outgrowth of a number of prior express companies, dating back to the 19th century’s days of stagecoaches and intercity steamers on the east coast, with express companies undertaking to deliver packages and parcels (for a fee) to certain destinations. These gradually grew into a number of much larger companies, among them Wells Fargo and American Express, surviving today in related business areas. 

An adequate history of REA is provided by Vic Roseman’s book, Railway Express (Rocky Mountain Publishing, Denver, 1992). Considerably more coverage of rolling stock, though not of corporate history, is available in Pat Wider’s excellent contribution to Railway Prototype Cyclopedia (Volume 7, 2002), which is entitled “BR and BS Express Refrigerator Cars.” I will summarize the background, as I have done previously (see, for example, my post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/01/express-refrigerator-cars.html ).

During World War I, when the U.S. government took over railroad operation under the U.S. Railroad Administration or USRA, a simplification was accomplished by compelling the merger of railroad-owed express companies and the four major private companies at the time, Adams Express, Wells Fargo, American Express, and Southern Express, into a single company, American Railway Express (ARE). After the end of the USRA, it was expected that the ARE would be disbanded and the business returned to the prior companies; but this proved impractical, and the ICC approved continued operation of ARE.

But both the ICC and Congress wanted this business to be operated by the railroads, not a private company, and accordingly in 1929 a new corporation was formed, owned by 86 of the largest railroads, and named Railway Express Agency. Offices, employees and rolling stock of ARE were all merged into REA. The right to operate all express services and related services was held by REA, and all revenues were distributed to the owning railroads.

In addition to ARE-owned rolling stock, REA also obtained the use of 665 express reefers that had been owned and operated by General American Transportation Company as a lease fleet. These were wood-sheathed cars originally built by GATC. An example is below, REX 1227, photographed at Oakland, California on February 16, 1952 by Wilber C. Whittaker. 

After World War II, REA realized it owned a great many cars of wood construction that were over 25 years old. In 1947–48, they went to American Car & Foundry for 500 new, all-steel cars, nicknamed the “100-mph cars.” Their original rather flashy aluminum, green and red-banded sides soon proved too prone to dirt accumulation, and were repainted dark green, like the car in this view (New Haven, Connecticut, February 1954, Bob’s Photo collection). The rippling of the welded sides is evident.

With regard to express refrigerator cars, nearly all railroads with significant ownership of such cars voluntarily provided them to an REA pool. Distribution and movement of the cars was under REA direction. That meant that if you were a shipper and wanted an express reefer, you called REA, not your local railroad; but nearly all railroad station agents were also REA agents, so in reality you called the person you always called for an empty car, and he or she put on a different hat to take your order.

When REA cars were loaded, the local agent acted as the car clerk to apply any placards that were needed. I will show two examples, loaned to me by Michael Litant from his collection. Both are 5.5 x 8.5 inches in size. The first, below, was applied to REX 7465 in Santa Maria, California (very near the location I model on my layout) on June 17, 1967. The stamp at lower left is for salt additions, and is marked as 1 percent salt for this cargo, routed on the Santa Maria Valley to the SP at Guadalupe, and then by “best route” to Boston. Unfortunately the cargo is not shown on this placard design.

Here is a second example, virtually identical in format, this one applied at Yakima, Washington to REX 7499, on June 17, 1966, and is shown as departing Yakima on Northern Pacific eastward train no. 2, The Mainstreeter, which often carried substantial head-end traffic.

Both these placards were placed on cars in the 1957-built car group REX 7400–7899, 54-foot riveted cars with 6-foot sliding doors and BX trucks. Below is a photo taken at Dallas, Texas by Dick Kuelbs in August 1961, showing REX 7833.

To return to the topic of the pool, shown below is a listing of the REA express reefer pool roster in 1953. It is Table 5-4 from the PFE book. Note that of the 2500 cars in the pool, over 1600 of them had REX reporting marks. This is well over half of the pool. Express cars of other ownership sometimes came into REA use also.

It is known that the pool arrangements were that REA would only be responsible for minor repairs. Anything consequential was the responsibility of the car owner. Thus although the REA pool operated nationwide, and indeed an express reefer of any ownership might travel anywhere, the majority of each owner’s cars were kept in more or less the owner’s geographical area to facilitate maintenance.

The modeling consequence of this is that whatever area you model, local railroad express cars would predominate, along with REX cars, which could go anywhere (and the table above shows how they numerically dominated the pool). On my layout, express cars are operated in just this way. I will return to the modeling and operating uses of these cars in a future post.

Tony Thompson

Monday, March 4, 2024

Understanding bridges

Some years ago, I co-authored with my late friend Larry Kline an article about prototype railroad bridges: how they work, how the prototypes evolved, and how one may choose a bridge on model layouts. Here’s a citation: Larry E. Kline and Anthony W. Thompson, “The Evolution of American Railroad Bridges, 1830–1994,” Symposium on Railroad History, Volume 3, A.C. Kalmbach Memorial Library, National Model Railroad Association, Chattanooga, TN, 1994.

My purpose in the present post is to introduce the topic by suggesting a simple way of understanding what a bridge does, and what affects its performance. I will begin with an analogy the most people will understand from experience. Consider  a 1 x 10-inch board, say ten feet long. It can readily be imagined that if it is laid flat, that is, the wide side horizontal, and supported only at the extreme ends, it would be quite springy and flexible if an adult tried to walk its length. 

But now imagine it set up on edge, so that the wide side is vertical, only end-supported, and braced so that it is maintained vertical. Stepping onto it (a delicate balance problem, to be sure) would reveal that in this orientation, it’s very stiff; even a heavy man would scarcely cause any deflection. Yet it’s the same wooden plank.

The reason for this major dependence on thickness, or if you will, depth of the beam, is expressed in the formula for stiffness of a beam. I won’t address the math, except to point out that the stiffness varies as the cube of the thickness, that is, thickness to the third power. That 1 x 10 on edge is a thousand times stiffer than the same plank lying flat. Note that this is not a material property of the plank, but depends on orientation only.

Bridges essentially follow this fact in most bridge designs; the key is the thickness of the “plank,” with everything else much less important. Of course, the stiffness of the material itself matters; wood is hardly one-thousandth as stiff per unit size as is steel. But for any given material, it is all about thickness or depth.

In essence, a bridge is a beam across a gap in the terrain. And in fact, very short bridges over culverts or tiny creeks can be simple wood beams under the track. Longer bridges of that kind require deeper and deeper beams, but of course it is often more practical, rather than increase the beam size, to simply subdivide the gap. Trestle bents at suitable intervals permit using short-span beams under track, from bent to bent.

(The photo is by J.R. Knoll on the Apache Railway south of Holbrook, Arizona, my collection.)

Of course, the trestle bents need not be as short as shown above; the identical principle is illustrated with far taller trestle bridges, still with wood beams under the track, as shown in this famous Richard Steinheimer photo on the San Diego & Arizona Eastern, with a Baldwin road-switcher leading a mixed freight across Goat Canyon trestle in Carriso Gorge in 1952. (used with permission, DeGolyer Library)

And steel is a far more suitable material for substantial loads than wood. The familiar girder bridge, with girders beneath the rails or alongside them, uses this principal of a beam under or alongside the rails, of course with sturdy crossbeams connecting the side girders.

These bridges, though simple in appearance, do in fact have very specific design characteristics. Of course, the most basic is the depth of the girder, relative to its length. This again references the third-power dependence of girder stiffness on depth, so naturally the depth will increase together with length. 

There is extensive prototype information on this topic in Paul Mallery’s outstanding book, Bridge and Trestle Handbook, first published by Simmons-Boardman in 1958. I have the second or revised edition, published in 1976 by Boynton and Associates.  For the present subject, Chapter 9 on plate-girder bridges is applicable. It contains a table of typical length and depth of girders, Figure 2 in this chapter, which appear to range between 7 and 9 times longer than they are deep, in other words, a length-to-depth ratio between 7:1 and 9:1. 

The photo below shows a deck girder bridge in the process of construction, and its length to depth ratio is indeed about 8:1. This is the proportion identified in Mallery’s book, as just mentioned. This is the Butte Slough bridge of the Sacramento Northern, east of Colusa, California, on November 1, 1912 (Harre DeMoro collection, courtesy Kristin DeMoro). 

I realized that this same topic was important when looking at a bridge on my layout, originally built very simply by just cutting down the Atlas commercial girder bridge to the appropriate length to span the gap on my layout. But as soon as I looked at prototype bridge photos, I could see the difference: the proportions of my short bridge were way off. Once I recognized that, I replaced the bridge with one of the correct proportions, following Mallery’s information. I described that project in a trio of posts. Here are links:

https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-new-sp-bridge-for-shumala.html

http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-new-sp-bridge-for-shumala-part-2.html

https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-new-sp-bridge-for-shumala-part-3.html

This concludes what I want to say about simple bridges. But there are more complex designs, particularly the widely-used truss bridge, and I will turn to bridges of that type in a future post.

Tony Thompson

Friday, March 1, 2024

A new vinegar tank car

Vinegar tank cars, made from wood, were unusual, but not rare, cars in prototype service. Vinegar is in essence mild acetic acid, and corrosive; a steel tank car would require a lining, while wood seemed to stand up to vinegar all right. I have long wanted one, having seen a photo of one being repaired at Southern Pacific’s Sacramento General Shops.

Below is a photo from the internet of a preserved car of this type, at the John Street Roundhouse in Toronto. You can readily see many details of construction. Note that there are a substantial number of circumferential rods, connected with cast clamping devices, holding the tank staves together, along with tank hold-downs that are flat strapping, and that comes down to the side sill. The heavy end bracing is also evident.

Sunshine Models, many years ago, produced a kit for such a car. Their Prototype Data Sheet or PDS #60 for these cars showed a good prototype photo, shown below with credit. This is a car owned by Standard Brands Inc., thus the reporting marks, SBIX.

The Sunshine kit was infamous for its complexity and tedious assembly, not to mention the challenge of getting all those rods to look right, with somewhat even but not exactly even spacing, lying flat on the tank.

One of the best Sunshine kit assemblies that I know of, was built by Lester Breuer; he described the process in his blog (you can read it, and appreciate the assembly difficulties, here: http://mnrailroadcab100.blogspot.com/2020/09/vinegar-tank-car-sbix-1641.html ). But it is inevitable that some parts are oversize and it is difficult to avoid glue getting onto the tank. I’m not criticizing Lester here; practically every completed versions of this kit that I have seen is rather clunky compared with this.

For these reasons, I had shied away from buying and building the Sunshine kit. But there have been brass vinegar cars too, notably a Heinz car in brass from Overland Models. Unfortunately this is a quite different-looking car than the Standard Brands car shown in the uppermost photo of the present post. Here’s a representative photo of a Heinz car (Henry Ford Museum collection), dated 1915, and you can compare it to the prototype photo above:

Accordingly, I was really thrilled to hear that North Bank Line was going to import brass models of the Standard Brands car in brass, and I signed up to receive one. These models have just been delivered, and I am delighted with mine (as far as I know, they were all sold out on arrival, though some may be available at dealers; for example, https://resourcedrails.com/products/copy-of-ho-new-brass-nbl-north-bank-line-various-roads-sbix-1605-standard-brand-vinegar-car ). Here’s an overall view of the model, and you can readily see the realistically small rods around the tank:

The lettering, often red in the 1950s for these cars, is very nicely rendered on this model, as are all the details, and here again, you can admire the tank construction; Kadee couplers and Tahoe Model Works trucks provided (thankfully, no “roll like sleds” brass trucks).

And I have to mention the nice end detailing, including crisp lettering. It may seem unusual that the gallons capacity of the car is not lettered on the end, but that is true also in the prototype photo I have. We can of course look it up in the 1955 Freight Tariff 300-H, “Showing Capacities of Tank Cars,” and we find that car SBIX 1641 had a capacity of 7965 gallons, very similar to all the 97 cars shown in this tariff entry without expansion domes, as is this car.

I look forward to lightly weathering this model and putting it into service on my layout. And congratulations to North Bank Line for an excellent product!

Tony Thompson

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Shake ’n’ Take Seaboard box car, Conclusion

The Seaboard box car which was the 2020 “Shake ’n’ Take” project at the Cocoa Beach Prototype Rails meeting that year, a model project designed and presented by Steve Hile, is being built in this series of posts. For prototype photos of the car class being modeled, see the first post in the series (it can be found at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-2022-shake-n-take-seaboard-box-car.html ). 

The only major deviation from the project instructions was that I did not correct the side panel spacing to the right of the doors, using the Archer rivets provided with the project. I have done this on other models and will have to confess it is pretty hard to see on a completed model. I did remove the second rivet row at each panel seam, as mentioned before.

At the end of the previous post, describing construction (at least the steps where I differed from the very clear Steve Hile written directions), I was ready to paint the model and the yet-to-be installed running board (that post can be viewed at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/02/shake-n-take-seaboard-box-car-part-2.html ). As mentioned there, I chose Tamiya “Red Brown,” color #TS-1, for this model. This fits Steve’s comment that the Seaboard cars were a color “on the brown side of boxcar red.”  

I should mention that there are two things not yet installed on the body as you see it, Both were held back so that paint would cover areas underneath where these parts would go. One is, of course, the running board, very evidently absent in the photo above. 

The other thing missing is the replacement levers for the Camel roller-lift mechanisms on the car doors. These were made from short lengths of scale 1 x 2-inch styrene strip, pre-painted, and installed with canopy glue, as shown below at right. The original Bowser door is at left. You can compare the model, below, with the prototype photos (see link in first paragraph, above).

The running board was cut apart, as mentioned above, and the center part installed first. The photo below shows the roof “indent,” nearest the camera,  which accepts the lateral running board. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.)

I then installed the lateral boards to fit, using canopy glue again. With all modeling and paint completed, I could turn to lettering, using the very nice decals provided for the project by National Scale Car. I chose to use the original all-white Seaboard emblem, since I have a bunch of Seaboard cars with the red “Heart of the South” emblems. 

Here is the model, fully lettered and awaiting weathering. You may note that I added a route card from the very nice decal set of such cards from Owl Mountain Models, their set 1220 (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/12/route-cards-part-30-modeling.html ).

My usual weathering method, with acrylic washes, was applied to this model (for full description and examples, see the “Reference pages” link at the upper right of this post). I attempted to make the roof dirtier than the sides, as is often observed in the prototype, and then added a protective coat of clear flat (I prefer Tamiya’s flat, TS-80, nowadays). Then of course I added some chalk marks with Prismacolor pencils to complete the project.

This was an interesting Shake ’n’ Take project and I enjoyed doing it. I am also pleased to have one of these distinctive Seaboard cars in my fleet. Thanks to Steve Hile for his work on getting this together. Greg Martin would have been pleased.

Tony Thompson