Furniture and Carriage Cars

As just about everyone knows, the scope of a project has a way of growing. The one I just finished started after I completed the Henderson Carriage factory at Stockton (see my post here). I wanted a carriage car or two to service the factory. As you can see, the project did grow significantly.
     My first choice was the A. A. Cooper car shown above. I liked the billboard look of the car. It was also 40 feet long, a typical size for carriage and furniture cars of the period. This was due to the fact that the loads they carried were relatively light for the volume so they could build larger cars without increasing the stress on the timbers and trucks. Decals were by Art Griffin.
   

 My second car was to be a Southern Pacific furniture and buggy car, also a 40-footer, and one for which I had original drawings. It was the car which the SP used to represent the maximum height and width for travel over Donner Pass. It was large enough that the bolsters were lowered to keep the total height down. Notice how the body sort of nestled over the trucks similar to the apearance of some narrow gauge cars. I had the decal set for the Cooper car, some SP heralds left over from another project and the rest was not difficult to make up. While I was rummaging through my decal drawer, I found a few more decals and thought I might as well build up some of them, all of which were larger cars. This led to the following cars.

     The Abernathy Furniture Company was a Kansas City concern whose building still exists in the West Bottoms area of the city. According to some documents I have, these cars made it out to California in the 1890s so it was appropriate for use on the S&C. Decals for this car were also made by Art Griffin.
   

     The Santa Fe cars also appeared in California and, since several of my operators are Santa Fe fans, I decided to include it. It rode on Thielsen swing-motion trucks. More Griffin decals.

     

Kentucky Refining was a surprise to me when I found it in a record of cars appearing on the Southern Pacific. It was a 52-foot long behemoth (for the day) and delivered all sorts of oil, mostly for cooking purposes. The two hatches in the roof presumably were for loading tanks located inside the car. Another great decal set by Art Griffin.
   

The Samuel Cupples car was 50 feet long and another car which was extra high. Here was another manufacturer who used all the "billboard" space he could. I guess he thought bigger was better. More of Art Griffin's work.
   

The C. C. Comstock car was one which has intrigued me ever since I saw a photo in poor condition. Mr. Comstock was again one of those who liked advertising and apparently multi-colored paint jobs and fancy lettering. Applying the decals was somewhat exacting but they came out to my satisfaction which is what matters.
   

While going through this, I found another large car, the Menasha Woodenware 50-foot long car described as the tallest freight car built (of the period anyway). It was a kit made by Main Line Models and one I had forgotten I had. Since it fit with the theme of large car construction, I assembled it as well. Interestingly enough, one of these cars was restored or reconstructed and donated to the National Railroad Museum so you can visit it if you like. These cars, too, made it out to California.
     While a 50-foot car seems like no great shakes in the context of modern railroading, these "monsters" as they were sometimes called gave rise to editorials questioning the wisdom of such large cars on the railroads. To give an idea of what they were talking about, take a look at the photo below comparing a standard 34-foot car to the Menasha car. There was a lot of difference, especially in high winds. And, yes, there were even larger 60- and 70-foot wood cars tried out before the car builders wisely changed to steel construction.

Windmills and a Little Whimsy

The prototype Davis windmill wheel and vane on display at the San Joaquin County Historical Society at Micke Grove Park.

The Improved Davis Windmill.

Stockton, at least in my time period, was known as "The City of Windmills." Windmills were needed since Stockton was on a flat plain. With no elevated spots nearby, there could be no gravity flow of water, and before vast municipal water companies, the only way to get water was to pump for it. Hence
the mills were erected in almost every backyard, all grinding and squeaking away providing background noise for the city's business. Stockton may also have been known as the Windmill City because there were at least two manufacturers located in town: R. F. Wilson and Relief Windmill.
     The R. F. Wilson company had its plant down by the Stockton Channel not too far from where the rails of the Stockton & Copperopolis ran. While the prototype railroad did not directly service the plant, my S&C does so I had to have some of the Davis style windmills the company made. Fortunately for me, there are numerous pictures showing the popularity of the Davis mill and there is an real windmill wheel and vane assembly in the San Joaquin County Historical Society which I could measure and copy.

The Improved Davis Windmill as rendered in Sketchup.

   
     Building a windmill wheel is kind of tricky. All of the parts are small and must be aligned perfectly for it to look right. I decided to try to 3D print mine. It was my first project and went ahead without too many mistakes and starting-overs. I had it printed, made some decals and had a genuine [model] Davis windmill. Now I've got to print a few more to scatter around the landscape.

   

While building some other boxcars (more about these in a later post), I came across a couple of old items. One of these was a decal set I had made several years back for a Central Valley Superior Detritus car. Back in the 1950s, when Central Valley was building older railroad car kits, George Hook, CV's owner, made a few special kits up for his friends. One of these was for the imaginary Superior Detritus company advertising such things as diacoustic infusoria, frangible ceramics and so on. I have always liked the car so I built a standard CV boxcar and lettered it for the SD Company.

The original cardboard sides and the Central Valley car with the new decals applied.

     The other item was a set of cardboard sides for a Red Ball boxcar. Before high quality decals, screen-printed cardboard sides were very popular and really didn't look too bad. The Red Ball sides advertised the products the Red Ball company made in the style of the nineteenth century. Most of the Red Ball parts (no sides, though) are still being offered through Bitter Creek Models. I did not want to use the printed sides so I scanned them and made up artwork for a decal side which I used.
     These two cars represent the whimsy alluded to in this post's title. There were never any prototype cars such as these run on America's railroads but I enjoyed building them and remembering when I first saw the SDC car at age 12 and the Red Ball car a bit later. After all, as Model Railroader used to say (and sometimes still does), Model Railroading is Fun.