Horseless Carriages Invade Burnett's

Two Locomobiles on the main street of Burneett's. The green and blue colors, among others, were factory options. I picked those since they matched the color of my Locomobile and that of a friend's.

"According to the Oakdale Leader, two "horseless carriages" were spotted traveling through Burnett's this week. Both were powered by steam and driven by persons who otherwise appeared normal. The vehicles sped through town traveling at least 15 miles per hour and were last seen on the Knight's Ferry Road east of Oakdale."
   

Powered by steam, the boiler of these cars is under the seat along with the engine. The rear of the
car contains the water tank. You can see the tufted upholstery on the left-hand car.

That's the history record. The actuality is the completion of two 1900-era Locomobile steam cars. Once the most popular car in America, the Locomobile company switched to gasoline cars in 1902 as did almost everybody else. Driving an antique steam car is somewhat of a thrill. Even though the speed is not that high (25-30 mph), you feel like you're speeding down the street while sitting on a card table. How do I know? I have a 1901 Style 02 Locomobile in my garage which I restored back in the 1990s. Ever since then, I wanted to make a model of one for the railroad. Yes, it is slightly anachronistic but I had fun building them.
     The bodies of the two cars were made using 3D printing. I worked up a drawing in Sketchup and then sent it to Shapeways to do the actual printing. There are three parts: the body, the chassis and the tires. When I received the parts from Shapeways, I still had to fabricate springs, the tiller and other small parts. Photo-etching enabled me to produce the wheel spokes which fit into a groove in the tires.
   

On the workbench before being placed on the railroad.

  Although all this may sound somewhat high-tech, each part is actually not too bad. Sketchup is a free program which can be downloaded. It takes a bit to figure out just how to get what you want but there is plenty of documentation. The photo-etching was done with the Micro-Mark etching kit in a sink in the bathroom. Again, not very difficult. Seeing the parts you working with may be another story. I recommend the Optivisor which I have used for years. If you can see it, you can work with it!
     Upholstering the car was little  more difficult. The prototype used leather in a tufted pattern. Not having any wish to actually use fabric, I substituted a piece of styrene and scribed it where the folds would fall. A small drill was used at each intersection to make a small dimple which would represented the buttons.

The author's 1901 Locomobile. Note that the tiller is now on the side of the car rather than the center.
This was an improvement in 1901 as was the ability of the brakes to work when going backward.

      Just a bit more history of the car and the railroad. The first car into Yosemite was a Locomobile in 1900. In 1901, two Locomobiles drove from Stockton to Yosemite. There was a nice article in the August 1902 Overland Monthly about their adventures with photographs. I found it a nice read and it is available on line.

Another Town Finished and a Long Caboose

An overview of Burnett's with the corral, general store and warehouses.

The scenicking around Burnett's is pretty much complete now. There are still some vehicles and figures which need to be added but I'm happy with how things turned out. The Gilmer & Martin Warehouse is for grain and is a big shipper for the railroad while the Golden State Box Company turns out crates for the area's fruit and produce packaging industry.
 

The Gilmer & Martin warehouse is to the left while the depot and storage room
are at the right.

The G&M building is scratchbuilt based on plans found in SP station plats plus some insurance diagrams (no photos found yet). The GS Box building is a Walthers shed to which I added a platform and did some weathering so it would like a little unkempt. The interesting part of the area is that it was not an agency station but it had both a depot building and a storage facility. These are modeled full size. In 1871, the depot building was a saloon but, by 1895, it was a depot so I modeled an enclosed waiting room. The other building was called a barn or just storage. Again, no photos of either so I put together a sort of baggage/storage building and painted it the railroad's color scheme.
 

Looking down the county road into the crossroads of Burnett's shows the general store plus the grain warehouse.

The stock pens were also there so I used a Walthers stockyard kit to make these. Some day, I'm going to have to build up some stock cars. Ziegenhorn's General Merchandise stores rounds out the crossroads area. I may yet add a local blacksmith shop but I need to do some other things first.
   

The S&C's Long Caboose could seat around 32 people plus the train crew so it could take a load off a regular passenger train.

While waiting for things to dry, I started a project I had been looking forward to: a Central Pacific Long Caboose. While some folks would call it a drovers' caboose, the CP just labeled it a "long caboose" so that is what the S&C will call it as well. It was obviously designed to carry a few passengers so I may have to convert one of my trains into a mixed. Drawings show the car as being 52 feet long over the end beams. My car was scratchbuilt using styrene with Grandt Line windows. The trucks were an odd size (6-ft. wheelbase) but I found just what I needed on the Shapeways site.
   What's next? Well, Burnett's was a flag stop but just exactly how did a prospective passenger flag a train? It turns out that several companies made small signals just for this purpose and that will be my next project.
 

A Small Plaster Store

The store in its approximate location at Burnett's. The Crown Mills sign was taken from the side of another store in Fillmore, California.

The last few days I've been working on a C. C. Crow kit which I had picked up many years ago at a swap meet. It appealed to me because I distinctly remember the prototype which inspired the kit. It was an 1850s building located in Shingle Springs, California. I had been by it many times and had photographed in the 1980s. The Crow kit is not an exact replica as he admits patterning the kit by memory but it's pretty close.
 

I had no names of actual businesses in Burnett's so I named the store after a friend of mine who is an excellent modeler.

It is a plaster kit which is easy to work with but there is a chance of the seams showing in the stone work. I used heavily thinned colors to stain the walls after sealing them with clear spray. After the assembly, I added some signs and posters to advertise some of products sold by this small country store. The posters were found on the internet and just printed on photo paper which gives a slight glossy finish which hopefully looks like porcelain.
   The cigar store Indian in the photo was from a now-forgotten line of figures while the scale is the one discussed in my last post (http://sandcrr.blogspot.com/2015/04/a-weighty-matter.html). Since then I found that the kit was missing the legend above the dial advertising your "Exact Weight - One Cent." I added that and sent a photo to the manufacturer who agreed to add the decal to his kit.
 

The Shingle Springs building in the 1980s.

The shop doors and second story door was also an addition made by cutting down some Grandt Line doors.
   The only disappointment was when I learned that the prototype had been torn down a few years ago. It's interesting that there is always enough money to bulldoze a building and cart off the stone but never enough money to repair it.

Burnett's Station

A station plat book maintained by the railroad's superintendent supplied the details above.

On the north side of the Stanislaus River lies the small community of Burnett's. During the era of my S&C Railroad, there was a siding with a grain warehouse and a corral. The main wagon road to Oakdale crossed the tracks here heading upstream to the county bridge. Later on, when the wheat farms were being broken down into smaller ranches for produce and fruit, there was reportedly a small factory for making the crates used in the field.

 

The Dakin map shows sizes and building construction.

 The earliest record of the arrangement of buildings appears in a notebook of station plats maintained in the 1874-1888 period. I copied the information and developed my own sketch for modeling purposes. Later on, I discovered the Dakin maps showing several of the warehouses along the S&C. The Burnett's map show additional building details which will aid in its construction. 

  My model of Burnett's will include both the grain warehouse and the crate/box factory along with the corral. There was no agent at Burnett's but the drawings show some sort of waiting shelter along with a small building for freight. The absence of photos requires me to freelance everything but all will be in accordance with similar buildings.

 

The Golden State Box Company. The ground around the building will obviously have to be reworked to properly settle the building. Peeling paint and fading signs show that regular maintenance is not a priority with the proprietors.

 My first structure is the box factory. I had a Walthers "Shed on Piles" which seemed to be about right. I wanted the factory to be an older building, possibly a former grain warehouse, which was cheaply whitewashed a few years ago and not repainted. I achieved this effect by painting the structure with a light gray primer followed by white. A small wire brush was used to remove random sections of the paint to allow the gray to show through. The stock roof was covered with Minuteman Scale Models rolled roofing and a small loading dock was added.

An overall view of the Burnett's area shows the future locations of the structures. The temporary signs are used to identify switching locations during operating sessions.