Yet Another Stock Car

The gray pans are the watering pan which are now turned in the empty position. Filled with a tank located within the car, they would need to be rotated 90 degrees to function.

My stock car fleet continues to grow. This car, the Street's Western Stable Car Line, is not a well-known line but, after the turn of the century, ended up owning the two other major lines, CCCC and Hicks. This prototype of this particular car was on display at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and the drawings and specifications for the car were published in a book describing all of the transportation exhibits. The drawings were also published in Engineering magazine in August 1893.
      My model is built entirely of styrene with trucks I obtained from a seller on Shapeways. They do a very good job of matching the Street's trucks shown in the drawings. The colors for the car were taken right from the specifications. This just points out that even stock cars could be colorful in the 1890s period.
     This car has watering pans for the cattle which rotated in the prototype car. I had these produced by Shapeways from a drawing I made and they fit right in. I even have enough left to do the Hicks car I want. The stock car door is a little different. It is of the Alsop and Fisher patent and is made in two parts. The lower part is hinged at the bottom and opens downward to form a ramp for the animals. The upper part then slides open to let them out.
     For some reason, photos of these cars are hard to find. I found two, both in a freight yard and at a distance from the camera so details were not discernable. The lettering was based on woodcuts found in the Official Railway Equipment Register.
   

Sound Effects Come to the S&C

Pushing the "Water" button will start the sound

of a tender being filled with water.

One of the things that I have been toying with over the years is adding sound to the railroad. I don't mean in the locomotives but in other areas. For example, if a rule is established that all locomotives take water at Peters, then how long does that take? How long does it take to load a stock car? Why doesn't the band ever play anything? Those problems have now been solved.
   Recently, a friend of mine, Keith Robinson, turned me on to some sound modules on ebay. They used mini SD memory cards to hold the sound files and could play back up to 500+ separate files. I purchased a couple and tried them out. They work great! The memory card makes it very easy to record the sound(s) you need but it does take some playing with the sound files. Although the modules are new, the technology appears to be a bit old. They will only work with memory cards with less than 1 gigabyte capacity. Try to find one of those at your local store. I did find some 128 megabyte cards on line which is more than enough capacity for any sound I will ever use.
   Also, the sound has to fit within some fairly old parameters. The free program, Audacity, allows these modifications to be made but not with the current version. I had to download an earlier version of Audacity (V. 1.2.6) that could save the files in the older format. In spite of this, the end result still sounds good.

The power supply (right) and sound module (left) are mounted on a wood block for ease in attaching to the layout. The SD mini memory card fits into the slot on the sound module. A Radio Shack amplifier stands beyond.

 To implement all this fun, I built some 9V power supplies. These take 12V DC power from an accessory bus I have running about the layout and drop it down to 9V DC to power the module and the Radio Shack amplifier I use to deliver the sound. A push button on the fascia completes the installation and now S&C engineers know how long it takes to fill the tender tank. A similar recording will eventually go by the stock pens to tell operators how long it takes to load a stock car. I even have a recording for the bandstand at Oakdale. The band has a 5 or 6 song repertoire and each push of the button will start a new Sousa march.
   The possibilities are high but I have to keep the volume low enough so that all the cows mooing, water running and band songs won't send my operators marching away.

Oil Refining at Peters

The Pacific Coast Oil Refinery at Peters.

I am pleased to say that the August Model Railroader contains my new article entitled Build an 1880s Oil Refinery. The prototype of the refinery was built in Newhall, California in the 1870s and refined oil from the adjacent Pico Canyon until the late 1880s. Information to build the model was obtained through period documents and on-site measurements of the remains of the refinery. In the 1930s, Standard Oil restored it to its 1880s condition but, sadly, it has since deteriorated through neglect and vandalism. Present-day Chevron Oil was kind enough to furnish several photographs of the 1930s restoration.

Thanks to Google Books, I was able to obtain information on the petroleum refining process of the nineteenth century. Quite different from today's goal of producing gasoline, the folks of the 1800s wanted a clean-burning kerosene for lighting. Gasoline was just a by-product.

The prototype in operation in the 1880s.

 Pacific Coast Oil operated the refinery and ran both cylinder tank cars and oil/box combination cars. These latter cars looked like boxcars but contained two tanks for bulk kerosene with a dry space between them. This space was used for canned goods including oils, benzene, etc.

It was fun building the structure and my operating crews find it an interesting switching challenge.If this is interesting to you, pick up a copy of the August MR.