Rural General Store

The Micro Engineering structure with an added roof over the walk.

Finally, I've constructed a building that will NOT be located in Oakdale. Several years ago, I had bought some model railroad stuff which include a couple of old Micro Engineering structures someone had built up directly from the kit. They were dirty but had satisfactory construction and somewhat typical of the Central California area I am modeling. As a filler in my construction plans, I decided to paint and letter the building. The prototype I chose to loosely model was an old store near the junction of the Milton Road and the Sonora Road. It was abandoned when I photographed it a few years ago but the signs attracted me and the little plastic building seemed right for the signs.
 

Kelliher's store located not far from the route of the Stockton & Copperopolis. The real Mr. Kelliher also raised sheep in
the 1910s at this location.

 Since the store was on private property, I could not see the false front on what was once the main road so I improvised. The porch roof was added since most California buildings had them to deflect the intense sun received in the summers and was supported by columns from Alexander. I decided that Mr. Kelliher would have sold Buffalo Beer which was made by a Sacramento Brewery. This brand was an common as Boca Beer which signs have been seen in other postings.
 

The building sign was duplicated as close as I could get it using Adobe
Illustrator. 

 I am not sure just where the building will end up. Like the prototype, it represents a rural local store which would be out of town. Right now I am think either Cometa or Burnett's. We shall see as scenery develops in those locations.

Wagons Galore with Harnesses, Too!

Three companies unloading goods at the Oakdale team track. The typical two-horse teams gave the public track its name. All three wagons are variations of the Jordan Farm Wagon kit.

The wagon building project is done. As mentioned in the last blog (Wagon Assembly Line), Jordan kits were used as a basis for them all. The lettering on the wagons was all decals made by Art Griffin. If you are not familiar with his line, you should check it out at http://www.greatdecals.com/Griffin.htm. The only exceptions were the Wells-Fargo wagon and the Moulton Soda wagon, both of which were made from my artwork. If you look closely at the Wells-Fargo decals, you can see that it says Wells, Fargo & Co's Express. Prior to 1898, this was the name used by the firm. After 1898, they left off the apostrophe-ess on both the spelled-out name and on the diamond-shaped sign that was used.

 

Another Farm Wagon conversion into a flatbed for lumber. This load and
the obvious compression of the rear springs was based on a photo found
in a Blue Springs MO restaurant.

The Jordan horses all have the harnesses cast on the horse so all the modeler has to do is paint the harness to make a good-looking horse. Heretofore, I have left off the traces and reins mostly due to a lack of a good scale-sized material with which to make them. A friend of mine, Keith Robinson, suggested a carbon-fiber based fishing line which was very small. I checked it out and, while I did not buy the exact line Keith suggested, I did find one that seemed to work and it was a light tan color which was close enough to harness color to suit me. The big problem now was to find out what harnesses looked like, where they attached and so on.
 

A couple of pieces of new furniture bound for the local "social" club. The colors and lettering styles for the Wells-Fargo wagon were taken from a period color drawing advertising the wagons.

The Jordan Light Delivery Wagon was the basis for this grocer's delivery.

 I found out that knowledge about harnessing horses is not quite as common as it once was. You can find catalogs of current suppliers of the necessary appliances but they don't publish instructions on their websites. To make matters a bit worse, I found out that, for every application, there were several different rigs. To make a long story short, I found out what I needed to know and applied it to my project wagons. This is a first trial and I am still learning the best way to work with this material but it seems to be promising.

While his horse tries to find a little nutrition, a drayer waits his turn at the team track.

Delivering soda is a big business so the Soda Works keeps a small wagon and a single horse. While the wagon sits outside, the horse gets an inside stall.

 
 

Wagon Assembly Line

The assembly line of wagons almost ready for decals

When I build items where I need more than one, I find it a bit more convenient to build more than one in an assembly line fashion. When you model the nineteenth century, you need a lot of wagons to make the scene look right. Think how many wagon loads are there in a boxcar? I decided to build a few of the Jordan kits I had been accumulating but I wanted some variation so they would look like they came from different manufacturers.
   I chose the Farm Wagon as my basic kit, built one as Jordan intended, another with lower sides, another with a spring seat, one flatbed wagon and a last one with very low sides. These went all right. The Jordan kits are finely detailed and look right if you don't lose too many of the very tiny parts. Most wagons had two colors, one for the wagon bed and another for the wheels and running gear. This now takes a little more planning since the right running gear has to go with the right wagon. You also find that very small parts are often blown away by even the light pressure of an airbrush so you need to make sure that they are very secure. I used painters' tape which worked fairly well.
   The last three wagons were also Jordan products, the light and standard Delivery Wagons. These were assembled per the directions. I used some of Art Griffin's wagon decals (www.greatdecals.com/Griffin.htm) so the colors had to match them.
 

When the body paint is dry, the heads, harnesses and hooves will be painted. The tape is really not holding them upright. They are just standing there on their own. No, the end horses are not blue, they're really gray.

 Painting horses is another interesting chore. Horses are hard to hold while painting. There is not enough hoof surface to hold well on tape. I decided to hold their heads and paint the rest. I'll go back and get the heads after the body dries. Then I have to paint the hooves, add stockings and other small marks to make them more individual and then paint the cast-on harness which is painstaking. I use a water-based paint, a fine brush and a wet Q-tip to wipe off any paint that shouldn't be there.
   Painting figures to drive the wagons come next and that's a little easier.

New Boxcars for the Stockton & Ione

New boxcars for the Stockton & Ione are patterned after 1880s Denver & Rio Grande prototypes. The red barrels are on a building behind the cars.

The HOn3 Rail Line boxcar kit has been around for a while and it is a good representation of a 30-foot later period D&RGW car. I wanted to try to see if I could easily modify it to represent an early 25-foot car of 10-ton capacity. To do this, I cut the car at the door opening and glued the two halves together with some reinforcing strips inside. This gave me the necessary length. Using a fine razor saw, I removed the roof running boards. Some .020 thick styrene with .060 scribing applied right over the Murphy roof gave me the earlier wood plank roof. A .010 x .080 strip was applied for a new fascia and cut flush with the car ends. New doors were made from .020 scribed styrene and the door hardware from the kit used to "hang" it.
 

The lettering was varied slightly with the arth to a give a little variety to the cars.

 The earlier boxcars had short end platforms for the carmen to stand upon. I glued .060 x .124 strips with scribed siding to represent those. The nut-bolt-washer representations for the grab iron bolts were removed with a razor blade except for two on the end for the new grab irons. The floor was similarly shortened and reglued. Fishing line truss rods and Grandt turnbuckles were used. The brake cylinder was only applied to one car as I figured this little narrow gauge line would be slow in putting brakes on everything.
   

Compared to the 1875 S&I prototype cars, the D&RG freelanced cars are much more graceful.

   The cars were painted boxcar red and decals based on D&RG lettering schemes were applied. The finished car is not an exact model of the prototype but close enough for the Stockton & Ione.

The Pay Car is Here!

It's payday at Peters and the pay train has just arrived!

"There, just coming around the curve, was a glittering vision of brass and varnish half hidden in a nimbus of smoke and dust. Two short blasts on a whistle greeted the gang, the vision hesitated for a minute, while the section men disappeared in the nimbus and reappeared as suddenly as if they'd been shot out of a gun, and here came this vision gliding up to the platform with bell ringing and pop valve sputtering sotto voce, like a young lady trying to suppress a ticklish cough. It was the pay car.  
   At each joint in the engine jacket was a band of brass 4 inches wide. Dome, sand box, chests and cylinders were encased in brass polished until you could have seen to shave in it. Her front end and her dainty straight stack were rubbed with plumbago until they shone like a small boy's heel. All her brightwork was smooth and spotless and glittering, while all the rest of her surface was striped and curlicued with all the colors the general shops could mix.
   Coupled to the engine was a wheeled palace built on graceful lines in freshly varnished paint which rivaled the brasswork on the engine in brilliance. The plate glass windows were curtained in bright-hued brocade. Not a speck or a flaw was to be seen. Even the wheels bore only so much dust as had been gathered on the day's run."*

 

Employees at Peters await their turn at the pay window. Yes,
The S&C does employ women telegraph operators.

 Unlike the direct deposit "pay checks" of today, getting your monthly wages in the nineteenth century was a big affair. Most railroads dedicated a locomotive and car to the pay service and, on a large line, it spent most of its time running everywhere there was an employee of the railroad. You climbed aboard the car, signed the pay roll and received a stack (it didn't matter that it wasn't that tall) of gold and silver coins representing last month's work.
   I wanted the S&C to have its own pay car. Information on them is not that easy to find. There are a few old articles about the process and some text books advising how many men with rifles, pistols and cutlasses should be on the car but nothing really good for modeling. Most of the photos I saw were older, lighter locomotives  but very well kept up with older, well-kept coaches converted to pay service. Based on these facts, I built my car.

Built from a Bachmann old-time coach, the Aurelia serves as the S&C's pay car.

  The basis of the car was a Bachmann old-time coach. There are several good features of this car. The windows are proportionally good and the roof is well-detailed. The trucks have the right wheelbase and appearance of 1870s-early 1880s trucks. I began by removing the over-large truss rods and end railings. The truss rods were replaced with Grandt Line turnbuckles threaded onto nylon fishing line while new Cal-Scale end railings were used on the platforms. The old cast-on handrails were scraped off and wire was used to form new ones.
   Every once in a while, in a photo of an older car, you see molding arranged in an oval on the side of the car. This was used for the car's name or number. I wanted this effect on my car. The oval piece is from a Grandt Line structure dating set. This set comes with several "shields" on which to place the building date and one of them is an oval of about the right size.
    After painting in the standard S&C scheme, I added decals proclaiming the car's purpose along with its name, Aurelia, which is from the Latin for golden being, of course, what the car carried.
   The locomotive, the C.A. Coscia, is the dedicated engine for the pay train and was discussed in my post on October 31, 2013.


* __________, The Passing of the Pay Car. The Railroad Gazette, New York: July 26, 1907.

Water Tanks and Park

An engineer's view of the new water tank and windmill at the Oakdale depot.

In my scenicking work at Oakdale, I had left the last eight inches on so next to the aisle for last so I wouldn't be continually undoing my work. I've finally gotten to the point where I have been able to work on this area.

The small engine facility here needed a refueling and watering ability so I built one of the typical CP/SP enclosed water tanks along with a small shed
for the storage of firewood. A windmill was also built to pump water into the tank.
   The spout on the tank was a Grandt Line product while the windmill itself was built from an etched-brass kit formerly made by Sheepscot Models. The vane lettering was taken from a period Fairbanks-Morse Eclipse windmill of the turn-of-the-century.
 

Railroad Park just south of the water tank. Wood posts keep errant wagons from encroaching on the park.

 Adjacent to the prototype water tank at Oakdale was a small park. I have not yet been able to locate photos of this park but railroad drawings seem to indicate just some trees and a large expanse of grass. My version also contains a number of paths and flower bushes to add some interest.

   Last night, I painted about ten new figures for the railroad. I find that figure painting is very relaxing for me and I use mostly Preiser old-time figures.   The gentleman on the left is standing slightly away from the  rest of the traveling public since he is reading a rather racy periodical of the time, the Police Gazette. You could always identify the Gazette since it was printed on pink paper to make it stand out.

Combination Boxcars

An early photo of the SP system's 34-foot combination boxcar.

AHM/IHC's version of the combination boxcar.

The term "combination" as applied to boxcars meant a universal car to the folks at the Central/Southern Pacific. It came equipped with various barred openings in the sides and ends which could be closed by internal sliding doors. Close the doors and you have a secure and weather-tight car. Open the doors in various combinations and you had a stock car, a ventilated fruit or produce car or a car suitable for carrying flammable liquids. In the latter case, the lower doors allowed any vapors from leakage to be blown out of the car rather than accumulate.
   The SP system had hundreds of these cars starting with the outside-braced cars of the 1870s (kits made by Rio Grande Models) to 28-foot cars (no kits) to the 34-foot cars which are the subject of this post. The 34-footers made their first appearance in 1891 and were distributed around the SP system for accounting purposes. This resulted in reporting marks for the SP, CP, O&C, SP of Arizona, SP of New Mexico and others. See Tony Thompson's Southern Pacific Freight Cars, Volume 4 for more details.The combination cars were replaced by iced refrigerator cars and most were off the roster by 1900 but there were still many around in 1895
 

The reworked AHM cars.

 I chose to model four cars for my railroad, one each lettered for the Southern Pacific, Central Pacific, Oregon & California and California Pacific. Fortunately, AHM and, later, IHC produced plastic cars based on this prototype. The cars are generally crude and do not have the end doors so some modification was needed.
 

End doors were cut and barred. This car represents one with
the openings closed by the inner solid doors.

To make my cars, I removed the truss rods, molded-in brake staff/chain and cut three square holes in each end of the car. The bars on these openings were made from .020" styrene rod. Nylon fishing line truss rods with Grandt turnbuckles were installed along with Cal-Scale brake wheels. The grab irons were 23" and 18" preformed pieces made by Westerfield. In this period, the SP used a one-piece grab-iron which wrapped around the end of the car to form both the side and end irons. I used the Westerfield irons installed with Art and Adrian Hundhausen's (Silvercrashcarworks.com) method to try and get the proper appearance. Intermountain wheels replaced the plastic wheels which came with the car although the truck frames were used. The end result is not an exact copy of the prototype but it works for me at least for now.
   In 1895, there were few of the 34-foot cars compared to the 28-foot cars. Although Mantua/Tyco made a car similar to them, my version, when I get around to making them, will have to be scratchbuilt. Another project for another time.