A New Locomotive

The stripped down Porter Mogul with new cylinders, motor/gearbox and drivers. 

Now that the Christmas season is behind us, I can finally get back to some serious modeling. Santa was good to me this year giving me some needed tools for the shop and some interesting reading material.

    Before Christmas, I had decided to start building the town of Milton but had to wait until some of the windows and styrene were ordered. While I was waiting, I started some research on early Virginia & Truckee RR locomotives. Without going into great detail (you can get detail at www.virginiaandtruckee.com), the first three engines came from Union Iron Works, a small foundry and machine shop in San Francisco. I also discovered that engine 3 had been featured in a centerfold in an 1871 issue of Engineering magazine published in London. A trip to the nearby Linda Hall library led to finding that issue and getting a copy of the article which included a full-scale drawing with dimension. With that in hand and three photos of the engine, I decided to try to convert an engine to Number 3, the Storey.

Ken Kidder's Porter Mogul was roughly the same dimensions
 as the Storey but several features had to be redone or replaced.

   A few dimension checks showed me that the Ken Kidder Porter Mogul was very close to the right size for the Storey. I had one the moguls on my shelf so I checked what would have to be done to convert it. The boiler was the right size but the domes were not. A couple of Precision Scale domes solved that problem. A Cal-Scale 1860s smokestack and bell solved those problems. The cab looked pretty good but had a curved roof rather than one with a ridge. I decided to live with feature rather than rebuild the entire cab.
    The frame was a bit more work. The drivers were the wrong size (40") and had the wrong spacing. I had the correct size drivers (48") and could easily move the driver slot so it would be closer to the prototype spacing. Replacing the old open-frame motor with a Northwest Short Line gearbox and Sagami motor was next. The Ken Kidder cylinder set was also replaced with a spare MEW set I had along with the crossheads and main rod. Some careful machine work produced a pair of new siderods. While I was at it, I fabricated new fenders for the rear drivers and added a crosshead water pump. I have a spare PFM Reno tender that I will use.

The prototype Storey as seen on the V&T. 

     There's still a lot of work to be done to finish the locomotive but it seems to be going along well. When done, it won't be able to pull a great deal but neither could the prototype. There will be more to come later as construction continues.

A Couple More Heinz Cars

Heinz Vinegar Tank No. 50. waiting in Oakdale for a gigantic salad.

While I was cleaning up after my Heinz car project (http://sandcrr.blogspot.com/2015/10/condiment-cars.html), I found two other cars and a couple of photos that prompted me to do another two Heinz cars. The first photo was of a large vinegar tank car. What appealed to me was the pickle cutout mounted on the side of the car. I looked through my decals and found that Art Griffin had made a decal for just that car. He said that the lettering was designed for an AHM wood tank car which I happened to have on hand.
    The car was easily painted and the walk on the side of the car added. The railing is from a Central Valley fence set. I made the cutout by applying the decal to a piece of .020" styrene and then cutting around the decal outline. A roof hatch was made with some tubing and a circular piece of styrene.
 

Vinegar Tank car No. 203 is a two-compartment tanker kitbashed from two kits.

    The second car was also modeled after an old photo. I had a Northeastern Models Richter Tank Car which I thought I could use except that it was too long and too modern looking. The prototype photo (too poor to reproduce here) looked like a tank mounted on a flat car. I found an old 35-ft. flat car kit in my stock and assembled it according to the instructions. The two tanks on the Northeastern kit were cut down to fit on the car. The end pieces and the letterboard were added along with the filler covers. The artwork for the decals was worked up and printed out and applied. I had to use a lot of decal softener to get the "57" to form around the tank rods.
    Although there are more Heinz cars to be built at some point, I think I will stop for right now. I have too many to have on the railroad at one time and my display case is getting crowded. Time for a different project.

Condiment Cars

Ten new Heinz cars at Oakdale. The two white cars are the earliest paint scheme with the two yellow cars represent the latest scheme. Heinz changed the paint frequently and even had at least one car advertising a different product on each side of the car.

Before I left California to move to Kansas City in 2005, I had started to assemble ten Westerfield kits. All the things associated with moving overcame me, however, and I packed away the kits to be built later. Over the last few weeks, I finally finished them. As you can see, they are all based on cars used by the H. J. Heinz Company.
    Due to variety of car decorations and the products mentioned, I have always like the Heinz cars. Fortunately for modelers, I guess Westerfield did as well since they came up with numerous lettering sets to adorn their kits. Clover House has done so as well as has Art Griffin. The old Heinz Special Interest Group researching and promoting the cars helped as well. The kits are still available if anyone has any leanings toward condiments being advertised on railroad cars.
   The cars appear to be refrigerator cars but they are not. Most of the Heinz "reefers" were built like refrigerator cars but without ice compartments so they were just insulated boxcars. This makes sense as most of the products produced you find right on the grocery store shelves rather than in the cooler. I assembled the cars per the kit instructions. Some of them require swing motion trucks rather than arch bars. I used ones that Westerfield had originally made for these kits and which are not marketed by Wiseman Model Services (http://www.locopainter.com/store/product.php?id=422). They are fiddly to assemble but do look good.
    When I finally finished the ten-year-old project, I took inventory and found that I still have four more car kits plus enough decals for 15-20 more cars. I doubt that I will build them all but they are fun to look at.

W. S. Bailey

The paint scheme was improvised. I figured that buff was a good color for a car originating in Nevada.

While I was in the mood to build cars, I decided to try another John Canfield/Bob McGlone kit that I have. It was for a 30-foot Tiffany refrigerator car. Tiffany made an early appearance in the refrigerator car field and was used by many railroads. Their main feature was that the ice was carried in bunkers located immediately beneath the roof, hence the roof hatches on top of the car rather than the ends. For some time, I had a copy of such a car which was used on the Southern Pacific. It was lettered for a private owner, a W. S. Bailey in Reno, Nevada. I did a little reading of Reno papers and found that Mr. Bailey was a long-time resident and rancher in Nevada with his ranch located around Churchill. He also had a slaughterhouse on the east side of Reno and used a fleet of refrigerator cars to carry meat to Sacramento, San Francisco and other places. No other information could be found.
 

The drawing showed the basic outline. Although this car is for a 28-foot model, the kit I had was for a 30-foot variety which I figured was close enough.

  Although the drawing I had did not include lettering styles, it did have the rough lettering diagram. I improvised and designed a plausible lettering set based on similar cars. It was an easily construction and used a pair of Eric Cox's 3D printed Allen trucks which are typical of those used on the SP at the time. Some liberties were taken with the design but I think the car is suitable for one where there are no photos or good information on it.

Odds and Ends

The far siding is for the Stockton Agricultural plant while the middle one is for the future Standard Oil distribution center. A copper smelter will occupy the area adjacent to the ore cars. The cars themselves were built after similar cars used by the Virginia & Truckee Railroad for hauling ore.

When I am waiting for parts to arrive, I generally find some smaller projects to myself busy. That is what has happened over the past few weeks. Over in the Stockton area, there were three rail-served industries that had not had track laid to them, mainly because I hadn't decided just how the structures would be arranged.

   The first industry was the Stockton Agricultural and Manufacturing Company. The prototype made all sorts of things from plows to harvesters to steam traction engines. It was a large complex occupying several buildings. There was no way I could accommodate all of the buildings so I had to selectively compress what was there. Using an 1895 Sanborn insurance map, I decided which ones best represented the buildings and laid them out on the plywood sub-roadbed. This location pretty much defined where the Standard Oil Distribution facility would go. The only problem left was where to put the copper smelter.

    Stockton, in the 1890s, did not have a copper smelter. Any ore sent down from Copperopolis was shipped to smelters outside of California. The trouble (for me) was that I had a nice set of 4-wheel ore jimmies that I wanted to use. The only logical way to use them was to carry the ore to a smelter and the only logical place for that smelter was in Stockton. After evaluating every other option I could think of, I decided to install a diamond crossing in the siding tracks. Since the siding that would be crossed was on a curve, a special diamond needed to be built. I laid out the curve simply by taping a piece of paper over the track and making a rubbing of the rails on the paper. The location of the other track was marked in the same way. Using that as a guide, I soldered up the diamond on PC board ties. It was not as difficult as I had thought it might be. The resulting siding is just long enough to hold the string of empty ore cars as well as the full ones which will replace them.

   

The Canfield-McGlone kit is a good model of the prototype and is easy to assemble. Note the end doors.

Another of the small projects was assembling a kit of a car I had been wanting to build for several years. Photos of the Standard Wagon Co. car of the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad have been around for years. Irv Schulz, Clover House, Art Griffin and even MDC had made cars or lettering sets for it. A couple of years ago, John Canfield and Bob McGlone developed a kit for the car which simplified my work immensely. 

   

The prototype car was built without air brakes and is pictured here around 1890.

The car is interesting in that it was built on an old flat car. The stake pockets are clearly visible along the bottom of the car. The car siding is horizontal which is consistent with it being attached to long vertical stakes. The Official Railway Equipment Registers specifically call out this car as being only for buggies (i.e. relatively light loads) and should not be loaded with heavy freight. The end doors make it interesting. They were typical for carriage and buggy cars. Maybe I will have to build some end platforms on my team tracks.

   Unfortunately, the car kits were a limited run and are no longer available. They should not be too hard to build, however, using the information from the ORER and the photo.

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.
 

Tank Wagons for the Petroleum Distributor

Custom decals were used on the wagon side. The cans on the side rack are from the Jordan Model AA tank truck.

Once the kerosenes, oils, etc. had arrived at the distribution plant, they had to be conveyed to the customer. The innovative move at the time was the tank wagon. It would fill up with mostly kerosene plus some of the other products and then go door to door with the distributor's commercial customers who would take, in bulk, what they needed. If you did not need a whole barrel of a product, you could buy 10 or 20 gallons to suit your needs.
   

This Continental Oil tank wagon is typical of the era although many different
styles were used.

My model of a typical wagon was made from parts of several Jordan wagon kits. The tank came from their Model A Ford tank truck, the undercarriage is from a Standard Wagon Kit and the top is from the Buggy kit. The tank was assembled and glued to a couple of styrene channels. The front and rear wheel assemblies attached to this. A small block of plastic was attached to the front of the tank and shaped to form a seat rest. The seat itself was left over from another kit which I don't remember but it could be formed from some styrene.
 

Standard Oil had fleets of these vehicles running through the streets distributing their product. 

The Foothill Oil wagon is used for the oil depot I built in Oakdale while the Standard Oil wagon will be used for a yet-to-be-built distributor in Stockton.