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 I used ones that Westerfield had originally made for these kits and which are not marketed by Wiseman Model Services (http://www.locopainter.com/store/product.php?id=422).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.

Oil Distributor and Hay Dealer

The Foothill Oil Company is an independent firm buying its product from Standard, Union and Pacific Coast Oil companies.

The north end of Oakdale has had a siding which served two industries, an oil distributor and a hay dealer. I never really liked how I had arranged the siding as it did not allow enough room for either industry. The situation finally nagged on me enough that I realigned the siding to give me some more room between it and the main line for some structures.
 

The Grandt Line Petroleum Distributor kit provided most of the tanks and structures needed. Note the Standard Oil blue barrel on the dock.

At the end of the siding is the Foothill Oil Company. This is the third name change for this spot. At first, I thought it was a Continental Oil company site but later found out that Continental had been absorbed by Standard of Iowa in the 1880s. Some more research showed that a distributorship had not even shown up in Oakdale until early in the 20th century. For several years I had been switching cars there so I wasn't going to take it out so I created a fictional distributor.
   The tanks are a conglomeration of Grandt Line and Bar Mills tanks. I used a small office from an Atlas Lumber Yard and the pump house and distributing valves from the Grandt kit. The Grandt tank was cut down to a shorter version and the "concrete" supports cut down as well. The supports received a covering of styrene brick sheet to reflect an older construction period.
 

Barrels of headlight oil, Red Crown Gasoline and Fireproof Oil are stacked for
delivery to a client.

One of the things I did want to have, though, was the omnipresent blue barrels of the Standard Oil Company. Oil barrels are a specific size and most commercial barrels are too big or too small. I finally found a beer barrel in a Preiser kit which was about as close as I could get. I painted the barrels blue with the white tops of the prototype. Using the internet, I located images of old Standard Oil brands, reduced them to size and made decals for the top labels. Some of the labels came from black and white photos and had to be colorized slightly.
   While I didn't have room for a warehouse, I had almost enough room for the warehouse dock so I am making do with that. The dock itself overhangs the fascia somewhat but it gives a little credence that there is some more distributor in the aisle area. All I need now is a horse-drawn oil tank wagon to deliver bulk product to the Oakdale customers. That's up next on the project list.

The A. L. Gilbert Company is a hay distributor and stores its product in the warehouse and in open-sided sheds.

   

When horses were the main motie power, hay was a ubiquitous commodity. The animals had to be fed so growing and shipping hay was big business. The A. L. Gilbert Company represents a local concern which purchases the hay from local farmers and then sends it by rail to its customers.
   Some time ago, I had built a small building for the Gilbert hay warehouse. Looking at it now makes it seems rather small. Hay was usually stored in open shed rather than inside so I decided to add a couple of these to the scene. The track arrangement forces both sheds to be oddly shaped but they were easily constructed of stripwood. The hay bales themselves were pieces of balsa strip stock cut to length. I stacked them up resemble hay warehouses I had seen and then colored them with yellow ochre paint streaked with green. I guess I'll need a couple of wagons now bringing hay to Gilbert's.

New Turntable at Stockton Wharf

The Stockton Wharf turntable serves two tracks plus the lead. A small figure at one end of the table acts as a reference market for alignment. The two bright metal T-nuts support the motor assembly. This entire area will eventually be scenicked as a marsh.

The turntable at Stockton Wharf is fairly far away from the view of the operator and, as such, the rails have been difficult to align. A step stool and a mirror have been the best tools so far and those are a bit crude. The best solution would have been an indexing system like that made by New York Railway Supply but I thought that was a bit pricey for just three tracks to the turntable. Finally, I have found a lower cost system which seems to solve the problem.

 

A stepper motor is supported by a piece of aluminum and two lengths of all-thread rod hung by the T-nuts in the photo above. A machined coupling connects the turntable shaft with the motor shaft. The long rod extending from the coupling is an index to zero the table's initial position with the sensor at the left of the support bar.

 Last year I found a video on the internet which showed a small system being developed by a Scottish electronics company. I followed up with the company who then produced a circuit board kit which can be programmed by the user. The product is limited in that only six positions can be programmed. This means that two positions are used just to turn an engine (one for each end of the table). It's only good for those end-of-the-line turning situations with few or no tracks. I only used four positions for the Stockton table to serve a lead and two roundhouse tracks. 

 

A simple controller handles the position. The button and knobs along the bottom
are for programming. 

A system was duly bought and assembled (it's a kit), the additional parts (motor, switches, etc.) purchased and the mechanical end designed and built. Once it is installed, it is easy to program and can be reprogrammed just as easily. The motor used is a stepper motor which means that the hardware retains the motor's position so it always returns to the same place. The nice part is that it works. My only criticism is that the table's lowest rotational speed is too fast for my taste. I've spoken to the company and they said they would lower the speed. I'm now awaiting a new board to see how that works.