Southern Pacific’s GE 44-tonners

The General Electric 44-ton diesel switcher was sold to railroads large and small, and to industrial users, all over North America, and many survived 30 years or more in service (and a number have been preserved at various railroad museums). Powered by a pair of Caterpillar 190-horsepower diesels, they were easy to maintain, with Caterpillar parts available everywhere. Over time, Southern Pacific and its subsidiaries owned a full dozen of them.

The earliest three 44-tonners owned by SP arrived in the fall of 1942, only two years after the first 44-ton locomotives had been produced by GE. Numbered 1900–1902, they were mostly used in Oregon during the war, and later were tried many places on the SP system. Like others in the earliest production, these had side radiators, unlike the many post-1942 44-ton engines with end radiator shutters. 

(One of the magisterial Joe Strapac books on SP diesel locomotives, Volume 18 in the series Southern Pacific Historic Diesels, is about Alco and GE diesel switchers. He covers the 44-tonners owned by SP, Pacific Electric, Visalia Electric, and Petaluma & Santa Rosa, along with Pacific Fruit Express. It should be consulted for history of the locomotives on all the subsidiaries.)

Here’s a photo from that book (Gordon Spafford photo, courtesy Joe Strapac), taken at Eugene, Oregon on March 15, 1946, with SP 1901 painted in “Tiger Stripe” colors. The side shutters and plain hood end are clearly shown.

In the photo above, note the prominent rerailing frog over the front truck at right. Photos of these locomotives on the SP after the 1940s no longer show these frogs present, so they were not a permanent feature. 

What might this have to do with SP’s Coast Division and in particular, the San Luis Obispo area (which I model)? In the 1953–54 era, SP tried out a variety of diesel locomotives on different parts of the system, including Coast Division, and specifically at San Luis. 

One of my previous posts, with parts of my interview with Malcolm “Mac” Gaddis who worked there in the early 1950s, mentions trying out GE 70-ton engines, Baldwin and Alco six-axle road switchers, and others (here’s a link to that post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/08/san-luis-obispo-operations-3.html ). He mentioned the 44-tonners in another part of the interview. Neither the 44-ton nor 70-ton locomotives could do the desired job in the yard at San Luis Obispo (which is on a grade), and after short stints, they were sent elsewhere — but they did work there.

This is of current interest because Rapido Trains has just introduced a GE 44-tonner in HO scale, and they offer it in SP paint and lettering. Among the body styles they chose to do is the original design, with side radiators, sometimes called Phase I, correct for the SP numbers they have modeled. Here is a photo of SP 1902 at work on my layout, switching cars at Shumala.

The engine runs nicely, has a realistic diesel sound, and handles switching well. It’s shown below spotting a reefer at the Phelan & Taylor packing shed in East Shumala on my layout.

I’m sure the 44-tonners didn’t serve very long in this area of Coast Division, but the times when they were tested does fit my modeling era, so I will operate this one occasionally.

Tony Thompson

Chromite ore shipments on my layout

 I’ve written several posts in the past about chromite mining in the area I model, the Central Coast of California. The first issue for me, and for anyone modeling a specific mining area, is to find out the prototype facts. I wrote a fairly general introduction about this, emphasizing how anyone could follow the kinds of leads I followed to learn about mining history in the area I model. That post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/10/modeling-mining-in-your-locale.html. 

I then wrote about modeling suitable ore cars, and suitable loads, to represent this ore traffic, in a Part 2 of the post just cited. In that post, I showed the crushed green shale I have used to represent a disseminated chromite ore (read it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/10/modeling-mining-part-2.html ). This ore was too low of a grade to be used for refining to chromium metal or ferro-chrome alloying additives, and was typically used as a component in refractory brick.

In a third, more recent post, I repeated some of the background on chromite, and showed a few of the ore cars that I have placed in service. As I prefer to do in most of my open-top cars, the loads are removable. (See: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/10/chromite-mining-on-my-layout.html .)

I was aware that by the 1950s most chromite mining in California was “pocket” mining on a small scale. I also faced the problem that there wasn’t space on the layout to install a mine scene. Solution? Assume ore is trucked from mine to rail. Then a truck dump would be the way that ore cars would be loaded, and this is also a compact kind of industry. 

I did have minimal space alongside Bromela Road in my town of Ballard, and built up a small incline that could perhaps serve as a truck dump. The truck helps identify what it is. The dump is by no means high enough to get close to direct dumping out of trucks into a railcar, so a conveyor would be needed.

So despite its obvious limitations, this preliminary attempt does suggest the activity. Then, in an operating session, a loaded ore car alongside the “dump” looks all right. A switch crew can pick up this car and understand its origin.

I have for some time kicked around ways to make this more realistic. A low truck incline is all right, if trucks can dump into a receiving bin, which in turn is emptied via conveyor into a railcar. But the space alongside Bromela Road is terribly narrow to model all that. Another possibility would be to load the ore cars at a team track, a logical place for truckloads of ore to arrive. Most of my team tracks have ample space to model a loading scene.

Note in the above photo that I show a GS (General Service) drop-bottom gondola being loaded. In one of my interviews with Mac Gaddis, he mentioned gondolas of actual chromite, a much denser material than the disseminated ore I am modeling. (See Mac’s comments at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/01/modeling-freight-traffic-coast-line_19.html .) But either ore could be loaded on my branch.

I am still toying with the idea of kitbashing the Walthers Truck Dump kit (their number 933-4058) into something I could use at a team track. I am a firm believer in Tony Koester’s admonition, “Don’t look at the name or picture on the box, just use the parts you need to make what you want” (from his fine book, How to Kitbash Structures, Kalmbach Books, 2012). If I get sufficiently inspired to do that, I’ll report on it in a future post.

Tony Thompson

Operating an SP business car, Part 2

In the previous post, I described my attempt to use the Rivarossi heavyweight observation car as a stand-in for the actual Southern Pacific business car assigned to the Coast Division superintendent for the time I model, 1953. (That post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/06/operating-sp-business-car.html . )

In that previous post, I showed a Mac Gaddis photo at San Luis Obispo, of SP 119 arriving on Train 72, showing the left side of the car. Mac later photographed SP 119 in its usual visiting location, a stub track near the freight house, and this shows the right side (fall 1953).

As Mac told me in an interview, the car visited this part of Coast Division often because its assigned user, Coast Division Superintendent J.J. Jordan, liked the cooler summer weather along the coast, and liked to dine on fish and shellfish, fresh from the coast. In fact Jordan (known in the third person as “Jimmy” but not to his face) loved the Coast so much that he declined promotion to other places on the SP and remained as Coast Superintendent from 1931 to 1956.

Often seen with a cigar in his face, and famed for his desk-thumping “old-time railroading” style, Jimmy Jordan was a fixture up and down Coast Division. Here is a photo of him from the SP Bulletin.

I mentioned in the previous post that my Rivarossi observation car, standing in for the Coast Division official car, remained “out of service” once I discovered that it wasn’t numbered correctly and had several differences from the prototype.

But recently I was going through the SPH&TS official car book (briefly reviewed in the previous post, link in the first paragraph at the top of this post), and found the series of SP photos of the car after it was upgraded at Sacramento General Shops in the summer of 1953 with new mechanical equipment, and air-conditioned. One of these photos, taken from the book, is shown below.

This photo emphasizes another difference of SP 119 from the Rivarossi model: its rear end wall is at the outer end of the car sides, not inset to make a bigger platform, as is true of the Rivarossi model.

Still, I decided to see what changes I could conveniently make to the Rivarossi model to bring it closer to the prototype SP 119. I could move the rear wall outwards, and I could add the very evident truss rods using heavy brass wire. I had already removed the somewhat overblown awning under the platform canopy on the original model (internet photo):

I began with the rear wall. By repeated slicing with a hobby knife around the periphery of the wall, I was able to remove it intact, as shown below. You can see the previous location by the change in floor colors. Here the removed wall is at lower left, and the molded Rivarossi interior is at right. All colors shown can remain, as I move that wall rearward.

In a future post, I will show the completion of work on that rear wall, along with addition of truss rods to the body, and addition of some weight to the car. The model will still differ from the prototype in some ways, but I believe I am on the way to an acceptable stand-in for SP 119.

Tony Thompson

Operating an SP business car

Business cars, or as they are more often called by railroaders, “official” cars, are a distinctive part of the image of a railroad. Ordinarily they demonstrate that one or more officials are “out on the line,” overseeing their responsibility, most commonly a Division Superintendent traveling his territory. As a Southern Pacific modeler, I wanted to have such a car for my layout.

Many years ago, I picked up one of the Rivarossi observation cars (imported at that time by Associated Hobby Manufacturers, or AHM), complete with interior. It’s a nice model, and has air-conditioning ducts on its roof. At the time I acquired it, I had little knowledge of SP business cars, and contacted a friend with SP knowledge. He told me that the car assigned to the Superintendent of Coast Division, which I model, was named Coast, and was numbered SP 122. 

I proceeded to repaint and letter the car as SP 122, but made no other changes (it’s shown below as originally modeled). My late friend, Paul Koehler, a long-time SP employee, took one look at the model and said “That’s not even close to the real Coast!!” I didn’t doubt he was right, but I had no other resources at the time.

At that time, Wilbur Whittaker was still alive, and I contacted him to see if he had a photo of the Coast Division business car. He did, and I purchased a print. I show the photo below. It was taken at San Francisco in November 1947. Some things jumped out at me: the car number is 119, not 122, it isn’t air conditioned, and it has truss rods. (Note that the “SP 119” lettering looks freshly repainted, while the word “Coast” does not. You can click on the image to enlarge it.)

At this point, I set aside the Rivarossi car, because of all its differences, including that its windows were quite differently arranged than this prototype photo of the left side of the car.

Then in the latter part of the 1990s, I was working on the book project that became Southern Pacific’s Coast Line Pictorial (with John Signor), eventually published in 2000. I had a large group of photos taken at San Luis Obispo by Malcolm “Mac” Gaddis when he worked there in the early 1950s, and among them was this shot of SP 119, arriving at San Luis on the rear of the “Coast Mail,” Train 72. In the background at right is the Hotel Park, and the left background shows the Juillard-Cockcroft wholesale foods warehouse. Date is August 1953, and the car is clearly air-conditioned here.

This revived my desire to operate my Rivarossi version of the division’s official car, and I did so on a few occasions in subsequent years.

Then along came a new book. As with the passenger car book series from the SP Historical & Technical Society, now SP followers had a superb book about SP official cars, Southern Pacific Official Cars, by Donald M. Munger and Jeffrey Alan Cauthen (SPH&TS, Upland, CA, 2015).

 It’s a 528-page hardbound book, 8.5 x 12 inch pages, bound on the short edge. It is still available from the Society, and here’s a link to the purchase point: https://sphts.org/product-category/books/page/2/ . I should mention that in addition to the well-renowned “business” cars, the book also covers instruction, company service, hospital, and private cars, as mentioned on the dust jacket.

I haven’t commented on this book before in the blog, because I purchased it awhile after it was new, but it is worth mentioning how complete it is. And this is not a simple matter. SP changed the name and assignment of many official cars numerous times, and sometimes changed the car number as well. Tracking down the history of a particular car body is truly challenging, but the authors have done so for nearly all known official cars.

What does the SPH&TS book tell us about Coast Division official cars? and did it lead to any modifications to the Rivarossi model? I immediately found that the book does document that SP 122 was indeed named Coast from 1921 to 1932 (so the person who gave me that car number wasn’t entirely wrong). But in 1932 SP 119 became Coast, not at all an unusual kind of changeover in the SP official car fleet. I’ll return to that topic, and to upgrades to the car, in a future post.  

Tony Thompson

A new chassis for an RSD-5

As a modeler of the steam-to-diesel “transition era,” I want my motive power fleet to include models of all the diesel power that operated in my modeling locale. One of these is the Alco RSD-5.

Since I model the area of the California coast south of San Luis Obispo, I rely on my interviews with Malcolm “Mac” Gaddis for information on the operation of those RSD-5 engines in that area (to read that interview, you can see my post at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/08/san-luis-obispo-operations-3.html ). Happily, that RSD-5 operation took place in my modeling year of 1953.

Although the RSD-5 was first produced at Alco with all hood doors louvered, as was the case with the preceding four-axle model RS-3, a number of buyers of the RSD-5 ordered the engines with air filtration openings in the long hood. SP was one of these. When the 14 locomotives for Pacific Lines, SP 5294–5307, were delivered in the spring of 1953, they came with the standard Alco exhaust stack, but SP soon replaced these with a large, water-cooled spark-arrester stack. 

The photo above is by F.C. Smith (courtesy Guy Dunscomb) at Bakersfield in February 1954, by which time SP had decided the best use of these units was as Tehachapi helpers. You can clearly see the square filtration openings near the top of the hood on this left side view.

For a view of the right side of these engines, below is a detail from a Stan Kistler photo of SP 5301, descending Tehachapi with the Mountain Local. It’s a better view of the water-cooled spark arrester. The engine here is running in reverse of normal practice with the early RSD-5s, which was long-hood forward. The air filter areas stand out in this view.

 I have long had in my locomotive roster a Stewart/Kato model of an Alco RSD-5 roadswitcher. It always ran very well, back in the DC days. That original body shell had been molded with all louvered doors on the hood. I had sliced off the door louvers and approximated the filter openings, and applied a water-cooled stack from Rob Sarberenyi. I added the full “Tiger Stripe” orange diagonal striping in which the locomotives were delivered. Here’s a view of the model, passing the roundhouse at Shumala on my layout.

But when I set out to add a DCC decoder to this locomotive, I found that something had gone wrong in the motor. It would only operate intermittently and made some unpleasant noises in doing so. I spent some time contemplating repowering the chassis, but was a little worried that there was awfully little room to add a speaker for sound. Then I had the idea, why not simply buy a modern RSD-5 chassis, with DCC and sound installed, and put my shell onto it? I decided to try.

I purchased a new Atlas RSD-5 model, with the intent of replacing the new shell, fully louvered, with my old shell. The new chassis is almost identical in shape to the Stewart/Kato one that I had, so this swap does work. Below is a photo of the new chassis. Its air tanks on each side will have be striped in orange, since you can see in the photos above that these tanks should include the stripes.

I pulled out my old sets of Microscale decals for the SP “Tiger Stripe” schemes (set 87-71), and applied Microscale “Liquid Decal Film” to them to ensure they would apply all right.

The application of the stripe decals is more tedious than difficult, though the end moldings take awhile for Walthers “Solvaset” to snuggle the film down over the contours. The walkway sides are much simpler to decal. Note in the foregoing photos that on these Alco diesels, stripes slanted down toward the rear (short hood) on both sides of the locomotive. I mention this because the pattern was different on SP diesel switchers from some other builders.

An interesting challenge in the lettering is the letter “F” for the forward (long) end of the unit, on each walkway. The standard drawing, as shown in Southern Pacific Painting and Lettering Guide (Locomotives and Passenger Cars), 2nd edition, by Jeff Cauthen and John Signor (SPH&TS, 2019) shows this letter as orange on tiger-stripe switchers. But photographs of Pacific Lines engines in this scheme often show a white or silver gray “F,”  including some delivered in 1952.

Moreover, one shortcoming of the Microscale 87-71 sets I have (possibly corrected by now) is that the decal set only has black letter “F”s. I used a Microscale F-unit set, 87-201,  for the letter “F” which, in current sets, is correctly light gray, not silver. Here is the newly-striped walkway part, installed on the chassis. Couplers and some handrails remain to be re-installed.

I have already verified that this locomotive operates nicely on my layout. It will now take its turn on some local freights in future operating sessions, further illustrating the steam-to-diesel transition underway in my modeling year of 1953.

Tony Thompson

Sugar beet loads, Part 2

In much of the Far West in the transition era, sugar beets were an important and lucrative crop. This was certainly true in the area I model, the Southern Pacific Coast Route, along which sugar beets moved in both directions, due to sugar factories in both northern and southern parts of California. So although the particular mythical branch line I model does not lie in beet-growing country, it certainly does see mainline traffic in beets. (I touched on some of these traffic aspects in one of my posts that presented parts of an interview with Malcolm “Mac” Gaddis. That post is here: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/01/modeling-freight-traffic-coast-line_19.html ).
     In accord with the idea to include sugar beet loads in my mainline trains, I devoted some thought and effort to making my own removable beet loads, using fenugreek seeds. My results were not quite as successful as I’d like, but they wee all described in an earlier post (if you like, you can find it at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/08/modeling-sugar-beet-loads.html ).
    Recently I came into possession of some of the old Chooch molded-resin loads which represent sugar beets. They show a reasonable size of the model beets, though they are not quite as irregular as real sugar beets, and overall have a good look. They came two to a package, and as noted on the label, part 7241 is for Red Caboose HO gondolas.

These loads are indeed sized for the Red Caboose cars, but in a way which is not realistic. Namely, they are made to sit on top of the car, representing a car loaded so high that beets lie on the top chords. Beets in such a location would, of course, soon vibrate off the car. Here is a look at the stock load, and you can see the ledge or offset that sits on top of the car side. (You can click on the image to enlarge it.)

When you put this load into a Red Caboose gondola, sure enough, the load looks significantly too high.

     The image below shows the look we are striving for: fully loaded but not onto the car sides. This is a Southern Pacific photo, taken in 1948 near Salinas, California (John R. Signor collection). The loads of beets await unloading at the Spreckels Sugar plant in the background. Though some of the cars are the obsolescent beet racks, many are the new composite GS gondolas (like the model car shown above). The loads stand above the car side, but are nevertheless are entirely inside the car sides.

     It seemed to me that I needed to remove the protruding edges of the Chooch load and allow the load to sit down inside the gondola. I used a heavy rasp to remove the excess resin at the edges of the casting. This gave a better fit (as I show below) but did expose white resin along the sides. Since I want these sides inside the car, however, they may not even need to be touched up.

But when the trimmed load is set into the car, it sits down too far. Some cars may have been partially loaded like this, but usually they were quite full, as you see in the Spreckels photo above. The photo below illustrates the problem, though at least it is realistic to have the load entirely inside the car.

So I used a couple of shott lengths of scale 10 x 10-inch lumber to glue spacers onto the bottom of the load. The height of these spacers could have been a little higher or lower, but this size does give a reasonable look.

     With the spacers shown above, I was pleased with how the car looks when the load is put into the car. This corresponds, to my eye, with most prototype photos from the days of the beet gondolas without side extensions, such as the photo at Spreckels, above.

     With these adjustments, I will go ahead and produce a set of beet loads for my layout. As I mentioned, these only pass by on the SP main line, but they are a characteristic part of Coast Route traffic, and I want to include them.
Tony Thompson

How’s your ballast?

Modelers take a wide variety of approaches to ballasting track, and of course the prototype exhibited a wide range of track conditions, from pristine, fresh rock ballast on main lines, to spurs submerged in mud or overgrown with weeds. But one thing to remember if you model the transition era or before: most railroads had assigned section gangs along main lines, and those gangs did a great deal of work maintaining the line. This included keeping rails properly set and aligned, but also often included careful work with ballast.
     The photo below is from the Southern Pacific employee magazine, the SP Bulletin, in an issue from the early 1950s. It accompanied an article about how important good crushed rock ballast was to dependable mainline operation. But noteworthy in this view is the pronounced and very straight ballast edge.

Not many of us have achieved this kind of ballast appearance on our main lines. I would submit that this is not an unusual appearance on a Class 1 railroad in that era.
     Of course, as I mentioned, many other kinds of track appearance can be found with a little looking. It was very common for there to be a footpath running alongside the track, worn by the use of those track gangs. It isn’t evident in the photo above, but the John C. Illman photo below does show an example. It was taken from a vestibule on Daylight No. 99 near Gato, milepost 330, on the SP Coast Route, on March 18, 1951 (love the semaphores!). That’s the Pacific Ocean at left, of course.

The speed limit at this point was 65 mph for the Daylight, and doubtless it was moving pretty close to that speed. The locomotive is GS-5 no. 4458.
     In many other places, of course, ballast wasn’t particularly neat and could be fairly dirty. The SP company photo below shows the Daylight west of Santa Barbara, running on a main line with barely elevated dark ballast, and with a siding at right that is almost submerged in the surrounding soil (You can click on the image to enlarge if you wish.)

     As the siding in the above photo suggests, secondary tracks were often not very visibly ballasted, and the same was certainly true of yard tracks. Below is a Malcolm (Mac) Gaddis photo from April 1954 at San Luis Obispo, with Consolidation 2803 and Alco switcher 1467 at work. In the center background is the familiar Juillard-Cockcroft brick building (which still stands). The point here is the appearance of the yard tracks, with the dirt surface of the yard about flush with the tops of the ties, and weeds visible in the nearer tracks to the camera.

      These examples are all drawn from the SP Coast Route in the transition era, as many viewers will realize, and typify the kinds of track appearance I have tried to achieve on my layout. If you too want to have track and ballast that look prototypical, this is the range of things that you want to duplicate. Look at a selection of photographs from your modeled area for inspiration.
Tony Thompson

Interviewing for oral history

I have had a couple of questions about this topic recently, and was able to answer on the basis of my own experience, interviewing Pacific Fruit Express retirees for the PFE book (Thompson, Church, Jones, Pacific Fruit Express (2nd edition), Signature Press, 2000), and also interviewing various former Southern Pacific employees for understanding of SP practices. In this post, I will pass along some of those experiences.
     I began this kind of interviewing while I was collecting material for the PFE book. I had arranged to fly out west (I lived in Pittsburgh at the time) to meet up with, and interview, Pete Holst, long-time Assistant General Manager of Car Service for PFE. It occurred to me that I needed to know more about the interviewing process I was going to attempt, and accordingly consulted a colleague in the Department of History at Carnegie-Mellon, where I was teaching at the time, to give me some pointers.
     He told me that he believed there were three keys to effective interviewing of this kind. First, do record the conversation; it seems vivid while you’re hearing it, but it fades terribly quickly. Recording can be an issue, because some interviewees are made nervous or uncomfortable if they are staring at a recording device. He suggested simply putting it under a coffee table, or on the floor alongside a chair, to get it out of view of the interviewee.
     Second, he urged me to take along lots of PFE photos, nice big 8 x 10-inch prints if possible, because these really stimulate the memory of the person you are talking to. I did this, and just as he had stated, almost every one brought forth a story. This little technique is something I have used in every interview since, and it always works very well.
     One of the photos I took along to show Pete Holst was a Don Sims print of icing in progress (shown below), and it triggered tremendous memories for Pete. He must have gone on ten minutes or more, with all kinds of reminiscing about icing, car supply, and perishable trains, and naturally on his first glance at the photo, he correctly recognized it as El Centro, California.

I’ve always loved the clerk at the bottom of the image, holding a clipboard and chalking info onto the cars.
     Third, my historian colleague warned me that at least 90 percent of the “facts” I would be told would be wrong. Yes, the person interviewed may know a great deal about how things were done, and why, and of course that is information you can get nowhere else. But facts? He said that we all remember things far less well than we believe. Someone will say, “we did that shop program in 1938, and I know the year, because my sister got married that summer.” Sounds like a strong memory, right? But it will turn out his sister didn’t get married that year, or if she did, the shop program was a year later. So he urged me to let the conversation flow however it would, and to not worry about chasing down any facts, but let the stories give you the “how and why.” You can get the facts later with your own research.
      To my surprise, he was entirely right about the bad facts. Both with Pete Holst, and later with Earl Hopkins, retired Chief Mechanical Officer of PFE who knew car design and construction forwards and backwards, there was just a whole series of wrongly-remembered numbers and dates and places. But as suggested, the “how and why” was terrific. I hadn’t set out to collect that kind of thing, but I feel lucky to have had the guidance, so that I did get some great information.
     My longest interview with an SP person was Malcolm (Mac) Gaddis. I filled up two 60-minute tape cassettes and we ran a little beyond even that (memo to self: take far more recording capacity than you expect to need). I was especially interested to interview Mac about San Luis Obispo, where he had worked in the early 1950s, and had lots of 8 x 10 prints to spread out on his coffee table. Wow, did we ever cover a lot of ground! Here’s one I remember he really enjoyed, a Richard Steinheimer photo of the blue flag being taken down from the Daylight’s helper at San Luis Obispo before departure (from the DeGolyer Library, used with permission).

     When I got back to Pittsburgh after that first interview with Pete Holst, my colleague told me there was a fourth thing to face up to: I needed to transcribe the entire tape of the conversation. It’s fine to have that tape cassette there on your shelf, but access to the contents is really quite limited. Transcribing a tape or any other audio file is pretty tedious, and I just drove myself to put in the time to do it. And it’s worthwhile to do this soon after the tape was made, because there are always mumbles or unclear words or both people talking at once, and while your memory is fresh, you probably will remember what was being said at such points.
     I will be quick to admit that at the end of the transcribing you have something far more valuable than the tape itself — the conversation is entirely in words on paper, and you can read and refer to it easily. I later donated copies of all my PFE transcripts to the California State Railroad Museum, so that these records are available to other people besides me.
     With the Gaddis interview, I have extracted several relevant sections that have some bearing on the modeling I describe in this blog, and have put them out in previous posts. Here is a set of six links to those posts:

http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/01/modeling-freight-traffic-coast-line_19.html

http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/05/san-luis-obispo-operations.html

http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/06/san-luis-obispo-operations-2.html

http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/08/san-luis-obispo-operations-3.html

http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/08/san-luis-obispo-operations-4.html

http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/01/san-luis-obispo-operations-5.html

These segments do not exhaust anywhere near the entirety of my interview, but they are perhaps the most interesting in terms of my modeling of the SP Coast Route.
     I offer these pieces of advice from my own experience with interviews. They worked for me, so I wanted to pass them on to anyone thinking of doing such interviews. These interviews are in many ways priceless windows into a vanished world. If you get the chance to do one, don’t pass it up.
Tony Thompson

Modeling mining, Part 2

In the first post in this series, I wrote about ways to find out whether there was any significant mining in the area you model, and some examples of what I have learned about chromite mining in the locale of my own layout. (You can read that post at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/10/modeling-mining-in-your-locale.html .) In the present post, I discuss modeling options and challenges.
     The first issue can involve layout planning, as to whether a mine can be included on the layout, and what it should look like. Most chromite mines were not very big or very deep, so did not have grand hoisting works, giant breaker buildings, or mammoth stamp mills. In fact, most of them trucked their ores to rail loaders, as in the Castro Chrome Company loader of which I showed the photo in the previous post. In that case, the truck distance was about 6 miles from mine to loader. Other mines described in the California Division of Mines report I showed previously had similar or longer distances of truck hauls. So my first conclusion is that a truck dump would be a good way to load chromite ore in my area.
     Second, what kind of ore would it be? I mentioned in the previous post that fairly pure chromite is a glossy dark brown or black color. But by the era I model, most of the high-grade or massive chromite deposits had been mined already. That means that mining would consist of disseminated ore, usually with some of the country rock with it, or reprocessed mine dumps, where modern methods could find additional low-grade ore discarded during mining of high-grade ore. There was also the reclaiming of what is called “float,” meaning ore chunks that have eroded from the top of an ore body and moved downhill in water courses. With a dense mineral like chromite, the float can readily accumulate at slower-moving parts of stream courses.There was extensive float recovery in the area I model, so that kind of ore might also move to truck dumps.
     I now plan to add a truck dump on the layout to permit loading of chromite ore. That modeling is not yet underway, but I have a couple of locations in mind. There is currently a Walthers kit for a truck dump (Cornerstone kit no. 4058) and I might use components of that kit for the dump. I’ll return to that in a future post.
     There was a company called Monarch Mining at one time in the central coast area, and it was involved in the chromite traffic. I can use Southern Pacific GS gondolas, as Mac Gaddis mentioned in the post cited in my previous post on mining, and showed in the Castro Chrome photo, or perhaps I could use an ore car or two in Monarch lettering. (I should mention that I have no evidence that Monarch in fact ever owned any railroad cars.)
     In a previous post (at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/02/open-car-loads-bulk-materials.html ) I showed a car lettered for Monarch. In the car, as described in that post, is a load intended to represent disseminated chromite ore. The actual material is crushed green shale, but it has the right hue to pass as the serpentine matrix rock of many chromite ores. Here is a repeat of that photo:

This is an O-scale Gilpin Tram ore car (offered as a kit by Grandt Line), simply given HO scale detail parts and trucks.
     I mentioned in the previous post, cited in the first paragraph at the top of this post, that chromite ore is pretty dense, 280 pounds per cubic foot. This sounds like a job for an ore car like the Mesabi ore jennies, 70-ton cars only 20 or so feet long, with cubic capacities ranging from 850 to 1250 cubic feet. But in fact iron ore is not as dense as chromite; 70 tons of chromite would only occupy 500 cubic feet. So even an ore jenny would not be filled with pure chromite, to stay within load limits. But disseminated ore, containing matrix rock as well as ore, would be less dense, and an ore car could be portrayed as entirely full.
     I still own a couple of kits for the old Model Die Casting white metal ore cars, and built up one of them to letter for Monarch Mining. I chose the reporting marks MMCX for this (there was no user of this mark in the year I model, 1953).

     My loads for cars like this have been shown previously (for example, in the post at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/02/open-car-loads-bulk-materials.html ). I make a base and apply paper mache to it to form the shape of the “heap” of bulk material for the car. Usually with these loads I leave a small gap at one end or one corner, and keep handy a small hook-shaped piece of wire that can be simply hooked under the load and lifted free of the car. In the photo below, one load is in the ore car, and two more are on the ground, one still just paper mache without the “ore” glued to it yet. At bottom right of the photo is a short wire tool for lifting loads, for example from the notch visible in the right end of the ore load in the foreground.

To illustrate the use of the wire took in lifting loads, the photo below shows this in progress.

     This technique with the wire tool is a simple and dependable process, and it allows loads to be built which fill the car. One sometimes sees quite undersize loads in use on some layouts, presumably for ease in removing them, but instead I would prefer to use a tool like this (or a magnet to attract a piece of iron glued to the bottom of the load), and have full-size loads.
Tony Thompson

San Luis Obispo operations-5

I haven’t posted a Mac Gaddis segment for awhile, so thought I would add one here. “Mac” was the late Malcolm Gaddis, long-time SP employee, who worked at San Luis Obispo in the early 1950s and in later years on many parts of Pacific Lines. Mac passed away in 2010. I interviewed him at his home in San Jose in 1990, and afterwards transcribed the tapes I recorded while he talked. Part 4 of this thread can be viewed at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/08/san-luis-obispo-operations-4.html . In this segment, some parts are not about the Coast Line, but they are interesting stories anyway.

     Here are Mac’s comments:

“The SP always ran big trains. I remember one time in Bakersfield, first time I went there, I saw a poor little Consolidation, 2831, with 127 flat cars, it about tore up the yard trying to get traction to move that train. They had to use an 0-6-0 to get it started, and they set up the main line all the way to Fresno to make sure he didn’t have to stop anywhere. He could never have started up again.

     “The Santa Fe was totally different. They ran shorter trains with big power, like those Mountains they had. They would call over to the SP to find out when the next Tehachapi drag was due out, then they would call their train for ten minutes earlier.

     “Of course, the Santa Fe dragged a lot of slow trains over there too. I remember one time at Cliff, they had piled up 40 flat cars in one pile. I got up there about four o’clock in the morning with Jim Strong, who was the chief engineer. What had happened, they had a lumber train, and they had EMDs on the point and those big Alco Alligators on the rear, and were going along the double track in Run 8, probably 18 miles an hour or so. The guy on the front end gets a red block at the end of the siding, and he shuts off, without setting any air or anything. 

     “Well, the Alcos, they were still in Run 8 and kept right on coming, and these flat cars just went every which way. So Jim Strong and I decided that one way to get the main line open quickly was bulldoze ’em over the side, and we had a Cat D8 up there and pushed ’em right over the cliff, and by seven o’clock it was about cleared up.

     “Bob Robinson, the Division Superintendent, came up there, and he didn’t exactly understand what we had done, but the road was clear. We never did have a record of how many cars we had shoved over the bank.

     “About two years later, D.J. Russell was coming up there in his business car, and coming around that curve, he was way out in the very corner of his back platform, so he could see over the side. He loved to do that, see everything on the railroad. They’re standing out there, and Russell says, ‘Say, Bob, what’s all that mess down there?’ 

     “So next day, we had a little staff meeting, as soon as the Old Man had left, and Robinson had to call everybody in and pass along some of the chewing he’d gotten. ‘Gaddis,’ he says to me, ‘how did all those goddam cars get all down that hill?’

     “I said, ‘Oh, gee, that was a long time ago, and I’ve forgotten all about that.’ He looks at me and says, ‘Oh, sure.’ Anyway, he must have driven back up above Caliente to see it, and he was telling me, ‘those all have to go, get rid of all of them.’ We got a junk dealer to go in there and salvage all of those cars.

     “I guess the worst wreck I got involved in on the Coast was at Guadalupe. There was a four-unit diesel, a fairly hotshot train westward on the main, and the Guadalupe local had a cab-forward. It must have been heavy with beets that day. He had switched out his loads, sawed all the way back up, then run down again.

     “Apparently he had gone far enough to clear the signal, and the four-unit diesel coming down the hill into town, doing 45 or 50, just saw three greens in a row. The Mallet had pulled up again and they met right there, laid them both right over, probably the worst mess I ever saw. All four units on their side, the Mallet over the other way, but nobody was killed. They had all seen it coming, I guess, and managed to get off the engines.

     “One time in a strike, management had to operate. I remember working on the Coos Bay local with three Baldwins and 42 log cars, just loaded to the gills. We started east early in the morning, pulled up to the top of the mountain, and went to eat. When we came out again, well, my brakeman was out of the accounting department, and his expertise was close to zero. The conductor was from the safety  department, and I told them both I wanted retainers on all the cars to go down the hill.

     “Of course, they're saying ‘What are retainers?‘ so you have to go back and show them where you turn this little lever, ‘turn it like this.’ They wouldn’t ride on the locomotive, but wanted to be in the caboose. That was okay. I was surprised, those Baldwins actually had an excellent dynamic brake, and they did quite well, no slipping at all. They would ring the alarm bell when they got up to about Run 6, and they would call me on the radio, and I’d say ‘Just keep going.’ They were built so sturdy, I wasn’t worried about the overload.

     “We used the Baldwins on the Coast for awhile, mostly for local work, and they had plenty of pulling power, but the trucks were so rigid they were always damaging the track. The Roadmasters would really gripe about them. Eventually they were moved off the Coast. 
     “Now about the Cuesta tunnels, they had water cars up there for protection. They had them there for years and years, in case of fires. It was four or five cars, usually two with platforms on the top and a couple just with water inside. I don’t recall if any of them had spray heads. Some were on each side of the summit. 
     “There was a siding just above the summit tunnel, between there and Cuesta siding, where there were work cars. You know they worked on those tunnels for just years. They dug out almost six feet of the tunnel tops, with 3-foot gauge cars to pull out the dirt. They could only do a little work at a time, because the line was kept open all through the project, and when they finally got the job done, those work crews must have been shocked. Probably they thought they had a lifetime job.”


     I have a little more from my interview with Mac, and I’ll include it in a future post.
Tony Thompson

San Luis Obispo operations-4

In this post, I will offer another section of my interview with Malcolm “Mac” Gaddis. He worked at San Luis Obispo in the early 1950s and had many recollections of how things were done. I taped my 1992 interview with him, and have transcribed the entire recording.

     “Now Jimmy Jordan, he was Superintendent on the Coast for many years, he liked to go up and down the division on his business car, you know, see how work was being done. He often came down from the Bay Area with his car on 72. Then he would stay overnight, usually with the car up there by the freight house.
     “One of the interesting things I did, Jimmy’s car might be set different places, but he never wanted to be down by the roundhouse, it was too noisy. We had a steam pipe that went up there to the freight house to supply his car, but we usually didn’t have enough pressure in it. He wanted his car kept quite warm, especially in the wintertime or if it was good and foggy in the summer, so I remember putting a 4300 up there for him. It worked out fine, we had the extra engine available, and with a spot fire in it, it was fine for heating the Old Man’s car.
     “One time we had an incident with Jimmy right there. That was when the E units were new. They often came up on 75, the Lark, and went back on 76, and they would pull them off 75 and hold them up near the depot, on the storage track up by the freight house. The track had derails at both ends, that we would just never set, you know, we never used the derails except when Jimmy Jordan was around. Well, that time when Jimmy was in there, the E units came off 75 and a steam engine took the Lark north. They shoved the units in there and lined the derails. Then 76 comes in and the other crew, going to move the E units out onto the main to get out of there, they forgot all about the derails because normally nobody ever used them. Of course the engines went right on the ground.
     “They had to put a 4-8-4 on 76 to go south, and they left the rerailing exercise till morning. I got a few photos  of that. Yeah, Jimmy raised hell about the whole thing, his car was right there, and he knew all about it. I’m glad I wasn’t the one who had to explain why nobody checked for open derails. But I’m sure Jimmy knew exactly what the situation was.

[Mac’s photos of rerailing the E units are in the book by Thompson and Signor, Coast Line Pictorial (Signature Press, 2000), pages 154 and 155, along with an edited version of this story.]

     “The conductor always had the same caboose, you know, assigned. They would sleep in there on runs like the King City turn. Some of them had special beds, shelves, all kinds of things fixed up in there for their own use, however they wanted it. We had this one guy, Luster, I think his name was, and his brakeman was Lee Pilot, called “Starchy” because of his starched overalls. He had linoleum in there, a beautiful caboose, 1256, I think it was, and Starchy’s job was to swab it out before and after every run. Luster was always elegantly dressed, parked his Cadillac at the end of the depot. Luster was really the crabbiest old guy I ever worked with. I don’t remember his first name, but he was called “Turdhead,” which tells you something.
     “I recall Starchy came to me to complain that his trucks were running rough. He did that about three times. So finally I called Rogani, the master car repairer at Bayshore, and had the caboose shipped up there. They changed out the trucks and the draft gear and sent it back. Starchy had it about a month, and I asked him if it was okay. He says, ‘Aw, they didn’t do anything for it.’ I said, ‘Well, they put rubber draft gear in it, and they put those new trucks in it.’ But he wasn’t happy at all.
     “Next thing I know, he files an accident report, claims he hurt his back with the rough ride. So I had to fill out all this paperwork, then I had to report to Robinson, the assistant super, and I was in all kinds of trouble since I hadn’t taken care of this caboose. When he filed a second accident report, I sent the caboose back to Bayshore. The caboose came back again, and I called Starchy on the phone. ‘Oh, it’s great,’ he says, ‘they finally fixed it,’ but he wouldn’t be more specific.
     “I was curious, so I took my keys and went to look at the caboose. They all had private locks on the cars, but I had to have a set of keys. I was in there looking, and Starchy happened by. ‘Starchy,’ I said, ‘just what did they finally fix on this caboose?’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘they painted it. I wanted it painted.’ ‘Why didn’t you just tell me that? You’ve filed accident reports, gotten me into trouble, and you could have just told me you wanted paint.’ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I thought if I got it sent to Bayshore, they would just paint it. And they finally did.’
     “I remember this guy Hinterman, one of the grouchiest old engineeers I ever knew. Sometimes he wouldn’t even speak to his fireman. One time I had to go down to Santa Barbara, because there was a problem with Jimmy Jordan’s car. He had gotten air conditioning put on it, and he couldn’t stand the noise. It had a Waukesha ice machine and a Waukesha engine generator, so this Jack Pauley, his clerk down there, told me Jimmy finally said, ‘Just turn the goddam thing off.’ So he turns it all off, leaving the fan running. By morning, everything was completely dead. I came down on 98 and brought a set of jumper cables and my electrical tools. Jordan’s old lady had gotten a table and chairs off the car and was sitting in the shade of that big fig tree there at the depot.
     “Jordan was so damn mad, with his old lady over there in the shade. He didn’t usually have her along, but this time he did. I had to get the diesel switch engine over there, since it had a battery I could jumper with, and then I sealed it all up so he couldn’t turn it off, and got everything going good. His wife was so delighted. She wanted to know what I wanted, this was about 4:30 or so. I got a really big steak, and I was in there eating it, when he came in. He basically liked me, but he had been saving this steak, so he was fairly mad. He didn’t have much to say.
     “I went down to the depot to see what I could catch coming back, and it looked like I could get 95. So Hinterman comes in and says ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I was down to fix the Old Man’s car, and I’m going back on 95.’ He says, ‘I’m going back light with a 2-10-2 in about twenty minutes. Come back with me and you won’t have to wait.’ I asked who his fireman was, and he really didn’t answer, but I went along to the roundhouse with him. The engine had a spot fire in it, and I didn’t see the fireman around anywhere, so I got up in the engine with him and got the atomizer going and put some fuel in it, and we backed out and I put the water in it myself.
     “Then we picked up the fireman, and he got up in the cab, looked at us and never said a word. I had about 200 pounds of steam in it and water about where it belonged, and I said, ‘Here, this is your seat.’ ‘Naw,’ he says, ‘you’re doing fine.’ So he sits on that little rear seat, for the brakeman, you know, and as we went along, I’d show him what I was doing and he’d nod at me. Finally, I guess we were all the way to the top of Shuman hill, and he was paying a little more attention, so I got him to sit on the seat, and showed him where I had everything set. Meanwhile, Hinterman sat over there and never said a word. When we got going down the hill, I explained to him to be sure and keep the water up. He got it pretty full and going down the hill, Hinterman really opened up and it was just like a percolator, there was water everywhere. By the time we took the siding at Guadalupe, the whole engine was soaking wet, and Hinterman was cussing us both.
     “I turned to this guy, and said, ‘I guess we’ve never met.’ The fireman says,
‘Yeah, I’m new. I’m off the Florida East Coast.’ It was all diesel, you know. I asked, ‘What? How did you draw a steam engine?’ ‘Beats me,’ the guy says, ‘I never fired one in my life.’

There are a few more segments of the interview which I’ll post later.
Tony Thompson

San Luis Obispo operations-3

In this post I’d like to present another segment of my interview with Malcolm (Mac) Gaddis, who was electrical supervisor at San Luis Obispo in the early 1950s. Here he adds some anecdotes about a slightly later period in addition to some San Luis stories. Previous posts with parts of this interview were Part 2 of this thread, at http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/06/san-luis-obispo-operations-2.html, and in Part 1 of the thread, at http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/05/san-luis-obispo-operations.html. The first segment I posted was in the thread on “Modeling freight traffic: Coast Line 1953,” which can be viewed at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/01/modeling-freight-traffic-coast-line_19.html.
     Here are Mac’s comments.

     “After I left San Luis Obispo, I was a test engineer for awhile, mostly working on the dynamometer car, then I went from that to being traveling locomotive supervisor. On that job, I covered the entire system. One of the early things I did on the dynamometer, I had made several Ogden trips in it, and it had a Krumbeller heater in it, which circulated heated salt brine around the car. But it was terrible. We could be burning up at one end, and at the forward end, where the recording table was, you could have two inches of ice on the floor. We got tired of that, and you had to stoke that thing, as well as a great big cast iron stove to heat water for the shower. You needed a shower regularly, it was filthy dirty there, as you were right behind the locomotive and collected all the exhaust and plenty of dust from the roadbed.
     “Anyway, we got the car into the Los Angeles General Shops in 1957 or ’58, and I got rid of the Krumbeller heater and the big cast iron stove both. I got one of those little mobile home stoves put in it, and a 30-gallon water heater which I bought myself, and then we had the icebox changed around so we could put dry ice in it. I got a pot-bellied caboose stove put up in the front end, which was the only thing I could get at the time, and I got the car painted two-tone gray at that time, it had been dark green, you know.
     “The only trouble was, we had a fellow named Ben Hinchman who was Superintendent in Los Angeles. I knew him remotely, I had been a supervisor
for him years before, so he knew who I was. We’d been in there a week or so, the car was about finished, and he came by to see what I’d done to the car. Well, I showed him I’d had it painted, had these four propane tanks added, which I’d gotten from the general car foreman as surplus, I’d paid for the water heater myself, and I don’t remember how we got the little stove but it wasn’t charged to the car bill. So really all that was done was painting and cleanup and a few repairs.
     “He said, ‘That’s impossible. There’s forty thousand dollars of work charged to this car.’ And I thought, something is really phony here. I had to figure out who was coming out on the long end if I’m on the short end, because I would have to answer for this charge. I found this Bill Kershaw, who I’d known for years, and he was overhauling the business car Los Angeles, and he’d overspent his budget by just about forty thousand dollars. He happened to see No. 137 [the dynamometer car] come into the shop, and he got his excess charged to me. As far as I know, that charge never got off of there.
     “That kind of thing was fairly common on the railroad. At the San Luis
roundhouse, there was always some locomotive in the house, stored unserviceable, like the 1629, and they’d sit there dead for six months, you know. Then perishable season would come around, then they’d move them out. But meanwhile, roundhouse employees had to charge time to engine numbers, and the 1629 was right there by the time clock, so we finally moved those engines outside and made sure we rotated engines through those stalls by the time cards.
     “In the yard at San Luis, there was a south-end job, and a north-end yard job, and they would usually use the Consolidations for those jobs. We also had a Twelve-wheeler, 2918. I remember being up at Bayshore when 2918 was on the scrap line. It had a nice big number plate up front, and I went over to the store department foreman and asked how I could obtain it. He said, ‘Well, if it’s scrap, help yourself,’ and I think he even loaned me a wrench. I’ve still got the number plate in my garage. What floored me was three months later, into town comes the 2918, and for front numbers they used some mail box numbers. It bothered me, but not enough to put the plate back on.
     “About 1954 or ’55, we got some strange engines in from Arizona, 3300s I think, then we had an Alco diesel switcher, then some more steam engines. We even had a GE 70-ton engine, I think it had come from Tucson, but it didn’t do very well on that grade in the San Luis yard. When I first went there, we always had a full painted Daylight engine, either to change out or to help 99, but that changed and we mostly had black ones. When we had the Alco RSD-5 engines, they were too slow for the hill, but I remember them trying to help the 4400s up the hill. There was probably about one mile where they actually helped instead of the 4400 pulling them.
     “Normally engines were changed on all trains, but there was water for both directions at the depot, and water and oil on the main line down by the roundhouse. Engines could have run through, but usually changed. The oil was always good and hot down by the roundhouse where the steam lines were close to the boiler.
     “When they started putting Baldwin diesels on for local service, we had a lot of trouble. You would think the diesel with two trucks would be much less rigid than an 8-driver Mike, but those Baldwins, with those six-wheel trucks, they were turning over rails practically every day. We had all kinds of problems with them, especially on those old sidings. I guess they probably tried the RSD-5 engines on that duty too, but they weren’t around too long. Pretty soon we got SD9s instead.
     “A few years later, I was over at Bakersfield, where they used those same Alcos on Tehachapi. While I was there, they got in a whole new batch of Alcos. I saw Carl Meyer there, and was complaining to him about the 7000s I had gotten, 6-motor Alcos with a 251 engine [rebuilt RSD-5s into an RSD-12 carbody], greatly improved over those RSDs, 5300s we called the RSD-5s, which had the old 244 engine. Meyer says, ‘You’re lucky.’ I asked why, and he says, ‘All the time I had the 5300s, they were so bad, they wouldn’t accept them for trade-in, so I had to keep running them.’ They were actually reasonably successful on Tehachapi, but the engineers didn’t like them. They were a little rigid, and they rode rough, which is what the engineers really disliked. Then they would make up stories that the engines couldn’t keep up. Finally they sent all those RSD-5s that weren’t rebuilt to Texas.”

There is more to the interview, and I’ll post additional segments as time permits.
Tony Thompson