Refining scenery, Part 5

This series of posts about minor scenery refinements on my layout is not intended to present profound insights into scenery development, only to illustrate that even a largely complete layout like mine can benefit from some refinement and upgrading of scenery. 

The present post is a follow-on to my post about creating some ground texture in an area alongside the modest-size industry, Pismo Marine Services, in my layout town of Santa Rosalia (read that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/01/refining-scenery-part-4.html ).

At the end of that prior post, I mentioned that I had chosen the Tichy handcar shed for a storage shed structure to be placed in the area I had worked on. Like most Tichy products, this shed goes together very nicely and is easy to build. The first step is to glue walls together and add the floor. (The building’s footprint in HO scale is 12 x 20 feet.)

Following this step, the doors were added. I decided to paint the roof of the structure a different color at this stage, when it is easy to do so. I chose dark green, a common enough color for rolled roofing as is depicted on this kit. 

And after considering several shades of gray and tan for the structure’s walls, I decided to keep the molded color of the walls, and thus simply sprayed the body with clear flat, so it could be weathered. I will paint the underfloor support posts a darker gray after weathering .

My next step was weathering. I used my usual technique, washes made with acrylic tube paint, as described in the “Reference pages” linked at the top right corner of this post. The intent was to show a moderate amount of dirt, consistent with a fairly long time in service. On the roof, I added some Pan Pastel gray to soften the dark green.

You can see above that the doors are a little elevated, to accommodate tracks for a speeder. But this isn’t going to be that kind of shed, so I needed to add a little platform, making shed entry convenient. I just used some scrap Evergreen scribed styrene sheet with about 10-scale-inch board width, and assembled it with styrene cement, using scale 8 x 8-inch strip for inside corner reinforcement. I then dirtied it with Pan Pastels. I also added the name of the adjoining business on the doors.

Next the ground texture and some grass and small vegetation needed to be added to complete the scene. That is why, in the previous post’s last photo (see link in top paragraph, above), the center of the area between the two dirt piles was unfinished. Now it looks like this.

Although really quite a small project, this does complete an essentially empty layout area that had been unscenicked except for painting the Homasote. The area has now been put to some use, instead of being merely a blank spot. I suspect there are lots of layouts with occasional small areas that could be given improvements or upgrades like this.

Tony Thompson

Car Service Rules, again

The Car Service Rules of the ARA and its successor, the AAR, are a topic of ongoing interest to many who attempt to mimic prototypical freight car handling. I’ve written about these rules before (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/01/car-service-rules.html ). The topic was large enough that I needed to complete the discussion in a follow-up post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/01/car-service-rules-2.html . 

Although those two posts were fairly thorough, there did arise further commentary some years later, as contained in a post discussing a comment to an earlier post; I wanted to clarify several aspects of the topic. (That post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/05/freight-car-handling-and-distribution.html ).

Just recently, I encountered several verbal discussions on the topic, most recently in the bar at the Cocoa Beach meeting two weeks ago (for a meeting summary, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/01/cocoa-beach-2025.html ). As commonly occurs, there were several misconceptions and misunderstandings expressed in those discussion. Let me see if, once again,  I can clarify.

Let’s say you’re the Car Distributor at an Illinois Central yard in the St. Louis area. You have just received a car order for a 40-ft. box car to go to Seattle, to a consignee located on the Great Northern. The “empty” track in your yard has six box cars: two IC cars, and one each New York Central, MKT, Rock Island, and Western Pacific. What do you choose?

Let’s look at the rules. These were reproduced for decades in the back of each issue of the Official Railway Equipment Register, or ORER. You can click on this image to enlarge it if you wish.

As can be seen with a little thought, the purpose of these Rules was to reduce the number of empty miles run off by freight cars. If every railroad always loaded its own cars, and sent all foreign cars homeward empty, at least half the miles moved by the national fleet would be empty miles, of no benefit to anyone. In practice, these Rules were found to reduce empty miles to a little less than a third of all miles. In a sense, then, the Rules reduced the need for car purchases, through better utilization.

Now to our car order. Rule 1 says that you shouldn’t use the IC cars. For the further rules, you have to look back at the Bill of Lading, which includes the shipper-designated routing, via Wabash as far as Council Bluffs. That would be one railroad’s car you could use, the Wabash, so that the car could run off some miles on its own road, but you don’t have one. At Council Bluffs, the route designates UP, but you don’t have a UP car either. The routing designates UP as far as Portland, Oregon, then via GN to Seattle, but here again, you don’t have a GN car. This means you can’t follow Rule 2, 3 or 4.

We now consult Rule 5, to load a car to a Home District before or adjoining the destination District. Here is the official map (from the ORER), and the destination in District 1 adjoins Home Districts for the WP, in both Districts 2 and 5. So the right choice for this load is the WP car. The Rock Island car could be used also, as the adjoining District 5 of District 1 is a Home District for the RI.

What else may come into play? The empty NYC, MKT and RI cars could all be readily returned directly to their home rails in the St. Louis area, provided that there was no car shortage, so this could be a further reason to use the WP car for loading.

The example above is a little misleading, in only having a single car order to fill. In most situations, the IC Car Distributor would have several. From the Car Service Rules, you could expect the NYC car to be used for destination in the northeastern quadrant of the U.S., the Southern car for the southeastern quadrant, and the MKT car for the southwestern quadrant.

Modelers often think that a railroad would load the home-road car first, and that might be necessary on some occasions, but the Car Service Rules clearly prioritize using a car from quite far away from the originating point, as in the case described above. A consequence that may not be obvious is that on a layout like mine, an SP layout in California, loaded cars arriving from far away have a good probability of being SP cars, not cars from railroads in that faraway location.

For a somewhat different example, here is a Great Northern box car spotted at the type foundry on my layout (to learn what a type foundry is, you can consult this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/05/whats-type-foundry.html ). The car came from Elizabeth, New Jersey and in accord with Car Service Rules, was routed to a Home District adjoining a Home District for the GN. The car, incidentally, has drifted a little into Alder Street, but should properly stand clear.

I should also mention a factor often overlooked by modelers: the state of the economy. When the economy is slack or in recession, each railroad tends to have more empties on hand than it needs, and priority goes to returning those empties; thus there are usually lots of empty cars to choose from in filling an order, and one can readily follow the Car Service Rules.

But when the economy heats up, cars tend to be in shorter and shorter supply. Then the Car Service Rules get ignored, in favor of getting your shipper the car that is needed. In such a case, you might fill the car order described above with an empty Southern box car, even though it would violate all six rules, if that was the only empty on hand. Railroaders sometimes called this provision “Rule Zero,” in reference to the Car Service Rules, as the most important rule: satisfy the shipper first.

Whether you choose to take these Rules into account in your model railroad layout, as part of car flow in operating sessions, is of course a personal matter, but it is one more component of achieving realistic operation.

Tony Thompson

Role playing for operation

Whenever model railroad operating sessions are discussed, the topic of role playing usually comes up. By that, we mean fulfilling a role of a railroad employee, most visibly the engineer of a locomotive. And of course there are other roles too, from dispatcher to yardmaster to brakeman, and not least, conductor. And there are others. These roles are played during the session.  I’ve recently posted a blog about those kinds of roles (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/01/realistic-layout-operation-part-3.html ).

But awhile back, my friend Jim Providenza pointed out some additional roles that end up being played, before and after operating sessions. These too are railroad jobs that have to be done, every bit as much as those that are pursued during operating.

An obvious one is track maintainer. It is a rare layout indeed that does not require maintenance, repair, upgrade or even replacement of track elements between operating sessions. (We also clean track, which the prototype does not need to do, so I don’t mean that part.) I’m referring instead refer to the rails and their correct arrangement.

As a person who has, to date, written fully 14 episodes on a continuing series of posts, all titled “Trackwork wars” in part, I know this well. (To check on that series, you can readily find them by using “trackwork wars” as the search term in the search box in the upper right of this post.) And I know from talking to many a layout owner, I am not alone.

I recognize, in my own layout, that there are areas that have been perfect in operation for years, but there are also trouble areas that I know will need work from time to time. The scene shown below, with an ancient NMRA Mark II gauge, is all too familiar.

Another kind of role, of course, is car maintainer and locomotive maintainer. Most cars and most engines are fine in any given session, but a coupler may be pulled out of alignment, or truck screws get too tight for trucks to rotate into curves, and so on. Between sessions, they have to be brought back up to standards.

On my layout, and I think on many, a significant time-sink of an off-session role is that of clerk. All the paperwork for a session, from train line-ups to notices of all kinds, have to be prepared, and of course whatever system of car forwarding is in use has to be exercised to provide the right waybills, car cards or other documents for the session.

Hopefully, of course, we don’t encounter an immense amount of such paperwork, so that setting up an op session doesn’t require a prototypical force of clerks (SP yard office photo).

Instead, we work through whatever our system requires, as it’s been developed for reasonably efficient resetting of the layout for the next session. As often as not, I find myself setting the waybills against the cars to make sure I have every one covered, and the bill is correct for the session. (Visiting operators are discouraged from doing this except at the outset of a session, when all cars need to be identified.)

What is shown above is not so different from the yard clerk attaching route cards to freight cars in the yard, as in this Missouri Pacific photo (courtesy Charlie Duckworth).  

So as Jim observed, we do play some roles between sessions, just as we play them during sessions. It may be a different kind of “play value,” but it’s mostly enjoyable just the same. And of course the core of all this is that you choose to have an operating session at all. My own sessions on the present layout are about to reach 100 in number.

Tony Thompson

Refining Scenery, Part 4

In this series of posts, I am describing some quite minor refinements to my layout scenery, not because they are noteworthy projects, but to illustrate that even a nearly complete layout like mine still has some needs for scenery repair, upgrade or completion. The second of these was a good example, simply moving  two trackside details farther from a ground throw; it can be found at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/12/refining-layout-scenery-part-2.html . (It also contains a link to the first in the series.)  

In the present post, I don’t describe a correction to layout scenery, as I did in the first two of these posts; instead, I describe completing an area that has been “bare ground” (actually, brown-painted Homasote) for years. In the photo below, it is the area against the backdrop, identified with the arrow, to the left of the long, low gray building (Pismo Marine Service). The small yellow shed was a candidate for this area, but will be used elsewhere. There’s really nothing there but a tie pile (you can click to enlarge the image).

What I decided to do was to add some kind of a (different) shed in this area, along with some terrain character that would look as much like dirt piles as anything. I made a couple of low piles using Sculptamold paper mache, as you see below. Note also the distinctive texture of the Homasote “ground” in the area (you can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish). What used to occupy this area was the foreground stack of ties.

Obviously we don’t want to be presenting snow piles, located mere yards from the Pacific Ocean in central California, so these were promptly painted brown.

Then the same scenic technique described in the previous posts in this series was used to cover the piles in dirt and a little grass, leaving the space between the piles open. The area is now prepared for the next step.

The intent for the gap between the two dirt piles was to accommodate a shed of some kind, whether a railroad-owned shed or something associated with the warehouse business to the right, in the scenes above. The real purpose is to fill the empty area that you see above, which can’t accommodate an industry to be switched because it is alongside a turnout. My choice was the Tichy kit for a handcar shed, which follows a C&O prototype, though I won’t be representing a handcar facility, just a shed. But that will be the topic of a future post.

Tony Thompson

Refining scenery, Part 3

Back in the summer of 2024, I relocated the MP1 switch machines at the throat of my trackage into the layout town of Santa Rosalia. I won’t go into the reasons for that (it can all be found in a series of previous posts, culminating in this one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/07/update-on-switch-machine-installations.html ), but to sum up, the relocated machines had linkage exposed between machines and track. This can be seen below, along with remnants of previous arrangements. 

The “trenches” in which the linkages lie need to be filled in with paper mache, so they can be scenicked. The wire linkages pass through brass tubing, so filling the “trench” will only contact the tubing, and allow free movement of the linkage wire. In addition, the surrounding area was unfinished scenically, so that needed attention also. Below is an older photo of the entire area, as it appeared when the current structures were in place and the MP1 machines connections were concealed.

The building at photo center with the gray roof, built from a Timberline kit, is called “Ballard Farm Supply,”and is located here to cover the switch machines shown in the upper photo. To its right is a railroad water tank, and in the foreground is the Richfield bulk oil dealer in the town of Santa Rosalia, including a tank car spotted for unloading.

I applied Sculptamold paper mache to the linkage trenches, and also to make some ground contours in the area. As you can see below, this area is right in front of the backdrop, and some effort is needed to minimize visibility of the joint between horizontal layout surface and vertical backdrop. The loading dock in the photo below shows the location of the left end of the Ballard Farm Supply building.

Next the area needed to be painted. I used acrylic tube paint in Raw Umber for this. I extended the color over the entire area, since I want to scenick it all.

Next I applied my usual technique, a coating of matte medium followed by real dirt and a few pinches of Woodland Scenics grass. Then the area is spritzed with “wet water” to make sure the matte medium contacts all the scenic materials and secures them.

Finally, to show how this was supposed to end up, I show below the Ballard Farm Supply building in place to conceal the MP1 machines, though with its roof off. Other scenery work in the area remains to be done. Incidentally, the Farm Supply business does receive inbound rail shipments, but having no spur of its own, receives them at the town team track.

As I have observed in each of these “Refining Scenery” posts, this is a quite minor project, but I wanted to show it to illustrate the kind of thing that is often needed, even on a layout as nearly complete as mine. More later.

Tony Thompson

The yard brush

I suspect this is another of those titles for a post that will puzzle some readers. What I am referring to is a soft brush provided to a yardmaster or yard operator.  But why, you cry. The answer is simple: when a lull in yard work comes along, the yard operator can remove dust from car roofs or interiors. To illustrate, below is a hopper car interior, quite dusty as the finger marks show. Why not dust this?

I have to quickly mention that in O scale, many layout owners seem to like the dusty look, and will tell you, instead of dusting the cars, to please not touch them and thereby disturb the nice dust. This post is for all other types of layout owners, who generally have the opposite view of dust.

So what kind of brush am I suggesting? The usual sort of “make-up” powder brush, available at any cosmetics counter, is large and soft, perfect for dusting without disturbing detail parts. The best kind is the broad brush I was told is a “blusher” of the kind you see below. This type is also called a “face brush” or a “powder brush.” This brush is about 5 inches long, and is the one I use for my layout.

As you can see, the brand is “essence of Beauty.” They have an extensive line of makeup powders and brushes, and brushes are usually around $5.00 or so.

Another brush I have used, and currently acts as my “traveling brush,” when I operate at someone else’s layout, is from the “bareMinerals” brand, and is also about 5 inches long. I use the larger, soft end. This brand also offers a “powder brush” like the one shown above. Brushes from this brand are considerably more expensive than the “essence of Beauty” brushes; I inherited this one.

I have a third brush, with no brand name on it, very similar physically to the others, which I keep on my workbench (in a different place than the layout). It’s the same size, but has black bristles, equally as soft as the others, and I use it for the same kinds of dusting.

All these brushes are quite effective, and I like what they can do. They all get used, whether home or away. And by the way, of course I ask the layout owner’s permission to dust cars, as should anyone! Below I show my “visiting” brush in action on Jim Providenza’s well-known Santa Cruz Northern layout, though in reality it wasn’t needed, just a demo.

So is this important? No, not really, totally a detail, though I sometimes remark that a well-equipped yard should have a yard brush handy. Brushes like this need not be expensive, so you might give one a try. Whether you permit visiting operators to wield one is a separate decision <grin>.

Tony Thompson

Realistic layout operation, Part 2

I have raised this very general topic simply intending to add a few comments on the subject. Most modelers already have ideas about what they want to accomplish on a layout, or have already accomplished those ideas. I am just putting forward some thoughts of my own on the topic. 

In the first post on this subject, I talked about completeness and realism of scenery and rolling stock treatments, obviously the visual parts of a realistic layout that is operated (you can find that post at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/11/realistic-layout-operation.html ). 

Let me repeat why I haven’t commented further on layout building, scenery, structures, and all kinds of other physical layout factors. Nowadays, there is so much guidance on the modeling side that I hardly feel any need to enter that topic. From Tony Koester’s outstanding book, mentioned in the first post (link in second paragraph above), and C.J. Riley’s long-awaited publication, Realistic Layouts (Kalmbach Media, 2020), which I reviewed when it was new (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/05/riley-layout-book-published.html ), my comments would pale beside these authorities.

Now I want to talk about operations themselves. Here the fundamental principle, in my opinion, as I stated in the first post, is to follow the prototype wherever possible. One part of this topic is paperwork. Of course, the prototype handled an immense amount of paperwork, involving armies of clerks before the computer age, that we have no interest in duplicating, but some of that paperwork is germane to model operation. The key is to identify the germane parts and decide how to use them.

I believe the first piece of paper that is essential to give a prototypical appearance is a timetable. I hasten to add that it need not be sophisticated or complex, and may not even be important in your particular layout operation, but it is a vital part of what’s called “typographic scenery,” a phrase coined by Al Kalmbach and included in his 1942 book, How to Run a Model Railroad. Here is part of page 44:

Note his examples above: they refer to his fictitious railroad, the Great Gulch, Yahoo Valley and Northern. Notice, too, his comment in the text about bulletins and letterheads, so typographic scenery needn’t be limited to timetables. I note in passing that the above page was published over 80 years ago.

On the timetable point, I have done what many layout owners do: I simply copied shamelessly from the Southern Pacific original. My layout is located on SP’s Coast Division, so I used the cover of the September 1953 employee timetable as my own timetable cover, almost verbatim. I only added the word “supplement” under the timetable number, to indicate that this is not the full Coast Division timetable.

Then in the center spread of this document I included the eastward and westward timetables for the Guadalupe Subdivision, which is where my layout is located. I simply removed numerous stations that are some distance away from my layout’s location, and inserted a line for Shumala, where my fictitious Santa Rosalia Branch leaves the main line. For more about this, you could read my article in the October 2014 issue of Model Railroad Hobbyist, an issue still available for free to read on-line or download for your use, at www.mrhmag.com .

I believe this captures a great deal of the prototype flavor, contributing to realistic operation. To complete the paperwork for conduct of operations, I also use a lineup of trains, for the benefit of yard crews at Shumala, giving the dispatcher’s estimate of times of freight trains and extras. For some sessions, I also supply a Bulletin, such as the one shown below (you can click to enlarge).

In addition to the above, I also use switch lists, “flimsy” train order forms, and clearance forms, all copied directly from SP originals, as shown below (at the time I model, SP did not put its name on train order or clearance forms). Prototype originals like this can be a starting point if your layout models a fictitious railroad. 

Last, I plead guilty to having contributed to the recent upsurge in interest and usage of prototypical waybills. Having over more than a decade, written 117 posts on the topic (for a guide to the first 100 of these, see this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/11/waybills-part-100-guide.html ), along with several magazine articles, I can’t hide from it; but I do think this is an obvious feature to include on any layout that has switching. I won’t go further into waybills at this point.

The paperwork items described above are certainly typographic scenery, but more importantly, they are among the tools for prototype operation that follows the prototype. I will turn to that aspect, layout operation, in a future post.

Tony Thompson

 

Refining layout scenery, Part 2

In the previous part, I mentioned that no matter how carefully built the layout is, or how conscientiously maintained, careful examination will inevitably reveal a few layout areas that need work. Some time ago I began to be more systematic in this layout examination process, which I have termed “management by walking around” (see the post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/07/management-by-walking-around.html ). And yes, I know this phrase is already a cliche in management circles.

My first venture back into this process, after some time off, was reported in the first post in the present series, describing an improvement in the location of my yard limit sign at Shumala. You can read that post here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/11/layout-scenery-refinements.html ).

One persistent problem on the layout has been in the area near the mainline tunnel, leaving Shumala westward. Near the tunnel mouth, there is a track gang’s tool house (at right below), a milepost (the telegraph pole with the white paint and the milepost number), a cable box (where telegraph lines from the pole go underground to traverse the tunnel), and a phone booth, all near a ground throw for the Shumala siding. This is a kind of tight location for throwing that switch, especially for those with fat fingers or diminished coordination.

The view above probably looks okay. But I realized long ago that some people would find the ground throw area a little confined, and would bump into the phone booth and cable box, so they aren’t glued down. As a result, after most operating sessions the area shown above looks like what you see below.

The real problem is that there isn’t room to put those two items farther from the ground throw, because the ballasted grade area narrows toward the telegraph pole. The obvious solution is to enlarge that grade down to and past the pole. My method was to mix up a little Sculptamold paper mache and adjust the contours appropriately, as you see here.

Next I painted the new area with acrylic tube paint, Burnt Siena, as a foundation for scenic materials to follow. I had originally planned to ballast the entire new contour, and put the phone booth and cable box back on top of it. But as I mentioned in the first post in this series, this is not what Southern Pacific usually did. They mostly put things like phone booths on the ground outside the ballast. I decided to do the same.

My usual base scenery material for “ground” is a medium tan earth, actually real soil collected around home plate on a softball diamond. I paint the area with dilute matte medium, apply the soil, and spritz it with “wet water,” water with a bit of detergent, this latter to help make sure all the scenic material is contacted by the matte medium. I then add a pinch of ground foam grass, so the ground isn’t perfectly bare. That gives the appearance shown below. Comparing the top photo in the present post, you can see how the level area has been enlarged.

Next I simply replaced the cable box and phone booth, but now much closer to the pole, leaving more space for “fat fingers” to operate the ground throw. These remain unglued for the reason stated above. I have considered adding a heavy cable from the top of the cable box up to the pole, representing the telegraph lines being brought down from the pole to an underground line, but have not decided how best to do this. So for the time being, this is the arrangement.

I have a couple more minor scenery refinements like these to describe, and will do so in future posts. To repeat, these are quite minor projects, chosen only to illustrate that even a fairly complete layout needs continuing attention to scenic details. Perhaps these posts will allow you to look at your own layout with a fresh eye.

Tony Thompson

 

More about making crate and box loads

I have written about this topic before, and in the present post, am adding more examples, in part to show a different technique. Crated loads on flat cars and in gondolas are prototypical and relatively simple to make, and offer variety in what your open-top cars carry. I showed a variety of crate and box types in my first post on the topic, some years back (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/03/open-car-loads-crates-and-machinery.html ). 

I expanded my ideas on this topic a bunch of years later, and treated it as a “Part 2” of the same topic, helpful in finding the predecessor, as it’s linked therein: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/05/open-car-loads-crates-part-2.html . This post was about building some large crates as hollow styrene boxes, and the project completion was described later: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/06/open-car-loads-crates-part-3.html .

The present post is about still another approach. I recently came across some hardwood offcuts from a project, and immediately thought of crates, but they were not square all around. On each one, the cut on one side was not square to one other pair of sides. But these could easily be braced to level them in use. I began by painting them light gray, then carefully examining them for any places that needed a little modeling putty, often lines of wood grain. I used Tamiya putty for this.

With the putty well dried and sanded smooth, another coat of paint made the boxes ready for use. Next came leveling them. Using a small square, as shown below, enabled me to identify exactly what size of stripwood or styrene to use as a level on each block.

Each wood block was different in what it needed. But the important part is that the styrene piece need not exactly fit at the extreme end, but could be placed  at an intermediate point, sufficing to level the block. An example is shown below.

With each block leveled in the way just described, I then added outside trim to hide the angle. For the block shown above, I used styrene HO scale 1 x 10-inch strip. The bottom of the block is shown below. When upright, of course, this is hidden.

I then painted the trim to match the block. Next came a choice of label or emblem on the load. Many shippers added a prominent name or logo on shipments like these, and this makes the load interesting too. One can of course browse the internet for emblems of famous companies; this is what I once did in making an emblem for an appliance carton (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/10/cardboard-cartons-part-2.html ), using General Electric. For the present project, I decided to use mining equipment, and where better to look than the ads in journals for that industry, like these:

Next came scanning of appropriate ads, reduction to a useful size for HO loads, and printing out on a high-resolution color printer at my local copy shop. Then the paper labels can be glued to crates or boxes with canopy glue.

It may be noted that the labels are added on the upper part of the crate. This is a deliberate choice so that they are visible when used as gondola loads as well as when they are flat car loads: see below. (You can click to enlarge.)

It might be asked, “Why mining loads? There’s no mine on that layout.” That’s true, but there was mining in the vicinity, as I’ve explored previously (see my post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/10/modeling-mining-in-your-locale.html ). These crates can be destined to my off-layout mining company, Monarch Mining, which produces chromite ore. I have written a bit about this company and the ore (the post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/10/modeling-mining-part-2.html ).

With the completion of these loads, I have some additional crates to add to my freight car operations. Now to make some suitable waybills for the movement of these products . . .

Tony Thompson

Layout scenery refinements

This topic may seem a little surprising. The great majority of my layout has been pretty much complete for ten years, and parts of it are considerably older than that (for some previous posts about my layout’s history, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/11/layout-origins-shumala.html or a more general one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/02/my-layout-description.html ). But problems do arise, or in some cases, persist for years. I plan to write several posts about correcting a few of them.

One of the areas on the layout that needs improvement is the location for my yard limit sign, for trains returning to Shumala from the Santa Rosalia Branch. This was a “small project” a number of years ago, and identified for branch train crews the point where they should stop and request yard entry. In my post, I even showed the SP standard drawing for such signs. (See that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/08/small-mdodeling-project-yard-limit-sign.html ).

Below is shown the area that includes the yard limit sign, and as may be evident, it is quite close to the track, close enough that steam locomotives with longer wheelbases often brush against it. This view is taken from right above the tunnel portal through which the Santa Rosalia Branch track exits the Shumala junction.

As you can see above, the problem is that the sign is already at the outer edge of the railroad fill as it is, and there isn’t room to put it farther from the track. So what is obviously needed is to widen that fill in the area near the sign location. 

This is pretty easy to fix. I simply mixed up a little Sculptamold paper mache and adjusted the contours appropriately, as you see below, to widen this area of fill.

Of course this snow-white look is not too appropriate for the California coast, so I painted it with acrylic tube paint, Burnt Umber, as a foundation for scenic materials to follow. One thought for the next step was simply to ballast the entire new contour. But this is not what Southern Pacific usually did. Photos of SP right-of-way almost always show things like signs located on the ground outside the ballasted area. I decided to do the same.

My usual base scenery material for “ground” is a medium tan dirt, actually very fine real soil collected around home plate on a softball diamond. I paint the area with dilute matte medium, apply the soil, and spritz it with “wet water,” water with a bit of detergent. A few pinches of ground foam grass then help the area blend with it surroundings. At the bottom of this view is the yard entry signal for Shumala (which I described in a previous post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/04/a-yard-entry-signal.html ).

The next step once all the scenic modifications are dry and solid, is to re-install the yard limit sign, which I did with canopy glue. This is the final result, looking to a casual observer as being much like it was before, but as you can readily see by comparing to the first photo is this post, now it’s really well clear of the track. In fact, the post is now 11 scale feet from the track center line, in conformance with the usual railroad standard that everything is clear within 8 feet of the track center.

I continue to tour the layout from time to time, with note pad or clipboard in hand, and try and find every area that needs to be repaired, upgraded, or even scenicked for the first time (I described this approach in a post some time back: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/07/management-by-walking-around.html ). I will mention a few other recent refinements like this in future posts.

Tony Thompson

Realistic layout operation

My topic today is realistic operation of a layout, including small layouts, and how to achieve it. A goal of many layout owners, including me, is to offer a realistic operating session when guest operators visit. But what do we mean by “realistic?” That’s what I want to go into.

I won’t spend too much time describing what actual layout owners have done or are doing, but intend to indicate what I think is required. This is drawn in part from experience hosting about 100 operating sessions on my own layout, but is also based on my experience on dozens of other layouts, many of them that I have operated on multiple times.

So what’s the core idea? For me, the core of realistic operation is following the prototype. Okay, what does that mean? I divide it into three parts: the first is in some ways the most obvious to observe, and yet the least important of the three, and I’ll explain why. This first point is realistic appearance. (I’ll return to the other two.)

There is an enormous amount of published material on this topic, and rightly so, because it has so many dimensions: scenery, trackwork, structures, rolling stock and locomotives, backdrops, on and on. And certainly this can matter, because just the first glimpse of  a visually great layout is usually stunning. But I think it’s important to recognize two points: first, that a visually stunning layout may not actually be very prototypical (Malcolm Furlow’s dioramas come to mind), and second, that there have been and still are any number of freelanced (not prototype railroads) layouts that meet the realistic appearance standard.

But before continuing, I should mention that I realize my topic is awfully close to the title of Tony Koester’s Kalmbach soft-cover book (2nd edition, 2013), which I reviewed when it had recently come out (you can see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/03/tony-koesters-recent-operations-book.html ). I hope to go beyond the basics of Tony’s fine book.

As I stated above, the first thing that comes to mind in trying to define “realistic appearance” is fidelity to the prototype. How broadly can we define this? I once visited a layout built by an owner who wanted to imagine a future time when hydrogen fuel would be used in locomotives (and in the rest of the economy), and had rolling stock, locomotives, and industries thoroughly “imagineered” to suit this vision. But I think there is a real barrier to “realism” in such an approach, just as there would be in a layout with brightly-colored rolling stock on a layout (named for the owner’s children) called the “Jimmy and Susie Railroad.”

But that shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that free-lance layouts have a problem, provided their appearance and operation are in fact “realistic.” There are famous examples, like Allen McClelland’s Virginian & Ohio, Bill Darnaby’s Maumee, Jim Providenza’s Santa Cruz Northern, Tony Koester’s former Allegheny Midland, and Jack Ozanich’s Atlantic Great Eastern, all beautifully executed layouts with strongly prototypical looks and operation. Below is a photo I took on the AGE. I think it speaks for itself.

Still, choosing a prototype railroad to model can furnish a strong connection to a visitor’s existing knowledge. This was, in part, the inspiration for my own present layout. During the year I lived in England, attending model railroad exhibitions on many weekends, I saw the strength of the idea behind many portable exhibition layouts: an imaginary branch line of a familiar railroad. Then the locomotives, depots, freight car appearance, signals, and so on, are all familiar sights, making many features of the model obviously prototypical.

With that inspiration, I chose to model a long-time favorite, the Southern Pacific, while also choosing to follow the imaginary branch line idea. That in turn means that I model a real railroad in a fictitious place. For me, however, it’s more important that the scenes modeled and the operations practices should reflect the prototype’s practices, than that places are accurately modeled.

A single example of this is my two-car ice deck, a common size in small towns, with its features and details taken from PFE prototype practice (as I described recently at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/06/background-for-my-layout-ice-deck.html ). Below is a photo of it in use.

And to repeat, lots of authors have discussed this same topic. A notable example, rarely recognized these days, is Frank Ellison, in a number of his articles and publications. Particularly rarely recognized is his article from the January 1956 issue of Model Railroader, entitled “Fitness of Things,” focusing on any number of physical features of outstanding layouts. You can click to enlarge it if you’d like to read this page.

Of course, the real way to represent a prototype railroad in full is to buckle down to the challenge of choosing scenes to model, artistically compressing them to retain the core of their appearance, and then getting it all built. Probably there exists no better example than Jack Burgess’s Yosemite Valley, a superbly conceived and beautifully modeled and detailed double-deck railroad (photo by Venita Lake).

But beyond realistic appearance, I believe, come two further points, which both relate to the way in which the layout is operated. This post has already gotten long, so I will defer comments on these operation aspects to future posts, and will address the two parts of following the prototype not covered here.

Tony Thompson