August 1st marks the anniversary of the start of construction of my railroad. I usually do a photo survey of the railroad to mark that occasion. This year, I was so busy preparing the railroad and rolling stock for my backdate to the 1950s that I blew right past that date and practice. The railroad was a mess and is only now starting to reemerge.
Two critical projects took advantage of the equipment change—painting the Eugene Arrival-Departure Yard tracks and replacement of the NCE Command Station memory battery. With the yards cleared of rolling stock, I could paint the yard tracks. If one ever wonders why my railroad was built with considerable benchwork strength, the painting process affirmed that choice. I spent much of the effort on top of the yard as I first spray-painted, followed by rail wiping with a piece of cork and then final rail cleaning with a “Bright Boy ™” track cleaning block.
Departure side of the Eugene Arrival-Departure Yard has been painted. The unpainted tracks are engine service tracks that await paint sometime in the future. Cardboard masks protect the room walls from overspray.
Eugene Arrival-Departure Yard body tracks fully painted.
With all of the locomotive consists killed as the locomotives were removed from the layout, the opportunity to replace the memory battery in my NCE command station presented itself. I have lived with the factory-provided battery in my command station since first using the system in 2014. NCE recommends battery replacement every five years. I consider myself fortunate to have made it through a dozen years of service without a known issue. I did succeed in changing the battery with power on which is the recommended procedure to not lose any command station memory settings. Since this was my first time changing the battery, I was glad to seize the opportunity to make the exchange when there really should not have been any memory settings to impact.
NCE Command Station opened up. The battery is the almost quarter-sized disk on the upper board at the upper center-left of the photo. That Panasonic™ battery served long and well.
In addition to the two tasks done with equipment removed from the railroad, I also made great progress developing the freight car fleet for the 1950s. I began this era change with probably two hundred or so 1950s era freight cars appropriate to the SP that previously ran on the California Central Club layout when I was an active member there. Those cars are mostly SP system cars. Since that time, I have become very aware of the distribution of the “free-running” (mostly boxcars) part of the national car fleet in the 1950s.
Although ICC car service rules intended returning freight cars promptly to their owning road, the reality tended to mix the fleet in rough proportion to each railroad’s size in the fleet spread all over the country. This was documented by Tim Gilbert and Dave Nelson as they analyzed conductor wheel reports (a listing of all cars in a train) for trains over the UP’s Sherman Hill. This car distribution likely was very true during World War II when the car service rules were suspended to maximize car use hauling loads rather than returning a car empty to its owner. Reports and interviews of railroad employees regarding their 1950s practices stressed the importance of “protecting the load” as a prime motivation. That protection meant using any suitable car, regardless of owner to carry a load offered by an on-line shipper.
I would love to see a mid- or late-1950s boxcar distribution, at least for the top twenty owning railroads, but for now, I use a chart prepared by freight car guru Ben Hom using 1950 data and a separate chart that Tony Thompson (http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/) uses for 1953 which appeared in the NMRA reprint of a 1953 Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER) done some time ago. Tony has used that 1953 chart frequently in his freight car presentations. The 1953 chart shows the top ten railroad boxcar fleet owners, while Ben Hom’s 1950 chart features the top twenty. That expansion to twenty is important to me as it captures fleets that are only slightly smaller than the tenth largest fleet.
I use the boxcar fleet size charts as guidance and a reminder when making purchase decisions, but only as “guidance.” The major point of both charts is that the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central System boxcar fleets were huge, nearly double the size of even the third, fourth or fifth fleets. Further, Ben Hom’s chart highlights the importance of the Pennsy X29 design and the NYC 1923 ARA design. Fortunately, good models of both have been available and I took full advantage, possibly to excess, to acquire those car types when offered for production and purchase. That stated, I still find myself playing “catch up,” trying to get a representative boxcar owner distribution beyond just a few western railroads.
The new cars I am pulling out of storage to place on my railroad for 1950s operation are biased toward my attempt at the national freight car fleet distribution for the non-SP cars. Home road cars will always dominate, especially for my piece of the SP which was only a modest consumer of goods from elsewhere in the country but heavy on shipping out raw material—forest products.
I set a goal of a hundred “foreign” (non-SP) boxcars for startup of my 1950s operation. I am closing in on that number, but not quite there yet. One impediment to that goal has been my commitment to weather everything before it hits the rails. At this point, I likely have over-weathered a lot of the cars I prepared this summer, but at least they have weathering! I never got back to weathering, not even to paint wheel faces, for my 1984 equipment. I recognized that and resolved this time around to take the time to weather everything.
Most of the newly-prepared 1950s freight cars are seen rounding the mainline curve in the “Marcola” area of my layout. Something close to fifty cars are in the string of cars on the mainline.
Example of a Fort Worth and Denver (CB&Q subsidiary) boxcar that has my current favorite weathering wash applied.
New York Central System 1923 ARA design boxcar. These were produced by Broadway Limited under the guidance and prodding of Richard Hendrickson—an important figure in the push toward more accurate freight car models.
As I note in the caption above for the NYC boxcar, Richard Hendrickson was an important part of the push toward more accurate freight car models in the 1990s and beyond. I recall seeing Richard and Tony Thompson as quite the pair at various Northern California railroad events that I also attended. They helped inspire a number of us to join the push for better models. “Rivets Count!”
As I close in on my equipment goal for startup of 1950s operation, I now turn to organizing those operations. It has been a push, but a solid core has been built and prepared.
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