Robert's Vasona Branch Blog

Visit the Vasona Branch... and Maker Faire!

2026-09-19T10:36:46.242-07:00

If you've been meaning to visit the Vasona Branch, this weekend is your chance.

The NMRA Pacific Coast Region's Coast Fall meet will be at the Santa Clara depot on Sunday, September 27, 2026. There will be clinics at the depot in the morning, and layout tours in the afternoon. The clinics should be fun and interesting - Ed Gibrovan talking about useful tools for model building, Guy Cantwell sharing how to build a fleet of freight cars quickly, and Seth Neumann giving his tutorial on layout design.

I'll have the Vasona Branch open as part of the afternoon layout tours from 1:00 to 4:00. There's at least a couple other great layouts in the San Jose area that will also be open. Come on down for a fun afternoon!

For full details, check your e-mail for the "COAST EXTRA" update. Alternatively, look at the NMRA Pacific Coast Region's calendar for times and location.

Note that this will be the same weekend (September 26-27, 2026) as Maker Faire Bay Area on Mare Island in Vallejo - "the world's largest show and tell". Maker Faire is a wonderful experience - a chance to see all the crazy things that other people make and do, and a great source of inspiration for new tools and new artistic outlets. Tickets are available online.

If you're curious what Maker Faire is like, check out the Maker Faire 2025 Virtual Field Trip showing off some of the things you can see and do.

Figuring out more about figures

2026-06-07T12:39:03.181-07:00

I’ve been happy enough with the cannery worker figures that I’ve continued to experiment with making figures over the last few weeks. Here’s a couple interesting observations.

Let the AI propose figures

The current workflow - I think of a description of a figure, let gemini.google.com draw a picture of a person based on that description, and I let tripo3d.ai turn the image into a 3d printer model - is pretty easy. Choosing which figures to make requires a little bit of care. What are suitable figures for my era and place? How do I describe someone in 1930’s clothing? How do I mix up my choices do I don’t have a bunch of similar figures?

As I was doing lots with the AI / large language models to create images, I realized that the generative AI systems are also good at analyzing photos too. So… we could also get the AI chatbot to propose a bunch of possible figures, and I could pick out the ones I want.

The AI chatbots work completely from text, so all I need is the right prompt. I ended up taking one of the photos of the workers at a cannery (such as the panoramic photo from California Canneries in Campbell. I dragged the photo into the chatbot at gemini.google.com, and gave it the following command:

Find the human figures in the attached photo from 1930’s California. For each person, write a four sentence physical description of the person that can serve as a prompt to generate a 3d figure of the person. Each description should start with "Create a front, side, and rear image of a human figure suitable for creating a 3d model of the person where the figure represents a person in 1930’s California. The figure is…" For each figure, the description should indicate details of body and face type: build, height, facial features, etc. inspired by the original photo The four-sentence description should also include a description of movement that would be appropriate for that person: either that the figure is walking (most figures should show some movement), perhaps carrying an item (personal item, fruit lug, tool, bag, appearing in a quarter of the figures), or indicate a reasonable pose for a normal person of the time. The description can also contain facial features or other details that might make the figure unique or animated. The output should be a sequence of description prompts that can be used later to create an image of the figure. Each description should contain a summary or label for the figure (“the lean plant mechanic”), followed by the four-sentence description in plaintext. Do not generate the images at this time.

Note that I started with a smaller prompt, but added detail and restrictions when the AI didn’t quite do what I wanted. For example, the gory detail about “show the output this way” happened because the chatbot would switch between giving textual output and just giving me a picture in a form I didn’t want. The comment about adding movement and animation was needed because otherwise the figures were all just standing with arms at their side.

Running that command on gemini.google.com quickly throws out three or four potential figure descriptions. Pasting those descriptions/prompts into Gemini generates nice images, sometimes with details or roles I hadn’t intended. I was particularly surprised when the chatbot started identifying potential roles.

Here’s a on example Gemini created:

The industrious cannery worker: Create a front, side, and rear image of a human figure suitable for creating a 3d model of the person where the figure represents a person in 1930’s California. The figure is a sturdy, broad-shouldered woman with a kind, experienced face and graying hair pulled back under a simple white head covering. She wears a long-sleeved dress covered by a practical, thick canvas apron, and she is holding a small metal fruit-sorting tool in one hand. The figure is posed standing upright with a slight forward lean, as if preparing to return to an assembly line.

and here's the image that Gemini created for that prompt. Don't ask me what the tool she's holding is.

Now, I don’t want to have figures done automatically: I still want to be choosing what kinds of figures match my era and setting, and what figures help tell the story. But automatically generating these is a neat way to get inspirations about what figures to do next, and give me options I might not have considered.

The most annoying part of AI is how the work doesn’t fit what usually keeps me focused. Each request to generate an image or generate a 3d model can take from 30 seconds to a few minutes. That’s annoying because it involves a bunch of waiting and often bumps me out of a flow state where I’m focused on work. The pauses encourage me to go off and do another task, and then by the time I come back, I’ve forgotten what stage I’m at with each image. Worse, the AI tools often do something screwy - producing images without a background, or disregarding part of the prompt, or generating an incorrect figure. Using the generating AI systems often feels like trying to get a teenager to help - sometimes it does really well, sometimes it misunderstands completely, and some times it does something stupid because it just wants to go play outside. A figure might be shown walking, but in different poses in the front and side images. Another figure may have odd details added, or might appear period-inappropriate.

Dealing with the 3d printing process ends up being in some ways easier. Taking each 3d model, adding support structures, and arranging multiple figures on the build platform is tedious work, but at least it’s constant work that keeps me engaged.

Painting

I’ve usually found painting figures taxing because it takes so long, because I’m not happy with my color choices, or because of delays waiting for paint to dry when painting a few figures.

My first big improvement was painting bigger groups of figures. I’d attach 10-20 figures to a strip of styrene, prime all the figures, then go down the line painting each color - flesh color first, then clothing, then hair (once faces had dried), then shoes, then hat.

For color choices, I started out this time writing down potential color choices for clothing, then made sure I had those colors on my pallette. Having the color ranges figured out meant that I had all my colors ready, and had ideas about variations to try ahead of time. I did one table of colors for the regular worker figures, and another for some of the unusual figures (such as management).

white, yellow

Clothing	Men workers	Women workers
shoes	brown, black	brown, black, tan
pants/dresses	tan, brown, black, blue, olive	yellow, white, light blue, dark blue, tan
shirts/aprons	white, blue, red check, tan
hat	brown, black, tan	white
hair	brown, black, yellow, white	brown, black, yellow, white
shoes	brown, black	brown, black, tan

All this sped up figure painting so I could do a large set in an evening.

Next steps

Once we’re doing figures of random folks, the next question is obviously “can we do figures of people we know?” I’ve also been doing a few figures based on friends. I’ll share some of those results another time.

Structures and Stories: Reproducing Industries of the Santa Clara Valley

2026-05-17T23:31:44.523-07:00

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you've already heard how I've crossed over from building models of canneries along the tracks into some full-blown local history research. Last month, I shared that journey at the NMRA Pacific Coast Region's annual convention in Rohnert Park.

My talk - "Structures and Stories: Reproducing Industries of the Santa Clara Valley" - focused on four of the industries along the branch. For each, I gave a history of the building, talked about the business there, and showed the model I built. Then, just as on this blog, I veered off in crazy directions, talking about the deadly elevator at the Guggenhime packing house, or how Higgins-Hyde pissed off the Santa Clara valley, or about the Ainsley cannery's exports to England. The talk seemed to be well-received, though I got more compliments from wives of model railroaders who enjoyed actually hearing about the people, men and women, who helped run the fruit-related businesses in the Santa Clara valley. One listener, after hearing I was using appeals court rulings and accounting records to understand the business, asked if I'd been an investigator in a previous career, because my research seemed very similar to her past work as an IRS investigator!

If you weren't able to attend but you're curious about the presentation, slides are here. I also put together a quick handout on research tips for doing similar historic research.

And fingers crossed I encouraged some of you to similarly do some historic research on the buildings along your favorite stretch of track!

3D Printing a Whole Shift of Cannery Workers

2026-05-16T12:17:39.276-07:00

Back when I got my first resin 3d printer, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what sorts of objects and models were worth printing. Full structures? Took too long, and I only needed one of each. Windows? Hard to print objects with open spaces and unsupported spans. Clutter? Good. Common freight cars? Good. My big lesson was that I wanted to 3d print objects that I needed a lot of, that were mostly a single blobby object, and had enough curvy detail that I couldn’t make them by hand.

One really good find was the idea of human figures. Model railroads do look better with some humans around to help encourage a sense of scale and make our imaginary world seem lived-in and occupied. Although many of the places on a model railroad might be remote and lonely, there’s also a bunch of places where the railroad intersects with lots of people.

Back in 2014, I wrote about some early experiments with figures. I’d just found that another maker, The Great Fredini, had taken a 3d scanning rig to maker faires on the east coast and scanned various faire goers. He’d uploaded the STL files to the Thingiverse, a site for sharing 3d models. These were wonderful models - they were detailed enough for HO figures, I could print lots of them, and the figures looked more American than our favorite fallback of Faller’s 1970s European figures.

The Great Fredini’s models did have one problem: they were all scans of modern, 2010 era people going to an exposition in hot east coast weather. Folks tended to be dressed informally and for hot weather. T-shirts and shorts were common. One of my favorite figures was a big barrel of a guy wearing a football jersey and giving a thumbs up. It’s a great figure for a contemporary layout, but it’s not quite Fred Astaire or Grapes of Wrath.

Some of the faces I wanted on my figures - from California Canneries employee photo, 1920s.

I was also very specific about the kinds of figures I wanted. For the Vasona Branch’s 1930’s setting, most of the people I’d see would be the workers going into and out of the canneries and packing houses. Both kinds of businesses hired hundreds of workers for the summer rush, and the workers would have been dressed in very 1930’s garb. Old photos and histories talk about lines of women walking into the cannery in dresses and white aprons, and coming out with aprons stained from fruit and tomatoes. Men unloading fruit and working in the warehouses would be dressed for hot and dirty weather. I also needed a bunch of variations of the figures - young and old, tall and short, portly and thin. None of the Great Fredini’s figures were appropriate for capturing these crowds.

I tried using a figure modeling program to create my own models, but wasn’t good at setting human poses nor could I figure out how to get 1930’s clothing on the models.

Finally Getting Unstuck

I almost got unstuck last year; at the NMRA Pacific Coast Region’s annual convention in San Luis Obispo, Michael Eldridge gave a talk on using some new 3d modeling software for making human figures. This program, Daz3D, was intended for graphic artists to create realistic human images for advertisements and other purposes. It would also do 3d models, allowed posing, and had a market for buying clothing designed by the company and others. This seemed like a decent solution. In practice, though, the learning curve was steep: I had to learn how to use the software, how to pose a figure, how to get period-appropriate clothing models, and turn it into a solid “watertight” 3d model. This turned out to be beyond my ability for the time I was willing to devote to the project. Posing didn’t come naturally to me, and the 3d model machinations to turn the figures into a printable model required too much knowledge of the cryptic Blender 3d modeling tool. One particular problem was that clothing was treated as an infinitely thin separate object, so combining the figure and clothing into a single solid figure required significant 3d modeling knowledge I didn’t have. I put the project aside again.

Luckily, at this year’s PCR convention, Michael gave a new clinic using new AI tools to make 3d figures. Michael’s new approach got rid of most of the learning curve. Rather than using CAD-like figure software to create a human 3d model, Michael showed a much simpler approach: using some of the generative AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc) to generate pictures of a correctly dressed and posed figure, then using a commercial website called tripo3d.ai to create a 3d model from the figure. This approach didn’t require 3d modeling skill at all, but just having one or more photos of the figure to be created; the software inferred anything else it needed (like what a human back looked like), and it would generate a decent model for 3d printing. Yay!

Making a Figure

The first step is to generate a 2d image of the figure; these can be reference sheet images (aka an artist’s drawing of front, side, top, and bottoms of the figure as might be used to get approval from a client for an image or character), or simply a front and side view. These can be generated by the free AI tools such as Google’s Gemini from just an english description of what you want.

For example, you can go to gemini.google.com and type:

Can you generate a reference sheet image for a 3d figure of a middle-aged 1930’s woman in a knee length dress and apron with a nurses cap waling with a small step and without a base under the figure

I got the following, though the form of the image varies wildly on every run.

Generative AI tools are weird - they can generate different results every time, so the figure I generate today from a prompt will certainly not match what I get tomorrow. I added the clause about the “no base under figure” because a previous time I ran it, the figures would often be placed on a circular base. My tests yesterday also made reference images with a slightly different format, and always listed a “drawn by” with a name that I assume was completely made up. Weird.You can put in a different prompt and get another image, demand changes, etc. Note that all the captions and labels won’t matter- the 3d figure generating software seems to ignore it.

Michael had suggested the reference image, but I started asking just for a front and side view - that seemed to be sufficient for the later steps, and was much easier to check over.

For example, type the following into gemini.google.com:

Can you make a front and side image for a 3d model of a 1930’s workman with a thin build and dressed for warmer California weather, and have the figure walking briskly

I got this from that prompt and description.

Male cannery worker figure created from prompt.

Great! So now as long as can type an English description, I can make a figure!

Next step is the 3d model. Michael Eldridge and others suggested tripo3d.ai , a paid service with a $20/month plan that allows you to create models for 60 figures a month or so without paying more. (Signing up for a plan is a challenge - make sure you’re getting the monthly plan. Supposedly, you can use a free plan if you choose to render the 3d figure using their older AI system.) I went to the 3d workspace page ( https://studio.tripo3d.ai/workspace/generate ) , and dragged the front/side view into the “upload” box on the left . I then pressed the “Generate multi views” button just below the image - this automatically splits the front and side view into separate reference images for the model making. Finally, I pressed the “generate model” button at the bottom left to start the process of making the 3d model. It takes about 3 minutes. When the image is generated, I could then go to the "list of assets" to see the model and select it for exporting. (Careful - the models don’t show up in Safari. I had to use the Chrome browser on a Mac to see the model on the tripo3d.ai site.)

Now that I’d downloaded a 3d model as an STL file, I treated it like any other 3d model - I brought it into my 3d program’s slicer program, added a support structure to hold the object when printing and support arms and other overhanging parts of the model, then set up a print job with that figure. The worst part was making a support structure that supported the right parts of the figure, but were easy to cut off. After a quick 3d print, I had my figure printed. The software complained about bugs in the 3d model, but I see those even with the models I create in SketchUp - the slicing software was able to fix the flaws itself just fine.

I ended up doing ten figures from seven models, mirroring the walking figures for variation. I also made multiple prints of each figure, adjusting the scale of each to vary heights. After a bit of printing, I had around 100 figures done, printed in ten minutes on the newer printer.

I’m using this crowd of figures for the workers walking into or out of the canneries and packing houses - I needed a mob of figures, and I needed figures that looked like cannery workers and looked 1930s-like. (See if you can guess the prompt for each.). This workflow gave me the figures I needed, and got it done in essentially one long day.

First set of cannery worker figure designs.

result

I’m very, very happy with this process. With a day or so of work, I had a half dozen figure models, and had 3d-printed the first round of figures. There’s still a fair amount of hand work required to make these figures: setting up the printer, removing and cleaning the printed figures, removing support structure and cleaning up the figure, curing the figure in UV light, then priming the figures. Painting the figures is probably the most time-consuming part of the whole process; I’ve been gluing a dozen or twenty figures to a strip of styrene and going down the line assembly-line fashion. All that’s worth it to me to be able to have some figures that match my era and setting.

Figures arranged for painting

The neat thing about the figures and the 3d software is how easy it was compared to handcrafted models for freight cars. Most human figures that we try doing with the AI tools method take very little thought about how to make something printable; the figures are all sort of blobby, continuous single models that print efficiently. There's not a lot of overhangs or separate pieces to make us have to think about what direction to print the figures, or whether the model can be printed successfully. The software also doesn’t need perfect information; it already knows what a human arm or back looks like, so it can infer something reasonable that isn’t well-specified in the input image. The most challenging part, honestly, was just figuring out support for things like arms and hands so they'd print decently, and then just dealing with printing and cleaning up the figures.

Compared to the commercial figures, the models generated by AI are interesting. They’ve got a surprising amount of detail, such as exaggerated shoes or rolled-up sleeves that both looks good on the model and 3d prints well. The resulting parts remind me more of 1970's O-scale white metal figures cast in rubber molds than the Faller injection-molded figures.

Bags of figures from first day of 3d printing cannery workers. I've got a lot of painting to do.

As I was writing this, I looked back at my past adventures with figures in 2014, and got reminded how much the 3d printing world had changed. Back then, my Form One printer could print nine figures at a time in about 90 minutes - the software had a problem processing more 3d models in the slicing software, and the Form One’s slow movements of the laser beam with galvanometer mirrors meant the 3d printing was slow. With the Anycubic Photon printer and a modern computer, I was able to print 80 figures in 10 minutes because of the faster UV screen that can expose an entire layer of resin at one time. That’s also with a printer that’s one-tenth the cost of the original Form One. It’s really gotten to a point where any modeler can be mass-producing 3d parts.

Stocking Up for the Fruit Season

2026-05-13T22:46:45.454-07:00

Part of building a realistic model railroad is building a realistic car fleet that captures the look of the trains and industries that service the places we model.

Back when I was a teenager, my philosophy for selecting model freight cars was easy: if it looked cool, I bought it. I’d pick up a boxcar with a bright paint scheme at the hobby shop after a dentist’s appointment. I picked up a pair of covered hoppers because they looked so different from anything else I had. I built auto rack and modern boxcar kits because I found them at the hobby shop and so I could learn some new techniques or so I could do some modeling some evening.

As I started focusing on modeling prototype locations, I got more picky. I cared more about getting freight cars that would have run in the 1930s, began curating the road names so I’d get a mix of Southern Pacific and eastern railroad cars, and pushed down any interest in inappropriate cars. I sometimes broke the rules - the pink Roma Wine refrigerator car that was eye-catching but the wrong era, the early covered hopper that the Funaro and Camerlengo owner convinced me would be a neat model for my era even if it primarily was used in Florida. I built a pair of Northern Pacific stock cars from the Central Valley kits even though they were likely inappropriate for my layout. As time went on, some of these cars got given away, boxed, or merely kept far away from the layout.

The lack of the stock cars wasn’t a big deal. Although I’d initially assumed that stock movements would be a staple of western railroading, stock movements on the real Vasona Branch were rare. The Northern Pacific cars always seemed like placeholders even for the imaginary cattle movements. I’d bought some kits for SP cars at various times, but they weren’t particularly important priorities when the layout didn’t actually have any stock pens to load them.

But there were always a few rumblings that there might be better uses for the stock cars. I’d seen various photos of stock cars being used to carry fresh (“green”) fruit - photos of workers unloading fruit lugs from a stock car at the Richmond Chase cannery in the 1920’s, Ed Gibson’s find of the crushed apricots in stock cars hit by an errant Daylight passenger train in Bayshore yard in the late 1920s, stories about watermelons being shipped in stock cars well into the 1950’s.

One find, however, convinced me that stock cars might belong on the Vasona Branch. Back during the pandemic, the Campbell Museum shared a bit of Ainsley cannery letterhead summarizing the peaches received by the cannery form the Treat Ranch in the summer of 1914. Looking over the list of incoming cars, I noticed that many of the cars delivering fruit in those days were actually stock cars. That was enough for me: I knew that other canneries were receiving fruit in stock cars into at least the late 1920s, and the accounting of the Ainsley cannery receiving fruit from distant orchards suggested that bringing in fruit from distant places was reasonable for the canneries along the Vasona branch. It was time to actually build some stock cars for the fresh fruit trade.

The Cars

My SP S-40-3 cars were built from plastic kits that Ted Culotta sold via his Speedwich Media business. The parts were originally intended for highly-detailed ready-to—run plastic freight cars sold by the Red Caboose around 2013. Ted, as a passionate freight car modeler, managed to convince Red Caboose to let him sell unassembled parts from the kit separately - I’m guessing for folks who wanted to modify the kits as well as folks who wanted the pleasure of building the kits themselves. When Ted offered these in the late 2010s, I bought three on the assumption they’d be fun to build.

Like a lot of projects, the kits sat on my shelf for a long time - I never quite had a strong reason to build them, nor the inclination to spend some long weekends building the kits.

Luckily, re-reading the Treat Ranch pear accounting when prepping for a presentation on cannery history reminded me that these cars could be useful on the layout.

There’s nothing too special about building these kits - the models were mostly built according to the instructions, painted them with rattle-cans of red primer, and decaled for the SP and T&NO. (The uncommon SP subsidiaries on the Treat Ranch accounting would have been fun to model, but the SP merged all those railroads into the T&NO in the late 1920’s, so the odd reporting marks would have been unlikely to have survived into the 1930s.)

I did bit of weathering on the cars using an airbrush. Specifically, I’d had friends talking about the inexpensive airbrushes with a small pocket-sized compressor. (Here is the airbrush I got.) These airbrushes aren’t suitable for serious painting, but they do have enough airflow to make them handy for airbrushing and other detail work. I'll admit it's also freeing to put the candy-bar-sized compressor in my pocket as I search around the layout looking for things to weather - something that's hard to do with a full-sized air compressor.

The Result

The three stock cars are now on the Vasona Branch, bringing peaches and apricots to the local canneries. I’m looking forward to crews asking why they’re bringing cattle to a cannery. They'll get an earful about how railroads make some very strange choices for assigning cars during busy seasons.

Keeping Up Appearances, Panel-wise

2026-02-18T19:31:00.000-08:00

How much effort does a panel of meters and switches deserve?

When we build a model railroad for operations, we’re not just building it for our own amusement, but also as an object to be shown and operated by others. If we’re going to invite folks over to spend several hours reproducing prototype roles, we’d like to make the layout welcoming and easy to operate. Some of us with nice inside spaces (not me) might make sure there’s a comfortable area for crew to hang out in with some comfy sofas and model railroad magazines scattered about. Others (like me) might focus on usability: are the controls for switches in obvious locations, and are the locations marked neatly and in a matching style on the fascia.

There’s also the less-obvious improvements. We might declutter the layout and hide storage with curtains below the layout, or make sure the fascia is neatly painted. All of this can make a big difference in our first impressions of a layout. I visited a home layout last year in Minnesota that was beautiful - well lit, clean, in a carpeted basement. Future kits were stashed away neatly on shelves as if in a hobby shop, layout markings followed good graphic design traditions, and general cleanliness would make crawling under the layout for repairs would be a pleasant experience. I described it later as “exactly as childhood me thought all those beautiful layouts in the magazines looked.” After touring a lot of layouts, I can safely say not all of them are that clean or welcoming.

Cleanliness also affects how others might operate the layout. One of the local modelers thought that folks might be rougher on his freight cars because he had a layout that lacked scenery and a pleasant space. “Folks will be extra-careful with Jack Burgess’s cars because of the beautiful fascia and carpeting, but then they’ll be less careful with my boxcars when they can see the 2x4s and the pink insulation.” I’m not sure that’s true, but I could imagine the level of care the layout owner applies to the space might affect the level of caution that operators apply.

Perils of the C-Clamped Panel

When I was cleaning the layout up for an operating session at the last PCR Layout Design and Operations meet, I got thinking about this. A few years back, I realized I needed a place for some layout controls and monitoring. The first was to find a place for the fast clock controller with its switches: I made a Plexiglas panel, cut a hole in the masonite fascia, and dropped the panel in. A couple years later, I realized it was helpful to know how much power was being drawn from the repurposed AC adapters I was using for layout lighting and switch machine power. That added a second panel for a bunch of digital meters to monitor power use. After a couple of problems with DCC power, I got some track meters to check voltage and amperage. The location on the fascia wasn’t big enough for the new meters, so I cut a scrap of masonite to hold the meters, and c-clamped the assembly in a convenient spot - good enough for the debugging I wanted to do.

When I started cleaning up the layout for the op session, I realized that the temporary meter panel stuck out. It was easy to bump, and looked slapdash. There also wasn’t room where the existing panels were located for a more permanent and professional site. Moving the existing electronics wasn’t easy. I’d attached every panel with machine screws into the masonite in random locations - moving panels around required cutting new openings in the masonite, drilling new holes, and covering any openings from the previous locations. Changing the existing panel locations wasn’t easy.

Now, the way I’d attached the different electrical panels isn’t a big deal; most visitors aren’t looking at the panels. However, the ad-hoc way I’d done it did look awkward to my eye, and detraced from the overall look of the layout. To make it look better - and to make me more proud of my work - it deserved a rethink. I wanted something that would be more amenable to change if I wanted to change what meters, lights, and switches I had, or change their locations. I wanted the different panels to be more uniform and similar so that the set of panels looked intentional and related. Because I sometimes needed to pull out the panels to access all the electrical terminal strips just behind, I needed an approach where panels could easily be removed and replaced.

A Sound Solution

One bit of inspiration came from electronic music. One of the big trends for folks interested in sound synthesis is a system called “Eurorack” where similarly sized small electronics modules can be placed into a case and connected as needed with patch cords. The idea of connecting individual oscillators, modulators, noise sources, filters, and effect processors dates from the dawn of computer music; Eurorack’s standards define how devices from different manufacturers connect electrically and mechanically.

Typical Euroarck setup. From Wikipedia article on Eurorack. Credit: Matthew G Daniel, wikipedia.org, Creative Commons "Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Mechanically, Eurorack relies on some mounting channels from professional electrical equipment. Individual module panels are fixed height (about 5.25 inches, or 3U in electrical rack units) with widths that are a multiple of 0.2 inches. Panels always mount with M3 screws into screw holes or sliding nuts in the mounting channels. (There’s also an electrical standard for supplying individual modules, and for the audio signals at patch points; those were irrelevant to me. The idea of a common 12 volt supply and common ribbon cable to connect power might be useful for model railroad accessories, though.) Multiple electrical manufacturers sell the mounting channels which the Eurorack folks repurpose and resell.

Eurorack mounting rail / channel

Eurorack seemed like a decent starting point for me. It allowed for neat panels that could be adjusted or rearranged as needed. Matching the Eurorack size constraints avoided needing to rethink appropriate sizes for individual panels, and gave me measurements for locations of mounting screw holes and tolerances for widths. This wasn’t the cheapest way I could get panels done - screws into masonite would have been fine - but this solution would look good, allow the panels to change over time, and showed visitors and operators that I cared about appearances.

The channels use aluminum strip and screws to set the precise spacing; I put this together and double-checked the height between the channels. Once this was done, I mounted the channels to wood blocks glued to the Masonite fascia.

Finally, I fabricated the different panels that mounted in the new panel frame. I’d previously used thin Plexiglas for panels. These panels were rigid and held switches meters firmly, and could easily be painted and marked. However, the plastic was hard to drill and mill because of its brittleness. I instead decided to use 1/16” aluminum on these panels. The aluminum worked well because it’s rigid and easy to decorate, Some local folks reminded me that some of the sign making franchises such as FastSigns can print designs on aluminum, but I decided to do everything from scratch. I did markings by printing designs on transparency material and then mounting these with Spray-mount to the aluminum.

I did hit some challenges moving to aluminum.

First, the tolerances expected for the Eurorack channels are tight, so I had to be precise when cutting and finishing panels to size and drilling holes in exactly the right places. Panels that were cut a bit too large wouldn’t fit between other mounted panels and needed to be filed down. Eurorack channels can use captive sliding nuts or continuous rods with even screw spacing - the continuous threaded strips I got seemed better because they couldn’t slide behind another panel. However, the threaded strips turned out to make tolerances even tighter because of the requirement that the holes in the panel exactly match the spacing of holes in the threaded strips. Some commercial Eurorack modules use rounded slots instead of screw holes to allow some play when attaching in such cases. The precision required meant I needed to be very careful making the panels and drilling holes for mounting screws. I’d started out assuming I could use a center punch and a drill, but realized that it was too easy for a hole to wander a bit too much. Instead, I had to drill the mounting holes with a milling machine, a center drill to start the hole, and a final drill to size. I still ended up having to file holes larger if the hole positions weren’t quite right.

A second problem was with the lettering approach. Using transparent plastic allowed me to set up lettering exactly as I needed. However, I couldn’t drill or cut the panels with the transparency material on, or it would get pulled off, get metal fragments stuck between plastic and aluminum, or get damaged. I needed to transfer holes for panel switches precisely to do the drilling, then needed to glue the transparency material down in the same spot for the lettering to correctly line up with switches.

My final problem was cutting the large openings for meters. Cutting in thick aluminum isn’t particularly easy. I initially tried milling the openings, but had a hard time holding the aluminum sheet securely on my Sherline mill. I tried a jeweler’s saw next; it worked fine for openings close to the edge of the panel, but couldn’t cut openings in the middle of a 6” wide panel. I finally fell back to using a nibbler tool which was slow and painful but eventually got the job done. I’m proud that I didn’t give myself blisters this time - the nibbler tool is particularly successful at that.

The panel for control and monitoring is done now; it’s got controls for the fast clock, accessory voltage and current, DCC fault lights, and DCC meters. I still need to add meters for the third booster on the layout - for now, I had a blanking plate over the space where this may be placed.

Making the layout look good is important - both for my pride of craftsmanship, for ease of getting around the layout, and for its effect on the folks visiting the layout. Functionally, I now see all the meters which help me spot and troubleshoot problems on the layout. Redoing these panels wasn’t strictly needed for the layout, but it looks much better, can handle future change, and represented a fun project for me.

PCR Layout Design and Operations meet, January 31 - February 1, 2026 in Santa Clara

2025-12-10T18:35:00.000-08:00

My favorite model railroad event, the PCR (Pacific Coast Region) Layout Design and Operations meet, is returning to the Santa Clara depot in 2026. In a reversal from the usual schedule, the clinics will happen at the Depot on Sunday, February 1 2026. Invites to operating sessions at local layouts will be the day on Saturday, January 31, 2026. Like always, the meet's a mix of talks about design and operation, layout visits, and opportunities to try model railroad operations on layouts in the Bay Area. As in previous years, you can attend virtually if you're not in the area or want to enjoy the presentations from your home.

Get more information at www.bayldops.com. Buy your tickets in advance at EventBrite. Virtual tickets give you access to watch the presentations and ask questions via a Zoom video conference. In-person tickets also include the Zoom link in case of last-minute travel problems or illness.

Like past years, we'll also be offering free layout design and operations consulting, in Santa Clara or virtually. Check the website to sign up for a session.

Bruce Morden is again running the layout design challenge. This year's challenge is to design a model railroad based on San Jose's Lentzen Ave. roundhouse and engine terminal. This is a great chance to think about how you'd design a layout based only on an engine terminal. What would you do when you're only moving locomotives around? How would you handle staging? What would an operating session be like?

You'll also be able to think about the era to model in the challenge. San Jose's Lentzen Ave. roundhouse handled South Pacific Coast narrow gauge and Southern Pacific standard gauge locomotives simultaneously before 1906. The site supported San Jose's heavy commute and freight operations throughout the 20th century. In 2004, the site turned into Caltrain's Centralized Equipment and Maintenance Facility (CEMOF), handling maintenance and repair of the commute fleet and the new electric trainsets. Any of those eras could make a wonderful small model railroad.

As in past years, we'll be inviting all attendees to an operating session on a local model railroad. For folks who have never done operations, this is a great way to gain some experience in model railroad operations, meet some of the local operations community, and find out how to join other operating sessions. For experienced model railroaders, this is a wonderful chance to operate on model railroads you've always wanted to visit.

I love the Layout Design and Operations meet because it pulls together a fun group of folks: interested in modeling specific locations, railroad history, imitating the real railroads' operating practices, and just interested in understanding what the real railroads were about. It's also a great meet if you're curious about any of these topics. The invites to operate on local model railroads got me interested in model railroad operations, and helped me understand the differences between running trains on my own versus working with a dozen other people to get trains moving on a large layout. If you're considering a new layout, or thinking about operations on an existing layout, you can sign up for time to talk with others about what you're building and what options you might consider.

We'll see you in Santa Clara next month!

3D Printing Again

2025-07-27T22:16:00.000-07:00

I love that feeling when a project finally satisfies some itch I’ve had for years.

I’ve talked about 3d printing a lot on this blog over the years. I’d been an early adopter of using 3d printing in model railroading. Around 2009, I bought one of the early FDM (“squirt out strand of plastic”) printers, the “Makerbot Cupcake”, named for the fact that it could print an object the size of a cupcake. I loved the sense of being able to sketch a design, then turn it into a real object, but found the resulting objects were coarse - good enough for say a coat-hook or a pocket for holding a DCC throttle, but less good for scale parts.

In 2014, a company called Form Labs started selling a stereolithography-based printer. Their printer used a laser to harden a layer of photosensitive resin in a glass-bottom tank. The printer would then lift up the partially-completed piece above the tank bottom and repeat by curing another layer of resin, slowly pulling the completed part out of the resin-filled tank. Other companies had been selling printers with a similar mechanism for commercial purposes in the past, but all were much too pricey for the typical hobbyist. Formlabs appeared just as the original patents on stereolithography were expiring, allowing them to make a similar printer at prices a regular person might be able to afford.

The Form One printer was amazing; it could produce models that were close to injection-molded quality. I found it great for making detail parts, and even managed to print some HO railroad cars - flat cars, the Hart gondolas, the Harriman passenger cars, and a bunch of other stuff. The Form One printer was truly magical; I loved being able to think of a project, and suddenly have dozens or hundreds of a part. It wasn’t the fastest; most of the freight cars took several hours to create, and even detail parts could take an hour or two.

The Form One was also really cute. A little bigger than one of the original Macintoshes, it just looked really cool with its retro orange plexiglass box keeping UV out of the resin tank and curved aluminum case looking a bit more like a 1970’s Braun kitchen appliance than a 3d printer. The folks designing it also had done a beautiful job with industrial design - easy to open and pull out the build platform, easy to send the model from the computer to the printer, and a single button for start and pause.

Beyond my personal project, the Form One also seemed like a great way to share the freight cars that otherwise weren’t available commercially. For a while, I was selling the Hart gondolas, and managed to sell a bit less than a hundred of them, with occasional folks still asking about getting a model. Manufacturing my own model railroad items was an eye-opening project; I loved making these real, but I got some hard lessons on fixed costs for a new product (pilot model, boxes) and challenges for quality when I was making one or two freight cars a day. The technology also had its temperamental moments. The Form One could have print problems because of dust in the optics or resin sticking to the tank bottom. Having only a single printer also made it hard to diagnose problems - I couldn’t just test on a different printer to narrow down causes. A couple hiccups hit just as I was trying to sell a second model, resulting in a bunch of freight car bodies that were too rough to sell where I couldn’t diagnose the cause of the problem.

Ever since then in 2017, I’ve occasionally gone back to 3d printing, but various life issues - work pressures, elder care, printer misbehaving - kept me from making much progress with it. I’ve occasionally hauled the printer out and run some test prints on it, but the effort needed to adjust it and getting it working reliably was too much.

Back to 3d Printing

Form One and Anycubic Photon sitting next to each other.

Meanwhile, another set of companies have been making FDM printers in the intervening ten years. Two Chinese companies - Anycubic and Elegoo - have been selling cheaper printers. They’ve been experimenting with different ways to harden the resin (LCD screens rather than lasers), different sizes, different methods for getting the resin to detach from the tank. I’ve heard stories from friends trying these printers, generally with decent results. "When life calms down," I kept telling myself, "I really need to to check these out."

Luckily, life’s calmed down on several fronts in recent months, and I’ve got more free time. With the threat of tariffs raising prices, it seemed like a good time to try one of these printers out. Because the Form One had always been a bit too small to print 40 foot cars in easy ways, I decided to go with one of the larger printers - the Anycubic Photon Mono M7.

Verdict? Wow.

A dozen Battleship gondolas, all printed in a couple days.

Battleship gondolas in detail. These are at least as good as the Form One prints when that printer was at its best.

It's been pretty magical and fun. I started off printing various simple parts I'd designed in the past, but quickly threw something challenging at it: one of the Battleship gondolas. I'd done the model for these early steel freight cars back in 2017, but never could get them to print reliably as the Form One aged - print quality was poor, and at best I could print a single car overnight. (To be precise, the Battleships took 5 hours on the Form One.) With the new Anycubic Photon, I found I could print three cars at a time, and they'd complete an a bit more than an hour. This is what I’d intended 3d printing to be like - being able to print fast enough to build up a stock to sell. Within a couple days, I had a dozen car bodies ready. I found the quality of the cars as good or better than the Form One at its best, and the speed and yield was good enough so that I could do mass production if I really wanted to.

Anycubic vs. Form One

So far I've been really happy with the Anycubic Photon, but it's been hard not to compare it to the Form One. The speed, print quality, and volume printed are all great. One really nice feature of the Anycubic Photon is that I can use the whole print surface. On the Form One, each layer of the part was detached from the tank bottom by hinging the tank and swinging it down and away. This was a decent method, but meant that peeling forces on the part closer to the hinge were lower than the forces of the tank pulling away from the far side of the tank. As a result, particularly big or delicate models really needed to print close to the hinge to avoid portions of the part breaking off and sticking to the tank. I found myself only ever using about half the available print surface to avoid failed prints. On the Anycubic Photon, a springy clear sheet is used for the tank bottom; to detach the part, the build platform raises vertically, causing the sheet to stretch up and peel off. This different peeling process means I'm able to print larger objects and print across the whole tank without problems.

There's also been some drawbacks to the Anycubic Photon. The photosensitive resins used by both printers aren't particularly nice chemicals, but the resin provided by Formlabs had a lot less odor. I'd been able to operate the printer inside the house - particularly handy when the printer needed a clean, warm, dust-free space to avoid messing up the optics for the laser. Anycubic's resins have a much more overpowering odor, probably not helped by the printer heating the resin up to 35'C for better curing. Though the odor isn't a good proxy for safe vs. not safe, the stronger fumes definitely make me cautious about potentially dangerous fumes. It definitely doesn't feel safe to be in the same room as the printer when it's operating. FormLabs argues that some vendors' resins contain more toxic base chemicals which might explain the differences. Ventilation systems are available to route the fumes outside; I'm looking forward to trying one of these. The Anycubic printer's LED screen used for curing also is less affected by dust, so it may be reasonable to just banish the printer to the garage.

I've also found it fun to spot the differences in industrial design. The Form One was much better for retrieving parts. The hinged lid could easily be opened and closed one-handed - helpful when the other hand was trying to pull out a build platform with a just-made print still dripping resin. The Anycubic Photon has an acrylic cover that fits over the tank and build platform, but removing the cover requires two hands and a place to put the shell temporarily. The Photon's build platform also gets fully submurged during operation, causing resin to pool on top of the buld platform. This resin spills or drips whenever the build platform and part are removed from the printer. The Form One's build platform was never fully submurged, so it didn't collect resin in the same way.

For cleanup, my original Form One relied on a manual approach - a clean and dirty tank of isopropyl alcohol, and a little basket to agitate the printed parts in each tank to clean off resin. The Anycubic Photon (like later Form Ones) has a separate cleaning tank device that automates the process: all I need to do is put the printed parts in the tank and press a button for a few minutes of agitation in ispropyl alcohol. It's really nice not to have to spend several minutes manually agitating the part to get the extra resin off.

What about the future?

I'm glad I've bought the Anycubic Photon, and I'm having fun getting back into 3d printing. For now, I'm mostly seeing what I can do with the 3d models I'd previously printed on the Form One, and thinking about what projects I need most urgently for the Vasona Branch layout. My two immediate projects are some simple Ford Model A cars for a cannery parking lot scene, and lots of cannery women figures for some of the nearby streets.

The Anycubic Photon also has me thinking about whether to sell 3d printed models again. I had a lot of fun selling the Hart gondolas - figuring out how to manufacture, box, and sell them. I also like sharing these models: helping to tell the story about how freight cars evolved, helping early 20th century modelers have more realistic freight cars to put on their layout, and encouraging others to try mass-producing their own freight cars. I haven't decided whether I'll go back to manufacturing. For now, I'm enjoying not having the pressure of making and selling the cars. But with the Anycubic Photon, I can see that I could mass-produce freight cars again if I wanted.

Model Railroad Sudoku II: Straight Outta SLO

2025-05-08T08:38:00.000-07:00

And now for another game of Model Railroad Sudoku, where we leaf through a railroad employee’s time book and try to piece together what a worker's job was like. As a reminder, railroad employees used these time books - little notebooks often handed out for free by insurance men or other businesses - to record the trains they worked and the expected pay, giving them a way to double-check the railroad’s records at the end of the month. Most time books included columns for dates, where the train came from and went to, times, pay, and names of the foreman they worked for.

This time, we’ll check out a time book collected and scanned by John Signor and available by the grace of Ed Gibson, proprietor of wx4.org, also known as the Dome of Foam.

Here's the time book so you can play along, or look at some of the raw data on a Google Spreadsheet.

I’m interested in this time book in hopes of learning something about the Southern Pacific in San Jose - Ed describes the time book as the 1920’s era, and various hints made me think that the employee, Vernon Frasier, was an SP employee.

Let’s see if we can learn anything useful! For those of you playing along at home, I’ll make sure to prompt with a rough area of questioning before going into my own guesses; feel free to dive into the time book, see what you discover, and compare your observations against mine.

Question 1: Is the time book for an SP employee? When’s it from, and what area?

Now, Ed describes the time book as circa 1925 and for “Vernon Frazier” (though the scanned book doesn’t actually show a page with his name so we can’t be certain of the name spelling.) If you look in the time book, you’ll see occasional month names on the top of pages - showing that this time book was filled out in December 1928 and later months. The ads at the top are mostly for San Jose, Watsonville, and Pacific Grove businesses, seriously hinting at someone working in the local area, suggesting an SP employee. We don’t have any proof yet that he was an SP engineer, nor definitive proof of where.

Question 2: How did Mr Fraser fill in columns in the time book?

The prepared columns don’t quite match the numbers written in. Date and engine number look sane (at least for the SP), but the train number appears to have a departure time, “called for” has various numbers and X’s, “left at” isn’t close to the call time, initial delay is always a number or an X, station has just numbers, and arrived at has obvious dollar signs.

The engine number looks like SP steam engine numbers - Mr. Frazier was driving Consolidations (2727, 2670), 4-8-0s (2814), and a bunch of 4-8-2s (3650, 3638, etc). It looks like he worked on the road, and must have been an engineer or fireman. The first time (in the train number column) makes sense as a start time; let’s see if everything else makes sense.

The “called for” has various numbers -73, 1-75, 75, 77, and 71 and X - perhaps train numbers? Straight numbers like 73 likely indicate train 73 (probably a northbound Los Angeles - San Francisco passenger train), numbers with a dash indicate which section of a train run in multiple parts (1-75 is first section of train 75), and X probably indicates an “extra” train not listed in a timetable.

The “left at” column appears to have times, and most are several hours after the time in “train number”. Let’s assume this is the time he stopped work.

The “Initial delay” shows some other numbers and Xs: 76, 2-102, 330. These look very much like train numbers, especially since they look very similar to the “called for” outbound train numbers. Halfway through the time book, he stops noting these as all.

The “station no.” column is numbers, ranging from 100 (several instances) to 208. The minimum value of 100 matches the railroad rule that a road crew gets paid in 100 mile days. The 100s could represent days where Mr. Frazier didn’t travel far, and larger numbers represent longer days.

The “arrived at” column has dollar values; larger values match longer miles in the previous column, confirming that these columns are probably miles and pay.

The final column, on the second page, lists last names, and we can guess these are the foreman, engineer, or fireman.

Question 3: What’s with those train numbers?

Now, the train numbers don’t look at all familiar. 1950’s timetables don’t show appropriate trains. However, the 1920’s timetables do make sense - see Coast Division employee timetable #126 from 1927, for example.

Train 69/70 was the Coaster
Train 71/72 was the Daylight
Train 73/74 was the Padre, which later became the Oakland Daylight
Train 75/76 was the Lark
Train 77/78 was the Shoreline
Train 101/102 was the Sunset Limited - San Francisco to New Orleans.
Train 243/244 was the Sunset Manifest.
Train 330 was Freight

That’s impressive! The odd numbers are always north-bound towards San Francisco (railroad westbound), and even always south-bound towards Los Angeles (railroad eastbound.)

Here’s an excerpt of the 1928 timetable:

The times for the scheduled trains (especially the passenger trains) seem to imply Mr. Frazier is working out of San Luis Obispo - the starting times usually coincide with the departure of the first train number from San Luis Obispo, suggesting he's starting work in San Luis Obispo.

Why does he include two train numbers on all his runs? That probably means that he's going out and back. All are odd in first columns and even in second columns, suggesting he’s going west out of San Luis Obispo towards Watsonville Junction, and always returning to San Luis Obispo. Maybe he went other directions on some of the extra trips, but there’s really no sign of him going eastbound from SLO.

The X’s could indicate actual extra freights or light engine movements. Xs out of San Luis Obispo (assuming they're westbound) and are likely to be actual extra trains if only because it would be unlikely to send a helper up Cuesta without a train - that's the direction that most needs the help! There are some cases where there are Xs in both directions, again suggesting some of these are actually extra freights rather than engine movements.

Vernon’s work also changes during the year. During the winter, he operates a mix of numbered and extra trains out of San Luis Obispo always northbound, but on March 9, he starts repeatedly working the Daylight Limited (71/72). The start and end times also start matching up with times both westbound and eastbound, and with longer (230) mile days suggesting longer mainline runs.

Question 4: What more do we know if we assume he is working in San Luis Obispo?

Now that we know he was working out of San Luis Obispo, we can start checking additional sources for background on Mr. Frazier: census records (for information about him) and published railroad seniority lists (for his career and the careers of his coworkers). He might live in San Luis Obispo or in one of the other towns. Is there anyone with the name Frazier near San Luis Obispo?

With some quick searching, ancestry.com does has some information on him from census records, though with a different spelling. In the 1930 census, Vernon Fraser is 34 years old, Locomotive Engineer, born in California, married 10 years to Ruby Fraser, son Gordon and daughter Eugenia, and living at 329 Santa Barbara Ave. near the SP depot. (Full Ancestry census page here).

Railroad seniority lists are also a great source for checking on Vernon's career. These lists were important to railroaders to understand the pecking order for bidding on jobs, but they'll also give us details on when Vernon started and gives us a way to guess at those other names in the time book and confirm their particular trade and seniority level.

A 1929 seniority roster (also from the Dome of Foam) showed “Fraser, VW” (not the same spelling as Ed gave) qualified as engineer Sept. 1, 1926. So he was an engineer at this point with three years of seniority.

However, looking at the paired up names on the time book, the names all match engineers: Deffenbach and Umbertis (qualified as engineers in 1920), Nevins, McGaha, Dutcher, Fisk, etc. Either Vernon Frazier was actually working as a fireman (but doesn’t appear in the lists), or Vernon Fraser was bidding on fireman jobs even though he was qualified as an engineer, or the engineer listed in the time book might be the engineer for the train he was helping.

Question 5: Where could Vernon Frazier have been operating those trains?

If we pencil out the train schedules:

The call times mostly match up with the departure of the northbound trains, and the end times match the arrival of the southbound trains with arrival in San Luis Obispo. It looks like we’ve got the time book of an engineer operating north out of SLO. He also doesn’t appear to go all the way to Watsonville Junction which appears strange - to get back in time, he would have to part ways with the train somewhere between SLO and Watsonville Junction. Now, we know there’s a big hill - Cuesta Grade - north of SLO. Could Mr. Frazier be operating helpers?

The engine numbers hint at that - at least some of his runs on first and second class trains are on 2-8-0s, which definitely don’t seem like motive power for named trains going up Cuesta. Even when he’s on a 4-8-2, the runs are shorter, suggesting he couldn’t have made it all the way to San Ardo or Watsonville Junction and back.

(How do we know whether he was working on helpers, rather than working on mainline trains? If he was enginer for the mainline trains, I'd assume he would show mileage that better matched running halfway or all the way through a division - I'll go through that a bit more later.)

Train	SJC	Watsonville	San Ardo	SLO	Surf
101	7:00a	5:35a	3:30a	12:42a	11:15p
102	7:30p	9:00p	10:56p	1:25a	3:08a
71	6:40p	5:17p	3:33p	1:33p	12:18p
72	8:47a	10:06a	11:50a	1:53p	3:07p
69	9:23a	7:50a	5:46a	3:12a	1:36a
70	10:22p	11:55p	1:56a	4:35a	6:14a
73	7:40a	6:10a	4:09a	1:48a	12:30a
74	10:07p	11:26p	1:10a	3:25a	4:43a
75	8:19a	6:37a	4:41a	2:15a	12:53a
76	9:04p	10:23p	12:12a	2:45a	4:10a
77	9:32p	7:57p	5:33p	3:05p	1:21p
78	9:05p	10:40a	1:06p	3:40p	5:18p
243	11:00p	4:50p	9:00a	11:45p	8:55p
244	3:15a	7:20a	3:33p	10:15p	3:08a
330	-	10:15a	1:24p	6:45p	8:55p

If so, his typical day is help a train north over Cuesta Grade, cut off somewhere at Santa Margarita, and return. The miles suggest the distance he travelled (unless he did multiple round trips). 100 miles were up and back. It’s only 16 miles from SLO to Santa Margarita, so he could have made it to Paso Robles or San Miguel and back on 100 miles. But that doesn’t quite match because of the precise mileage. More importantly, Santa Margarita has the only wye north of San Luis Obispo according to the employee timetable, and there's no turntable in the area, so there would be no other place to turn an engine. Assuming a single helper run up and down does imply a lot of time waiting. For example, on December 30, 1928, Mr. Frazier starts off in San Luis Obispo at 1:13 PM, 30 minutes before the arrival of the Daylight. He took the 71 north, took the 102 south, and arrived home at 1:35 am after 182 miles - one of his longer days. Now, a 91 mile trip would only have gotten him to King City, arriving at 3:50 pm, but catching the southbound Sunset Limited at 10:30 pm. That seems like an awfully long pause in the middle of his day.

It's worth noting that the timetable only has 7-8 scheduled (non-extra) trains a day in each direction, mostly clustered in the same times. Westbound trains towards San Francisco were often passing through between 3-5 am and 3-5 pm (morning and evening departures from Los Angeles) while eastbound trains were between 10pm-1am and 10am-3pm (evening and morning departures from San Francisco). That’s awkward for crews based in San Luis Obispo where a departure at 3pm on a numbered train may mean getting stuck at Santa Margarita for several hours until the late night rush arrives eastbound.

It would be nice to know how many extra trains came through San Luis Obispo, but that's hard without dispatcher's timesheets.

I’m more willing to believe that Mr. Frazier led multiple trains, going SLO to Santa Margarita at 1:30. He could have taken the Shore Line south at 2:44 pm, or 330 freight south at 4:08 pm, arriving in San Luis Obispo between 4:00 and 6:00 pm. There’s no good scheduled trains between 6pm and midnight - maybe he could have taken an extra - but he would have needed to be in Santa Margarita at 12:15 am to catch the train back. That’s still less than 100 miles.

100 miles is the minimum mileage for a day's work, so the 100 mile days probably just didn't involve much movement.

Different days had different mileages. November 30, 1928 had up on 77, back on 102 for 182 miles, but Dec. 2 had him up on 77 and back on 102 for 151 miles. There’s other days he’s back on an extra (4 hours, 100 miles) or train 244, the Sunset Manifest.

What about the distributions in mileage? I looked at 37 days of work for Mr. Fraser. 21 of the days were 100 mile days, and all were less than 8 hours of work. The rest of the days had unique or two-occurence mileages from 112 miles to 216 miles. Mileage also correlated strongly with hours of service: a 112 mile day was 8h35m, 116 miles was 8h50m, 126 miles was 9h25m, 134 miles was 9h25m. It definitely feels less like Vernon was getting paid for the actual mileage he worked (where I would have expected a lot of repeated miles), but instead getting paid by hours worked getting converted into a mileage. $6.23 for a 100 mile day plus 6c a mile seems to be a close but not exact conversion.

Let’s try thinking through a different scenario. On December 30, 1928, Mr. Frazier gets called at 1:13 pm at SLO, acts as helper the Daylight at 1:43 pm, and takes it as far as Santa Margarita (17 miles), breaking off the helper around 2:30pm, and catching the Sunset Manifest, train 244 at 4:45 pm. He returns to SLO at 7:25 pm, catches an extra, and meets the Sunset Limited at Santa Margarita at 12:15am. He got paid $11.34 for this 12 hour and 22 minute day which got recorded as 182 miles - much less than four trips to Santa Margarita (4 x 17 miles = 68 milees).

So from just this information, I think we’ve got it figured out:

This is a time book for an SP engineer, Vernon Fraser.
It records his work between December 1928 and mid-1929.
He's mostly handling helpers out of San Luis Obispo.
He probably did short trips, and had to wait at the top of Cuesta to pair up with a train headed down, or with multiple trips that aren’t fully detailed.
He was working near daily, even with only a few years of seniority. If I was more curious, I'd check later censuses to see
He was mostly paid on hours work (converted into miles).
He may have done 1-2 helper runs a day, and had lots of idle tiome waiting for the next train

How does that match what you saw in the time book, and what further information would you want to examine?

PCR Layout Design and Operations meet, Sacramento, Jan 31 - Feb 2, 2025

2025-01-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

My favorite model railroad event, the PCR (Pacific Coast Region) Layout Design and Operations meet, is happening this year in Sacramento at the California State Railroad Museum, January 31 to February 2, 2025. Like always, the meet's a mix of talks about design and operation, layout visits, and opportunities to try model railroad operations on layouts in the Bay Area. Friday will have a tour of the NMRA "Magic of Model Railroading" exhibit at the museum led by exhibit instigator Charlie Getz. Saturday's talks will be in the auditorium at the museum. We'll get to tour layouts in the Sacramento area on Saturday night. Operating sessions at local model railroads will be on Sunday. Like last year, you can also attend virtually if you're not in the area or want to enjoy the presentations from your home.

Get more information at www.bayldops.com. You must get tickets in advance at EventBrite. Virtual tickets give you access to watch the presentations and ask questions via a Zoom video conference. In-person tickets also include the Zoom link in case of last minute travel problems.

Like past years, we'll also be offering free layout design and operations consulting, in Sacramento or virtually. Check the website

to sign up for a session.

Bruce Morden is again running the layout design challenge, this time encouraging modelers to build a modular layout based on Sacramento's R Street industrial district. Read the layout design challenge and contact Bruce to become one of the challengers.

Hope to see you there!

Movie Night XXXI: Interurban Era visits the Vasona Branch!

2025-01-04T17:37:00.000-08:00

I'd mentioned YouTuber Interurban Era visited in October; we caught some pictures of his Caltrain electric locomotive model in front of the Market Street Station. At the same time, he also captured some video of some of the Alta California rolling stock braving the Santa Cruz mountains. If you've wanted to see the whole layout on video (which I've wanted to do but never got around to), Miles did a great job showing off the layout, both as railroad scenes and showing the overall layout.

Pop some popcorn and watch his visit to the Vasona Branch here!

Stuff Sucks

2024-12-09T23:41:00.003-08:00

One of the days when the cleanup was surprisingly under control.

We lost our mom last year, and my sister and I spent a good part of last summer emptying the family house. We got through it, but it was, as expected, an emotional and draining process. My parents had lived in the same house since the 1960’s, and they both lived in that house until nearly the end of each of their lives. That meant that all the items they’d collected over the years - all they’d collected to remember their childhoods, make a home, take in items when emptying grandparents’ houses, saving special items related to their children, or saving items to help my sister and I start our own homes - all that was packed into the house and garage. They’d obviously tried to prune at different times, but age, memories, disagreements, and a bit of procrastination kept an awful lot of stuff in the house.

Like most children, we had to sort through the items and find a new home for items in a too-short time. Some were meaningful to us, and we kept. Some went in the trash. Lots went to Goodwill and other thrift stores. Some items were hard to find a home for, but were sentimental enough that we couldn’t just pitch them. Some of those never found a home and ended up at the dump. The bookshelf my father made as a newlywed was too big and unwieldy for the Facebook Marketplace free furniture crowd. Others had strong memories for us and seemed worth extraordinary effort to re-home: the piano I learned to play on, the cool 1970’s stereo, some cool mid-century-modern furniture. I kept asking until we found someone who wanted each. Some items were so tied up in emotion that they went into our garages in hopes we’d have energy to sort them later, like the Christmas ornaments.

I suspect many of the folks reading this have gone through the same process, and know the same challenges. Some of the items we find bring a smile or a memory, and get a photograph before we toss them. Others we cling onto and keep, only to realize months later that the item isn’t actually so useful. It took a couple months before I could let go of a mid-century modern cake holder. I realized a couple months too late that it wasn’t useful, it had pinholes of rust and a subtle dent... and identical vintage items could be bought on ebay for $12 if I truly wanted one. Other items had too much of a connection to a parent or grandparent - a cigarette case given to my 20 year old grandfather by coworkers when he emigrated, a book that was one of the few remaining possessions from my other grandfather, memorabilia from my father’s time at the Western Pacific, my mom’s photos of the students she taught. A very few items were useful and were kept: a few dishes, some Christmas lights I remember from childhood, all the photos.

All of our experiences also aren't just a result of baby boomers shopping too much, or the Silent Generation following their parents' exhortations to save everything because of memories of the great depression. My father remembered cleaning out his grandmother's house in San Francisco's Eureka Valley. Her victorian dining room table wasn't interesting to mid-50's furniture dealers, so it also went to the dump. Letters from English relatives described the sadness of emptying a maiden aunt's house with old clothing and useless furniture. I imagine Neanderthal children complaining as they swept useless stones out of their parents's cave that had been saved "just in case we need to make more arrowheads."

I kept repeating to myself throughout the process “Just because something was important to someone else doesn’t mean it needs to be important to me.”

The stuff that we haven’t yet dealt with weights down the garage, makes it hard to get into the model railroad layout to do work. Every time I trip over it, I’m reminded that I haven’t dealt with the items, and the items within are slowly decaying without being used or enjoyed. I’ve got to go through the boxes at some point. Leaving them piled in the garage just pushes off the problem to the next generation, and just keeps us from doing other fun stuff with the space.

Model Trains Holding My Father’s Stories

Southern Railways locomotives at Waterloo Station during one of my dad's trips into 1947 London.

My father's photo of Flying Scotsman when it visited San Francisco

One of the boxes contained a bunch of model trains my dad had collected over the years. There was his Varney F-7 locomotive that he’d built and painted as a teenager, along with a few HO cars he’d also built from kits. He’d bought some British and European prototype trains when he visited Europe in the early 1960’s. He had other locomotives he’d bought at various times, such as a Pennsylvania GG-1 electric locomotive that he’d bought after a family trip to the East Coast. He kept some of these on display, and kept others in boxes in the garage, not wanting to lose the memories attached to them. When I’d offered to find homes for some of the stored model trains several years ago, he relinquished some, but held others; these model trains had memories of his life, and he didn’t want to let them go.

I had to keep my Dad’s Varney locomotives because he built those. The same with the half-done trolley model - for now I can’t let go something he put blood and sweat into creating.

For the others: well, my dad had strong memories for many of these trains. I’d heard some of those memories - of taking similar commute trains into London as a tourist seventeen year old, the freight car he’d gotten from a shipper trying to solicit ocean freight business. Locomotives which reminded him of childhood or his first railroad job. I’m glad he had that sentimental attachment to the trains, but that wasn’t reason enough to keep them. There’s other cases where I never heard the story. Why did he want that particular SNCF locomotive? Why did he keep that Life-Like 4-6-0 in a box for 50 years? Did it have meaning? Or perhaps there wasn’t a story. Maybe it was an impulse buy of something on a sale shelf. Did he just not know what to do when he no longer wanted it?

But Some of My Items Also Hold Stories. Do I Need to Hold Them?

And at the same time I was thinking about my father’s sentimentality, I was dealing with my own. I had my own piles of stuff with memories, and some of those piles got in the way and kept me from some of the fun I wanted to have. Pruning my father’s sentimental items encouraged me to do the same.

I cleaned out and rearranged the closet where I keep some of my model railroad gear, and picked out items that wouldn’t fit back in the closet. I cleaned off places around the layout where I’d stored anachronistic freight cars - usually freight cars from my childhood that I’d pressed back into service when I started building the Vasona Branch, but no longer needed. I picked through storage to find some old locomotives from teenage years that brought back memories of getting started in model railroading. I went through boxes of half-done projects, or badly built kits, or experiments with new materials, often highlighting memories of how I improved my modeling skills over the years.

My grad school layout with teenaged boxcar.

Getting Thomas the Tank Engine ready to be seen by nephew.

And as part of preparing to sell my dad’s trains, I decided it was time to do the same pruning on these items. Some to keep, some to throw away, some to find a new home for. I had a station I’d scratchbuilt when I got back into model railroading. It wasn’t appropriate for my current layout, and had an unrealistic roof line. I knew I could do better now. I liked the attached memory of learning to scratchbuild, but didn’t need the model. I had plastic freight cars from teenage years that brought back memories of the excitement of getting started in the hobby, but beyond that weren’t interesting. I had Thomas the Tank Engine locomotive I’d bought to interest my nephew in trains. He’s now 13, but never got the bug.

I also had model trains I’d bought as part of my own travels. One was a French freight locomotive I’d gotten at model shop in some small town in southwest France. We were staying with friends in a house in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wheat fields. We left the friends by the pool and took the car one afternoon and drove several towns over to a small town which had a model train hobby shop. The owner didn’t speak English, but my wife could translate a bit. I asked about trains that would run in the local area, and he pointed out a freight locomotive and covered hoppers, and also sent me home with some French model magazines. I got a tiny Hornby OO “Smokey Joe” switching locomotive from my sister when she first visited England. I had a Chinese National Railways diesel engine and passenger cars I’d gotten on a trip to Hong Kong. I’d walked by some store in the Central district and realized they had train models (though their main business was bus and tram models.) I’d never seen Chinese prototype locomotives (surprisingly from Bachman), and the locomotive ran wonderfully. (The owner of a hobby shop in Singapore scowled when I asked about Chinese-prototype models. "Why would you want that? The stuff from China's all cheap. You should buy these Marklin engines!") I had model kits I'd picked up in the UK when on a top-secret work trip.

I’d run some of those exotic trains when I was first building the Vasona Branch. In fact, the earliest shots of the Vasona Branch - photos taken at the end of a four-day binge of building - show the Chinese locomotive testing the trackage. I didn’t have many steam locomotives in those days, and big diesels were better for checking for crooked track and braving dirty track. Some of the teenaged freight cars operated on the Vasona Branch in the early days when I didn’t have enough rolling stock to make the layout fun to operate.

I lied. The Chinese locomotive wasn't on the tracks during the first weekend of construction.

They all had memories, good memories, my memories. But they all spent most of their time in boxes in the garage, occasionally pulled out to be looked at, and quickly put back. It wasn’t much of a life for a toy meant to be enjoyed, seen, and played with.

And So The Pruning Began

The first boxes went off to some local clubs. Dad’s books went to model railroad club at the Santa Clara depot; they could eBay the salable items to help support the club, and had a big table of free stuff for members to pick through and take home. Some of the odd books my father had relating to railroad rates went to that table. Much of my teenage HO cars and locomotives went to the Silicon Valley Lines, specifically for their younger members. They were having an operating session on a Saturday, and some of their new teenage members pounced upon the box like wolves tearing apart a carcass. One kid liked the look of the battered Athearn SDP-40 locomotive I’d bought at a swap meet table at the first serious model railroad event I’d ever attended. “Looks like the clips holding the body onto the frame are broken.” “Yep, that’s because I had too much fun with it when I was a teenager. Think you could fabricate new tabs out of styrene?” He thought about it for a while and kept it.

Full disclosure: I remember multiple times in my childhood where folks were giving away unwanted toys and trains like that, and and I was so excited to just have access to all these cool things - the neighbor dumping his hot wheels when he moved away, box of modeling supplies from someone's father. Watching the kids dive into the box and want the stuff was really fun!

The British trains were a challenge. My dad had strong memories of English trains as connections to his father’s country of origin and as memories of my father’s own trip to visit England in 1947. He told plenty of stories about catching the train at a stop near his cousin’s house and wandering into bomb-scarred London all by himself. He bought trains to remind himself of that important place and his first bits of freedom in a foreign country. There was a lot of sentimentality connected with those trains, but they were also the oldest and the least interesting to contemporary modelers. Instead, they went to someone on reddit.com who was asking about how to get started with British prototypes - fingers crossed those trains will get out of the box and actually be used.

The bulk of the European models got sold at the local model railroad group’s quarterly auction - in about 10 minutes, all the items started on a path to a new home - this Marklin locomotive to an enthusiast, that locomotive to someone who sells at swap meets, a couple freight cars went to who-knows-where. My French freight locomotive went to some younger modeler who seemed to revel in its oddity; I think it’s going to a very good home.

My Chinese locomotive - well, that went off to the swap meet guy at the auction because apparently it wasn’t interesting enough for the assembled crowd. I’m a little afraid I may see it again when looking on the tables at the next swap meet. My sister had a similar bit of haunting. She’d been taking a bunch of dishes and glasses to a local thrift store, and they were so grateful for everything, even the worn stuff and the unfashionably 1970’s glasses. Late in the cleanup, my sister found the lid to a dish she knew she’d given to the thrift store the previous week, and she wanted to make sure it got matched up again. So she marched into the thrift store to pair it up… and realized their whole housewares section was filled with our parents’ dishware. Our childhood was stretched across several tables, all priced at $2 each. She didn’t go back.

So it’s all gone now, and I’m a couple boxes closer to reclaiming the garage. My father and I had bought model trains because we thought they were interesting, because we liked constructing a model railroad, or because the trains were paired with some special event like travel or a particular time in our lives. We saved these artifacts because they highlighted an era in our lives, or a milestone in building our skills, or because they were just attractive to us.

My father saved those items - sometimes on display, sometimes just kept in the garage to know they were near. I’ve saved items so I can use them actively on the model railroad, or stored away so I can run across them again. In a very few cases, I’ve saved particularly significant items.

And I’ve let a bunch of them go. For some, the memories aren’t quite worth the space they occupy. For others, a photo is enough. For yet others, I just needed to write down the stories so I could get them out of the garage and instead let them linger right here in these words.

ChatGPT: "The Poisoned Track"

2024-12-07T23:13:00.004-08:00

There's nothing wrong with asking ChatGPT (or any of the other AI tools) about model railroads, right? I've played around a bit - asking it to describe fictional towns or a packing house in a 1930's California farm town. The generated text always seems a little rough or awkward, but I suspect it's got its uses for brainstorming. I couldn't get Google's Gemini AI tool to design track plans, but it keeps borrowing the same track plan image from some site on the Internet.

Wonder if it can put a model railroad into a story?

"describe a dashiell hammett murder mystery involving a model railroad"

Oh, my. I've got my issues with the story, but the whole "Something was off about the layout" sounds like a good hook for some good old human creativity.

Try for yourself here.

Title: The Poisoned Track

It was the kind of night that made you want to lock the door and bury yourself in a bottle of bourbon. The rain was coming down hard, the streetlamps barely cutting through the thick, swirling fog. I was nursing my second whiskey when the phone rang. A woman’s voice—steady, sharp, and as cold as the night air—cut through the haze of the bar.

“Mr. Alden?” she asked, like she already knew I’d be there.

“Yeah?”

“My name’s Marla Durant. My husband’s dead. I need you to find out who killed him.”

I straightened up, the weight of her words sinking in, cutting through the liquor fog.

“Dead, huh?” I asked, glancing at the reflection of my face in the dirty mirror behind the bar. “What makes you think it’s murder?”

“The way he died,” she said, her voice dropping to a near whisper. “He was shot, but that’s not what’s bothering me. It’s how he was found.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “You mind telling me more?”

“He was found in his study,” she said. “In front of his model railroad.”

Marla Durant was a tall, elegant woman in her late 30s—dark hair, sharp cheekbones, the kind of woman who could make a man’s heart skip a beat and his wallet empty in a second. She met me at the door of her mansion in Pacific Heights, wearing an expression that said she’d already seen too much for one lifetime.

The house was quiet, as if it had been holding its breath since her husband had died. She led me up the winding staircase and into the study, where the scene had been found.

It was a room I’d seen in a thousand men’s fantasies—mahogany shelves filled with books, heavy leather chairs, and an oak desk polished to a perfect sheen. But there was something strange about it, something that didn’t sit right. The thing that stuck out wasn’t the expensive furniture, or even the faint smell of gunpowder that still hung in the air. It was the model railroad.

It sprawled across the floor, winding in and out of miniature hills, through tiny stations, around ponds and rivers that looked like they could’ve been real if you squinted hard enough. The tracks were arranged with military precision, and there, near the center of the room, sat a small, delicate train—the kind that looked like it belonged in a museum more than a man’s private study.

And there, slumped over the desk, was Patrick Durant—his face pale, eyes wide open, the gunshot wound to the back of his head a clean, efficient kill. The revolver was resting just beside his hand, like someone had made sure it looked like a suicide. But something didn’t sit right.

There was a small train set at the far end of the room, nestled near a large model of a station house. It was different from the rest of the set—off, like a jigsaw piece that didn’t belong. The tracks seemed slightly bent, the cars slightly out of place. My instincts were on edge. I knew it was important, but I didn’t know why.

Patrick Durant was a quiet man by all accounts—wealthy, successful, a former stockbroker who had made a killing when the market was still roaring. But his real passion, the one thing he’d loved more than his business empire, was his model railroad. It was his obsession, something he’d spent years building. And it was something he kept locked away from the world—his sanctuary.

But then there was the question of his wife, Marla. I dug into their past, and what I found wasn’t pretty. Marla Durant wasn’t just the grieving widow—she had her own set of problems, ones that didn’t take too long to dig up. She’d been involved in some shady dealings, things that had nothing to do with her husband’s wealth. There were rumors about gambling, debts, and men who didn’t take kindly to being stiffed.

But nothing pointed directly to murder—not yet, anyway.

I spent hours going over the model railroad. It wasn’t just the tracks—it was the trains themselves, and the way they ran. Something was off about the layout, something I couldn’t put my finger on. I could feel the obsession in every inch of the track, in every tiny piece of scenery. This wasn’t just a hobby; this was a man who had poured every ounce of his soul into this little world.

Then I found it.

A hidden compartment. A small, well-concealed safe buried beneath the track near the station house. Inside the compartment was a ledger—carefully hidden, and filled with names, dates, and figures that didn’t belong in a model railroad. They were business transactions—shady deals, loans, and payments to a few names I recognized: some of the more dangerous men in the city.

I knew immediately what had happened. Patrick Durant had been involved in something he couldn’t get out of—a web of debts, illegal dealings, and people who wouldn’t hesitate to put him six feet under. And that model railroad? It was his way of hiding the evidence, a tiny, miniature world where he could keep his secrets safe.

The breakthrough came when I learned about a man named Alex “Big Al” Crawford—a former business partner of Durant’s. Crawford was the kind of guy who didn’t play by the rules, and he had a reputation for making people disappear when they became liabilities. Durant had been trying to cut ties with him, and that’s when the pressure started to build. But Big Al wasn’t the type to let go without taking something in return.

It all came crashing down when I found a letter, carefully hidden among the tracks—an unsigned note with a single line of text:

"Track 13. Final payment due."

I stared at it for a long time before it clicked. Track 13. There was no Track 13 on the model. But there was something wrong with the layout—a missing piece of track, a gap that should have been filled. The more I looked at the set, the more I realized the significance of the note. Durant had been trying to get out. He’d made a deal with Big Al, but he wasn’t going to make his final payment.

Big Al had come to collect, and Patrick Durant had fought back. But in the end, it was no contest. Durant had been too deep in, and the man who was supposed to be his partner had become his executioner.

When I confronted Marla, she didn’t deny it. She wasn’t the one who had killed her husband, but she knew who had. Big Al had made her a deal—help him cover up the murder, and he’d make sure she wasn’t left with nothing. But the deal had gone sideways, as they always do. Durant had been killed, the tracks had been rearranged, and Marla was left holding the bag.

She didn’t cry when I arrested her. She didn’t scream. She just stood there, eyes cold as stone, watching as the whole thing unraveled around her.

As I walked out into the rain, the sound of a train whistle echoed in my mind. The case was closed, but the model railroad still haunted me. In the end, it wasn’t just the trains that were moving in circles—it was the lies, the secrets, and the people who thought they could bury them beneath tiny tracks. But nothing stays hidden forever.

The poisoned track had claimed its final victim.

The Not-Pretty Side of Los Gatos

2024-12-03T22:26:00.003-08:00

[When you’re modeling a location on a prototype railroad, part of the fun and challenge is figuring out what to model. For most places, you can’t model a location exactly because it won’t fit on a model railroad. (If you can model a place in its entirety, then perhaps you’re modeling a place that’s not quite interesting enough for a model railroad, or maybe you’ve won the lottery space-wise.) Instead, you're forced to pick and choose the interesting bits of a location that'll help you tell its story and give you a fun place to run trains.

When I started sketching out the Los Gatos scene for my model railroad, I had to make my choices of what to model. Los Gatos is a confusing location to model, with a mix of interesting operational and scenic attributes, but not enough activity to make for a great model railroad location. The city sits in an enviable location up against the Santa Cruz Mountains and at the mouth of Los Gatos Canyon. Railroad-wise, it represents the end of straight track and easy grades. It served as a key point for controlling trains entering Los Gatos canyon, a terminus for commute trains to San Francisco, and a place for steam locomotives to take on water. The downtown area along the railroad tracks is interesting architecturally, with a mix of grand storefronts and less attractive back sides of buildings. It’s less interesting for freight traffic - a freight house, the Hunts cannery, a team track, and a couple other rail-served businesses are the only source of freight traffic.

In terms of structures, I knew I wanted to model the former Hunts cannery, both as a source of traffic for the layout and to keep my focus on the fruit industry in the Santa Clara Valley. Other potential scenes included the houses along the right of way north of downtown, the team track behind the Santa Cruz Ave. shops, and finally the passenger, freight depots, and water tower on the south side of town.

Any reasonable person would have modeled the station as a destination for passenger trains, a spotting location for freight cars, and an iconic and identifiable spot for visitors from the local area. My problem was that I didn’t have space to do the depot scene justice. Because of the Vasona Branch’s focus on freight operations, sidings and industries won out over passenger facilities. Instead, I modeled (1) the cannery, (2) the houses along the tracks to remind folks of the scene of tracks running through the backyards, and (3) the track and backs of businesses to highlight the urban part of Los Gatos. I’d already filled in the first two scenes, but hadn’t yet done the team track area.

So what did the track look like around here? Historical documents hint at how the area changed over the years. It’s been easy to keep compare the changes over the years - I’ve scanned and saved away the various maps on the computer so I can consider my plan. My notebook is full of of map sketches of towns that tell me where I’d found inspiration 15 years ago, and which photos I should look at when I started building.

Los Gatos track arrangement, 1880. From Southern Pacific valuation map, California State Railroad Museum collection.

When the South Pacific Coast Railroad came through Los Gatos, Los Gatos was the point where extra power was needed to pull trains through the Santa Cruz mountains. We can see this in the track arrangement: the mainline and three sidings in front of the depot for pausing trains, a turntable for turning helper locomotives, and a spur off to Los Gatos Cannery's plant in the middle of what is now downtown. Only thre buildings are marked on the map: the Lyndon Hotel on the west side of the tracks, and the station and Wilcox House on the east side. Development hasn't yet reached Los Gatos.

Los Gatos track arrangement, 1909. From Southern Pacific right-of-way boundaries map, California State Railroad Museum collection.

By 1909, we see that the turntable has been removed and replaced with the team track behind the storefronts on Santa Cruz Ave. Apparently, the turntable was unneeded after the end of narrow-gauge operations in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The available map was intended only for showing the right-of-way, so it doesn't show any of the buildings to help us understand how developed Los Gatos was at this time. Interestingly, the lot trackside on the other side of Elm Street has a gas tank for the former coal gas plant - this is where I've placed the ice cream factory.

Los Gatos track arrangement, 1930. From Southern Pacific valuation map, California State Railroad Museum collection.

In 1930, the team track is still present, and the valuation map shows the buildings backing on the team track. Not all the lots were built out - there was a gas station at the corner of Elm and Santa Cruz Ave, showing us Santa Cruz Ave. wasn’t yet the continuous strip of high-end retail it is today. The valuation map still shows the coal gas plant - perhaps I was hasty to put the ice cream factory there?

A final valuation map from 1946 shows a much-reduced Los Gatos. Two of the four sidings have been removed. The team track is also long-removed - a sad ending for a track that started out serving the turntable for the narrow gauge. The photo from 1953 shows the alley behind the buildings on Santa Cruz Ave., hinting at what the area around the team track looked like. It also seems to show that the third siding is still here - perhaps the SP considered it out of service and hadn't removed it.

Alley behind Bank of America, 1953. Charlie Givens photo, from Arcadia Publishing's "Railroads of Los Gatos"

The day to actually start building the Los Gatos scene finally arrived recently - the bare plywood around the team track in Los Gatos finally got on my nerves enough for me to start building. Taking a look at both my past thoughts and what I know about the location, I had a strong idea of what to build. I wanted arow of buildings backing the space behind team track, and giving a place for a detailed scene highlighting that the railroad was a bit hidden from Los Gatos’s commercial strip, but that we’re still in an urban area. The passenger station would be out of scene to the left; passenger trains stopping in Los Gatos will stop anywhere along here. I wanted to capture some of the back-alley feeling from that 1953 photo, but also wanted the area to still appear in use.

Panorama of the finished scene.

Finishing this scene required several building flats. From the 1944 Sanborn map, I see:

The leftmost building would be the Bank of America branch, just where the railroad tracks crossed Los Gatos’s Main Street. This was a modern building, appearing around 1928, and matching the style of many other Bank of America buildings in California. It’s a known landmark and an interesting building, and so it’s an important location to include.
There would be the backs of several older brick buildings along the alley paralleling the railroad. The first was a low one story building as a store. It held a liquor store in 1950’s. I haven’t been able to track down what was in this back-alley storefront in the 1930’s, but it’s still a valuable place to model - I hadn’t thought there would be storefronts along here until I saw the liquor store in an old photo. That same photo also encouraged me to make a wider alley along tracks. It’s a good building for setting the feel of being in an alley behind the main street, so I’ll make sure to model this.
The next was the Masonic Lodge building - two story with high ceilings. (It disappeared and the lot currently has a one story 1950’s store.) I’ll model this as well.
Next was another fraternal society - the International Woodsmen of the World - again multi story brick from the 19th century. Still there.) This will complete the row of buildings, and block the view of the backdrop neatly. (Probavblty the Templeman building, built 1921 from reinforced concrete?)
There was a series of one story buildings.
Finally, there was a gas station at the corner of North Santa Cruz and Elm. I won’t model this, but I will add some fencing.

The various brick buildings could be built using whatever scraps of buildings I’ve got in my box, but the Bank of America building deserves a bit better treatment. I'll talk more about Bank of America next time.

Freight Trains in the Sky

2024-11-06T12:44:00.005-08:00

One of the bigger changes in model railroading since the 1970’s is whether we’re modeling a completely imaginary railroad, a plausible but invented railroad, or if we’re trying to model the real world as it was at a particular time. The “imagine everything” folks might build something that’s a caricature - think John Allen’s mountain-crossing Gorre and Daphetid — or that borrows some historic reality (“bridge route in Colorado”) Owners get all the freedom to choose what they’re building out of whole cloth, create cities along the railroad from any inspiration, and avoid all the pesky research and visits to actual sites. Folks building to a plausible reality might need to understand something about the economics, architecture, and industries of a specific place and time - modeling an agricultural short line in California, or a fictitious logging railroad in Washington state. However, they’ve also got the freedom to imagine new places using whatever constraints they choose. I’m on the other side - I choose to model actual locations, and try to accurately model what’s there. I enjoy the research, I think I get a more realistic whole, and I suspect that the research helps me fill in details I couldn’t imagine on my own.

Or, more bluntly, the real world is stranger than I might imagine, so modeling a real place from photos helps me fill in those details I couldn’t possibly invent.

How strange is the real world? How about “freight trains in the sky” strange?

Report on Steam Railroads of San Jose

I was poking around in San Jose Library’s California Room, the library’s local history collection. One item caught my attention: “Report on Steam Railroads of San Jose”. This report from 1925 described the current state of the different railroads in San Jose at the time, and suggested ways to improve both the profits of the railroads while improving quality of life for San Jose residents and businesses. Considering the author was a well-known urban planner from St. Louis (Harold Bartholomew, who apparently had an entire urban planning firm specializing in railroad rethinks), I think we can imagine we’re about to hear a bunch of crazy ideas from those Back East crazy consultants. And it doesn’t disappoint, with a crazy proposal that I couldn’t have imagined.

[ Partial version of Report on Steam Railroads of San Jose here. I didn’t bother to scan the fold-out profiles for railroad elevation for the three plans. Sorry! ]

The problems of San Jose in regard to its steam railroads are similar in every respect to those in other Cities of normal and rapid growth, where the expansion of industries, commercial enterprises, and residential sections has taken place with little or no regulation. Instead of well defined and segregated industrial districts, we find in San Jose clusters of factories, warehouses, coal and lumber yards and a great number of packing establishments located close up to the railroad tracks, often main lines, as they have always existed. The industries have closed in on the railroads, so to speak, thus hindering greatly both their own expansion and that of the railroads.”

As a reminder, San Jose in 1925 was different from the railroads we know today. In the 1920’s, the College Park yard straddling the Guadalupe river was the main SP yard. The “big old barn” of an Eastlake-style wooden station on Bassett Street was San Jose’s primary railroad station. The line to Los Angeles ran down the center of Fourth Street, past office buildings and San Jose State University. The old South Pacific Coast line broke off the SP mainline at the old Lentzen Street roundhouse, past the current Shark Tank and future site of Diridon Station, and then off towards Campbell and Los Gatos. Santa Clara’s Newhall Yard hadn’t yet been built. The old freight yards were congested, lots of downtown streets got blocked by trains around the clock, and the residents complained about the 19th century feel of the railroad facilities in town. Main roads crossed the railroad at ground level, so busy streets such as First Street, Polhemus (Taylor), San Pedro Street, and the Alameda were constantly blocked by trains coming and going.

What’s Wrong with the San Jose Railroads?

It was a very different San Jose than we know. The report highlighted many of the challenges: the passenger station and yards were overwhelmed, the freight station wasn’t modern, and the city wanted the SP off Fourth Street.

There were 100 passenger trains running through San Jose each day. 70 of the trains were the commute operations - nearly as busy as today. Most of those passenger operations went to the San Jose Market Street station - a two track station that was too tiny for the service, stuck in the middle of the city, and ill-equipped to turn commute trains and send steam engines to and from the roundhouse. There were also five trains to and from Oakland and Niles, six trains to and from Los Angeles and points east, and six trains to and from Monterey and the Salinas Valley. None of these were trains to Santa Cruz - the Santa Cruz trains all stopped at the former SPC station off the Alameda.

The yards and services were still based on 1870’s San Jose. Freight switching of College Park blocked Polhemus (Taylor) Street; San Pedro Street had six to twelve tracks to cross. The consultants were particularly dismissive of the old Southern Pacific freight depot on San Pedro Street. The freight station was a fine building, 600 feet long with two tracks holding 44 freight cars each (assuming temporary bridges could be placed between adjacent cars.) However, the freight station predated automobiles. There were no loading docks for trucks on the property, the station was reached by a narrow driveway, and the only exit along San Pedro Street required crossing eight active yard tracks.

“THE FOURTH STREET PROBLEM That a problem exists as to the proper disposition of the Southern Pacific track in Fourth Street, is granted by all, including the railroad itself which some twenty years ago anticipated the situation and purchased the necessary right of way for relocating its track to by-pass the city to the South. The detour was never built, however, and in the interim the city developed a rapid suburban growth to the South and west so that the proposed route is now fairly well surrounded by residential and potential residential areas and is intersected by some 20 improved streets. Naturally, a well established community such as this resents the intrusion of the railroad into its midst. On the other hand that part of the public along and in the vicinity of Fourth Street, and those utilizing its own streets have endured the presence of the railroad for about 50 years and now feel the need of relief. It is also the sentiment that the natural expansion of the business district eastward is hampered boy the operation of trains on Fourth Street.
The railroad without a doubt would prefer to remain in Fourth Street, operating at grade for the rest of its life, as the sight loss in time due to speed reduction through the city is inconsequential and any change it may make to materially better the situation will probably cost from one to five million dollars.”

The great thing about the report is that the consultants went into detail about how the Southern Pacific and Western Pacific ran their railroads. They noted a ton of operating details about the SP.

San Jose yard assembled trains going to San Francisco, Oakland, Niles, Tracy, Watsonville Junction, Redwood City, and Santa Cruz.

30 switch engines and crews were needed for yard and industrial switching during the fall season.

30-40 freight trains a day, and 1600-1800 cars per day came through San Jose. “This is not an extraordinary great volume for the facilities at hand but the great diversity of classifications necessitates quick handling.”

SP had four team tracks just west of North First Street and north of passenger depot, and two additional tracks west of San Pedro Street that had a loading platform and Gantry crane.

For Market Street station, the two tracks under the train shed and one track north of the train shed were used for loading and unloading passengers. Five tracks north of the station were used for storing passenger equipment.

WP cars were only interchanged on the south side of town near Fourth Street and Alma. This was also a point of contention in the report, and the authors stressed that better and faster ways of interchange were needed.

The consultants were also detailed, explaining exactly how cars for the Santa Cruz branch were handled. They stated that Santa Cruz branch trains were assembled in “a small yard in Senter Street prolonged” (aka the current main line between Lenten Ave and Diridon Station). Train crews didn’t have to do any additional re-blocking or organizing there; instead, trains could sort cars at “several tracks on the Santa Cruz division in the vicinity of San Carlos Street (called the South Yard)” This is some great detail that I’m not sure how I’d get any other way. From the point of view of my Vasona Branch model railroad, it would be quite accurate for crews to sort and shuffle cars near Plant 51 either for local work or in preparation for later work further down the line. Best of all, I now know to refer to this stretch of tracks as “South Yard” - a little detail that otherwise might never have been recorded.

So What Should We Do About It?

The Eastern Consultants made four proposals, two that made sense and one that was batshit crazy to my modern eyes.

A: Bypass around San Jose to the west.

B: Elevated tracks along Fourth Street

C: Reuse the Western Pacific right of way around San Jose.

D: Pass around the city to the east/north, and parallel the WP on the east side of town.

The consultants thought the bypass around the west side of San Jose was a non-starter. Although the SP had owned the land for twenty years, suburbia now surrounded the right of way, and the neighbors were unlikely to want trains coming through their nice neighborhood. (Two years later, the Willow Glen neighborhood incorporated as a city, primarily to block the Southern Pacific from coming through. They merged back into San Jose once the SP bypass was built to their east, avoiding the neighborhood.) The consultants also noted it was going to be pricey to raise the tracks around the Alameda and through Willow Glen, build bridges at the Alameda and San Carlos, and fight the neighbors. “It is therefore recommended that this plan be definitively abandoned.”

Plan B was their favorite - they assumed that the then-current mainline north of downtown and down Fourth Street could be raised 15 feet in the air, and the city streets in the vicinity could be dropped four feet. More importantly, they only suggest raising the through tracks to Los Angeles - the station would remain at ground level (though it would be “replaced by an efficient and modern station”), and San Francisco commute trains would continue to stop at ground level. This plan seems to assume the College Park yard must be decommissioned, for there would be no way for a train leaving the yard to reach the ramp to the elevated structure. They still note that “freight and passenger terminal reconstruction will be quite expensive as will also the elevated line of open type design” - an interesting admission when they discounted the bypass around Willow Glen because of the cost of routing and elevating the tracks there.

To my eye, they’re being awfully optimistic about the plan:

“The principal advantages of plan B are as follows: (1) Property values along Fourth Street will not be depressed but should be favorably affected.” Honestly, I can’t imagine freight trains rolling by at second floor level would be pleasant, either for noise, shaking, or strange stuff dropping from the train. They also admit that “certain industries particularly in the vicinity of North First Street including in the Wye… will be unfavorably affected.” I think they’re primarily talking about the Golden Gate Packing Co on Fourth Street here - apparently, its sidings couldn’t be connected after all the work to raise the line. 

The third option, Plan C, was to bypass San Jose to the west like Plan A, but avoid the challenges of forcing a new route through the Willow Glen suburbs. Bartholomew proposed having the SP move the main line to the former South Pacific line, build a new station at today’s Diridon Station, and build the necessary overpasses and underpasses along the way. When the tracks passed by the Western Pacific crossing, though, the mainline would follow the WP line through the Willow Glen neighborhood and onto open country. The consultants suggested that a jointly operated double track line could be created, or the SP could just parallel the WP immediately to the south. They claimed this approach would remove all the tracks on Fourth Street, “no important industries would be affected”, “no additional interlocking plants would be required with the WP.”, and a joint line would allow for a more convenient place for the railroads to exchange cars. They also admit that moving the SP’s passenger depot away from downtown is a drawback, “passengers will be carried through an industrial area largely and will not get a satisfactory impression of the city as a whole”, and requires acquiring a different set of land through Willow Glen.

Paralleling the WP might not be as easy. From modern eyes, the WP’s line through Willow Glen seems to weave its own way through suburbia on a narrow right of way. I’d imagine the neighbors would have complained just as loudly as they had to the SP’s bypass proposal. The consultants proposed a joint line with the WP, or at least a parallel line, and do note that these would be much more unsafe than the existing situation if the line continued to have street level grade crossings - drivers and pedestrians were too likely to start moving when one train passed, not realizing another was coming on the parallel track.

Plan D appeared to be a bonus proposal, provided mostly as an afterthought. Although they noted the SP could go around the east side of San Jose, they noted that the railroad would need to push a right-of-way through many blocks of existing neighborhoods, increasing the cost and the outcry.

How’d the Consultants Do?

All joking aside, I really love this document. Not only does it propose an alternate San Jose that I would never have imagined myself, but it also provides so many details that are helpful for my model railroad based on the real railroads they examined. I appreciate their fact gathering about the activity in San Jose: the number of trains and cars switched, the work done at the freight house and passenger depot, the switching practices, and the informal names for pieces of track. I can’t imagine anywhere else I might have learned that the tracks near the Del Monte cannery were referred to as the “South Yard”.

I love the document, but that doesn’t mean I love that alternate San Jose they propose. I don’t know how serious this plan was, but the elevated tracks through flat San Jose doesn’t match my image of California - elevated structures like this definitely sound like something we’d find “back east”, not here. However, the fact that someone proposed this definitely highlights that this could have happened, and I could imagine someone building an interesting “what-if” layout with freight trains flying by downtown San Jose at treetop level. If I were into modeling plausible railroads, it might be interesting to build a major mainline through downtown San Jose on an elevated structure. However, I suspect it would look awkward and out-of-place. If we’re building a plausible layout, that also means we want to avoid the stuff that might be accurate but that doesn’t match our viewers’ expectations much. Just because some fancy east coast consultants thought it’s possible doesn’t mean my next guest to see the model would think so.

I’m also not sure it would be a fun model railroad. The operational challenges - the long climb paralleling existing tracks, the new two level station at Market Street, the curve onto Fourth Street - make me wonder whether it would be good or bad as a model railroad - the elevated and ground level tracks seem like they’d remove some of the complexity and action we’d like in a model railroad.

The whole plan, though, highlights how strange the real world is, and how folks might have suggested plans for our hometown that might seem surprising or improbable to our eyes. Apparently, someone in City Hall or the Chamber of Commerce didn’t think it was so strange, and was willing to cut Mr. Bartholomew a large check to “think outside the box” and consider freight trains in the sky.

Bartholomew didn’t just try to rebuild San Jose’s railroads - urban planning was his business, and he did similar reports for many big cities from the 1920’s through the 1950’s. The archives of his company, Harland Bartholomew and Associates, are in Washington University’s library in St. Louis, and a listing of just some of their records show how broadly he consulted - the list shows Alameda, Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Jose all having reports done, as well as many more cities across the U.S. If I had a couple days free in St. Louis, I’d likely stop by and check out Bartholomew’s other plans. I suspect I’ll find a bunch of “just put the freight trains on an elevated structure” ideas.

We’ve got a lot of choice when we’re building a model railroad - whether we’re building something imaginary, plausible, or historically accurate. I’ve always aimed to model real locations and times because I think I’ll create a more believable scene than I would have if I either had to imagine a place from whole cloth, or where I wasn’t doing research on what a real place was like. The Bartholomew report on San Jose shows highlights both how strange and unpredictable the real world might be, as well as the outlandish ideas that might have been seriously considered in the real world and might be reasonable choices for a plausible layout. Either way, searching through archives and building up knowledge can be a great boon for real or plausible layouts… even if it’ll tell us we ought to put freight trains in the sky.

Image generated by gemini.google.com, which refused to put a Daylight locomotive on the elevated structure regardless of how easy that would be.

Take the Electric Trains to the Broad Gauge Depot!

2024-10-28T00:08:00.004-07:00

I had a visit this weekend from YouTuber Interurban Era, a Bay Area custom model and layout builder. I've been a big fan of Miles's work for years. His 1960's Mexico-themed "Alta California" railroad has modeled interesting locations with diesels I recognize from my teenage Athearn years. His Oakland-tinted street running scene on the former layout matched a lot of memories of wandering around Oakland's vintage neighborhoods. Interurban Era also inspired my Google bus project when he showed off one of the Iconic Replicas HO buses in AC Transit livery, and introduced me to the high-quality modern bus models. He's also done virtual model railroading, helping build a San Francisco-themed world in the city-building game "Cities Skyline" called "Presidio Bay". I'd been up to see his workshop and layout a couple months ago, and finally got to repay the favor by inviting him and his other half to visit and operate on the Vasona Branch.

Interurban Era got lucky last year; when Caltrain decided to give away an HO model of one of the Stadler KISS trainsets that are now running on the electrified San Jose - San Francisco line, Interrban era managed to score that rare model. If that model needed a place to run, it would certainly be the San Jose Market Street depot on that portable layout I did a few years back. I set up part of the layout in the garage just for this visit, and that's why we've got an electric trainset sitting under the trainshed at Market Street.

The Market Street station was the Southern Pacific's primary station up until 1935 when Diridon station opened. Market Street often got referred to as the "broad gauge station" because the other major station, West San Jose, was the former South Pacific Coast narrow gauge station. Even after the former SPC line from Alameda to Santa Cruz was widened to standard gauge, the stations still seemed to keep the "narrow gauge depot" and "broad gauge depot" identifiers.

As the trainset was already visiting, we also took it out on the Los Gatos branch, leading to this photo at the Campbell station. Here's hoping Caltrain gets encouraged to string catenary down to Campbell and Los Gatos!

I keep wondering whether the HO Stadler model was a one-off promotional model; Interurban Era mentioned that it's based on a Lilliput model, but the manufacturer did cut some new molds for parts of the Caltrain version of the car. Because Lilliput is one of the brands owned by Bachman, I think we've got a reasonable chance that HO models of these trainsets will show up in stores one of these years. If that happens, plan to take the electric trains to San Jose's broad gauge depot!

Movie Night XXX: Serious Switchman Skills

2024-07-25T10:37:00.000-07:00

Playing the model railroad operations means trying to keep track of a ton of cars as you try to place each in the correct location. Real railroaders had the same problem - they'd need to know the cars in their train. Looking a couple cars down a string wasn't easy - for us modeleres, we might just need to glance a different way or perhaps pull out the reading glasses, but the railroad switchman might need to walk a long way down the track to remember which cars are on that spur.

For that reason, the real railroaders were skilled at keeping track of cars, whether having systems for where they'd place cars, or being very good about note-keeping, or just working on their memory. This video from "You Asked For It" from the 1950's shows switchman Brian Stevenson of the Rock Island's Kansas City yard demonstrating his photographic memory. The TV show runs a string of 40 cars past switchman Stevenson, and he attempts to repeat back the car reporting marks from memory. It's a neat memory demonstration, and a great chance to look at some 1950's boxcars up close!

What makes a social group work?

2024-07-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

Pat LaTorres greets the public at a garden model railroad exhibit at Bay Area Maker Faire 2016.

What’s it take to keep a group active over generations?

Recently in London, I visited the Museum of Freemasonry at the London Grand Lodge. The Freemasons are one of the oldest fraternal organizations in the western world, combining fellowship, charity, and a bit of mystery together to pull men and women together. Freemasonry starred as informal clubs in the 17th century. Several related groups pulled together for unified rules and rituals around 1717. By the 1760’s, several dozen lodges were active in different pubs and coffeehouses in London.

List of pubs hosting active freemason groups in 18th century London. From Museum of Freemasonry collection.

The “mason” in freemasonry is based on supposed attributes of medieval stonemasons - individualists who would journey around to work on major building projects. Medieval masons created guilds for training, and secret handshakes and processes to help masons share their level of skill when working far from where they may have trained. The projects they built were the most impressive building projects in Europe, and the masons had the sense of building for the ages as they constructed cathedrals and palaces across Europe. The Freemasons borrowed the metaphors and rituals from the medieval guilds. When men are all hopped up on caffeine and focused on bettering the world with talk of democracy, bettering selves, and breaking class levels, borrowing such metaphors of secret truths seems almost required.

As the British Empire expanded, freemasonry followed along, providing lodges that brought together all of the British expats and administrators - one of the few ways for men at different levels of society to interact. The museum highlighted an early 20th century British surveyor who knew wherever he went - Cyprus, the Middle East, New Zealand. Or London - there was always a lodge he could visit to make local acquaintances. In India, freemasonry allowed the levels of (British colonial) society to mix. The members also found it a comforting group even at the worst times - the Museum of Freemasonry included the meeting notes from Masonic gatherings at Changi prison in Singapore during the Japanese World War II occupation.

Initiation well, Quinta da Regaleira.

There was also all the fun ritual and secrecy as masons claimed they were passing on secrets from past ages. Some groups took this more seriously than others. One of Portugal’s elites, Carvalho Monteiro, was so dedicated to his Masonic fun that he built elaborate features in his gardens just for Masonic initiation rituals. He built caves and a deep well with a spiral staircase leading down into the depths. The lodge would send the initiates into a cave at the top end of the garden and expect them to find the correct passage to climb the well stairs "into the light." To be honest, if I had a big garden and a ton of money, I’d probably want to build a big occult fraternal society clubhouse in my backyard too.

The London Grand Temple highlights that pride and popularity of the organization. The London art deco grand temple with its two thousand seat auditorium is a beautiful and visible symbol of the organization. San Francisco’s Scottish Rite Temple out on 19th Avenue was a similar reminder. West coast model railroaders and rail fans likely have positive impressions of the Scottish Rite temple in Stockton where the Winterrail multimedia shows were held.

Main auditorium, Freemason's Hall, London.

Freemasonry has declined over the intervening years in numbers and influence. All fraternal societies have fallen out of favor as trends and preferences for how folks spend their time has changed. Freemasonry’s pseudo-historical self-improvement rituals might not be as attractive in this modern age. Their philosophy and attempts to improve the spiritual nature of their members veer awfully close to 1970s cults from my uninformed point of view. Freemasonry also has a very conservative bent. At the London Grand Lodge, the dress code was quite proper and old fashioned. Men in black three piece suits carrying briefcases with their mason’s apron and regalia may not be so interesting for more informal generations. Regardless, they’re still one of the oldest fraternal societies and still have an obvious following.

As much as friendship and gathering appeals to me, I’m likely not a good Masonic candidate - too informal, and too much of a Generation-X cynical bent. I’d pursue E Clampus Vitus, but I’m not sure I can hold my drink sufficiently to make it in.

What’s this got to do with model railroading?

Looking through the museum, I saw reminders of our own concerns about the hobby, especially as members age and interests change. I see the differences in how each generation wants to show their modeling skill: model contests at meets vs. RPM meets with their show-and-tell feel, focus on individual models vs the layout as a whole, layouts focused on operation against round-and-round club layouts. Each of these tensions can separate modelers, limit the size of events, and sometimes cause tension and conflict. For model railroading, I’d hope we can find ways of keeping the communities together just for a larger hobby and more folks to socialize with. I also want the community to keep attracting and encourage the next generation so we have more folks to hang out with and learn from.

Like the fraternal societies, we worry about participation and expectations and uses of free time changes. Formal rituals - the weekly meeting on Friday nights, or expectation of the hobby as a “mens-only” operation limits who might be interested, or when folks have time available. (See also the comments about the decline of scheduled social acitivities. Church groups and bowling groups both have seen the decline. For bowling, league participation has dropped off even as bowling in general is still popular, hinting at changes at how we want to belong. Some in masonry just blame it all on the hippies and drugs which I suspect is not one of the challenges for model railroad socializing.

The fraternal societies also remind us of the need to jump on new trends and styles. For me, it was interesting to see how model railroading changed after the introduction lion of DCC - more focus on operations and operating weekends, the new sub-hobby of electronics and command control becoming a significant part of the community, etc. Here in the Bay Area, we’ve had the DCC lunch on Fridays which started as a place for a dozen folks interested in command control to meet up and share their latest projects. That group’s quieted down after COVID thanks to an aging-out of one cohort of members, less unexplored corners, and changes in who was working close by enough to meet up.

The masons opened their museum, I suspect, in order to be more visible to a younger generation and search for new members. It was a weird and interesting vibe - I got the sense they were proud of the museum and eager to encourage a new generation, but I also got the sense they weren’t completely ready to open themselves up to the world.

For a model railroad group, there’s times where I think we’re hiding ourselves in similar ways. In other ways, I think we’re much more willing to talk with the visitors from outside the community, share what we’re doing, and just share our excitement. Members at club open houses are willing to talk with the public, as are the folks at our local model railroad shows. We also see how similar groups can be public and friendly at events like the Maker Faires (plug: San Francisco Bay Area Maker Faire will be in Vallejo in October!). Adam Savage’s YouTube videos sharing his personal and commercial prop-making skills also shows as an excited and modern way to share the excitement of building for building’s sake - see his video on making a carrying box for his prop gun from the Blade Runner movie.)

Printing group, Maker Faire Bay Area, 2016.

Burning Man illuminated art, Maker Faire 2016.

I like model railroading. I enjoy having a hobby that lets me construct interesting things without needing to navigate city building code, market and coworker constraints at the day job, or be concerned about building things with some critical need. I like using the hobby as a chance to learn and better myself as I research local history, technology, and the scenery in the places I model. I like that the hobby lets me be social with a fun group of people and be part of informal and formal groups. I like that the hobby gives me a framework to help the community whether in restoring and operating real railroads, sharing local history, or encouraging kids to learn how to make and repair things. I like that the hobby would give me ways to work towards achievements if I wanted, but that I’m not required. We don’t have a secret handshake, but we’ve got a lot in common with the Masons. I’d just like to make sure we stay as something active, modern, and interesting for newcomers rather than something defined more by what we’ve been.

Getting Way Too Excited About Terminal Strips

2024-02-24T00:09:00.000-08:00

In my last post about replacing the Vasona Branch's signal controller, you might have spotted those odd terminal strips in the pictures of the new signal controller. These are the Dinkle modular terminal strips (the 2.5N size) intended for professional use on industrial controllers and electrical panels. As someone who grew up using the vintage Molex black terminal "barrier" strips from Radio Shack, the terminal strips definitely feel like I’m in a new century of wiring practice. The individual terminals in multiple colors clip together onto a DIN rail, a common mounting bracket for electrical equipment like controllers and circuit breakers.

I found them great for model railroads (as compared with the traditional terminal blocks) for a few reasons:

packs more terminals in the same space - about 3/16" per terminal
multiple colors so easy to identify terminals and polarity
inset test points for safer testing with voltmeter
supports adding jumpers for wire-free connections between strips, and two jumpers allowed on any terminal.
terminals are covered, so loose wire less likely to touch others.
able to reconfigure as wiring changes - possible to pop terminals out of the middle to change colors, or move end clamp blocks to add terminals.

Close-up of the Dinkle 2.5DN terminals showing how they're wired and attached. Terminals are 3/16" wide, wire is 22 gauge.

The price is a bit more than terminal strips from Amazon; they work out to about 30c a terminal compared to 12c a terminal for the classic terminal strips. (They're all a deal compared to $4 each at Radio Shack back in the 1980's!) The other challenge is that getting an assortment of colors requires buying a box of 100 terminals at a time - that’s $30. Getting a good assortment (red, black, green, yellow, blue, white, and brown) requires spending about the same as a plastic locomotive. You’ll also need some of the DIN rail, and some of the end clamp blocks for securing a row of terminals. (For our low voltage uses, you don’t need the thin plastic endcaps to cover the last terminal in a row.) I’m planning on using all I need then selling off spare terminals to someone else if I've got enough unused terminals. I could also imagine having a group of modelers team up and share an assortment.

Jumper with every other pin cut. With these, I could line up a row of alternating green and white terminals for the different switch machine power feeds, then use two jumper barss to connect all to power coming in from a single pair of terminals.

The colored terminals are particularly nice for documenting the wiring. I use different colors for DCC supply vs terminals going out to the tracks (red/white vs red/black), and could color code for signals easily (red/brown and green/brown terminals for “upper” and “lower” signal lights at same location. Sets of terminals can be connected together using jumper bars that fit into the top (and don't interfere with the screw terminals.) 10 terminal jumper bars are available, and can be cut shorter to gang several adjacent terminals together. For the switch motor power, I ended up cutting every other pin from a pair of the jumper bars so that I could feed in the two wires for power to one set of terminals, and have power distributed to all the other pairs simultaneously.

The color coding and labeling also helps me double-check wiring and remember how things are connected years later. When I rewired my DCC track connections using the new terminal strips, I realized I’d mis-connected power from multiple boosters to different stretches of track, probably because I lost track of which terminals were for which section of the railroad. That mistake caused me to melt at least one locomotive when it shorted against a switch but was still getting power from a different booster.

Drawbacks? I needed to use a smaller screwdriver to fit the protected holes for the screw terminals - I couldn’t grab any random home repair screwdriver to turn huge screw heads. The terminals also bent a little bit when pulled by larger wires like solid 12 gauge DCC buses, but work fine for smaller wiring.

One of the rewired panels. It's much easier to understand now!

I’m slowly going around the layout, cleaning up wiring, adding labels, and adding the new terminal strips. I’m very, very happy with these - the terminal strips make it easier for me to understand the wiring even years after I’ve done it, and they make the underside of the layout look neat and organized. I suspect I'll love the terminal strips even more in ten years when I need to figure out a rewiring I did in the distant past.

If you're interested in checking these terminal strips out: I got my Dinkle terminal strip parts from Amazon.com - search for "Dinkle 2.5N". Some sellers offer the components - separate purchases for boxes of 100 of each color terminal, for the end brackets which hold the terminals in place, the DIN rail, and the jumpers. Others offer assortments of 20 terminals of specific colors for common electrical projects such as solar panel controllers. The little assortment was a good way for me to decide the terminal strips were for me. I cut my initial cost when buying full boxes of connectors by just getting a few colors of terminals that I needed for some specific tasks such as re-wiring switch machine power. (I was using just green, white, and yellow for wiring connected to the switch machines.) I later got boxes of the other terminal colors as I rewired areas with other wire colors.

You can also see the terminal strips in use on the layout - the Vasona Branch will be open for tours at the NMRA Pacific Coast Region's 2024 Convention April 24-28, 2024 in San Jose.

Big Changes At Signal Gulch

2024-02-23T23:38:00.000-08:00

Semaphores at the east end of Glenwood siding.

When is a model railroad “done”? Some might say it’s when it’s complete - when every scene is detailed and when the trains are running well. Some might say that a model railroad is always being changed, so it’s only “done” when it’s being torn down. I’ll throw out another option - our model railroad is “done” when we’ve confirmed that it’s the right design, when we’ve built enough to know “this is what it’s going to stay like”, and when we’re satisfied with the condition. One easy way to know when we’re satisfied is when we move from building new stuff to having to make big infrastructure changes - replacing a command control system, or changing control panels, or fixing other normally-invisible bits of the layout. If we’ve decided to do some wholesale replacement of some invisible aspect of the layout, that must mean the layout’s lasted long enough for us to need to do big repairs and that we’re happy enough with the layout to do the improvement instead of tearing down and starting a new one.

In my case, replacing the signal system suggests that I’ve done pretty good with this layout.

One of the pain points for my Vasona Branch layout over the last few years has been the signaling system. The real Los Gatos - Santa Cruz branch had automatic block signals (ABS) installed when the line was reconstructed after the 1906 earthquake. (Read Carsten Lundsten’s explanation of SP’s ABS signals here to learn what automatic block signals mean, and how the SP operated them.) The SP assumed the Los Gatos-Santa Cruz line was going to need increased capacity for future San Francisco - Santa Cruz traffic. As they upgraded the line from narrow gauge to standard gauge, they also added the automatic signals to minimize the effort of running trains over the mountains. In the narrow gauge days, keeping two trains off the same track required staffs and other physical tokens, or required explicit train orders to carefully control movements. Having multiple trains follow each other in the same direction was tedious and slow. The automatic block signals got rid of some of this work, allowing railroad crews to know the track ahead was safe to occupy. Note that ABS signals only provide protection, rather than authority. A green signal means that the track ahead is clear, not that your train is allowed to occupy that track. Those train order operators at the stations along the line are still needed to let trains know when they're safe to go.

On the model, the signaling system consists of a bunch of signals placed at intervals along the track, and a signal controller hidden underneath the layout. The controller keeps track of which tracks are occupied using detector circuits and notes which switches might be thrown away from the main line, and sets the ABS signals accordingly. Soon after I’d laid the track on the upper level of the Vasona Branch, I bought a pair of signal controllers - SIC24 (“Signal and Indicator Controllers”) from Team Digital. The SIC24 is a small circuit board with a programmable chip on it; using a DCC programmer (or LocoNet), I could program in signal logic so that if a particular track detector indicated a train was present, or if the switch on either end of a single track was thrown wrong, a signal would go red. The Team Digital boards could also be connected together so that an input on one board could affect a signal output on the other. I used two boards for the needed 16 inputs and 48 outputs. All the signals were within about 10 feet of the SIC24 boards, so I connected all the signals with twisted-pair code 26 phone wire - no need for scattering electronics around the layout.

Old signal controller. Not my best work, but it worked for more than ten years.

The photos shows one of the two SIC24 boards, and the phone cable providing the connection to the other board. This wasn't my neatest job, but it worked. You can see the signal power (large green wires with suitcase connector taps), inputs are yellow wires to the left, and signals are green/white and red/white wires below. I'd realized it was easier to put resistors on all the inputs and outputs here, so they're soldered onto the wires leading to the terminal strips. The odd shape of the plywood is because it's a scrap left over from cutting roadbed for curved track. I was unsure enough about whether the signals would be interesting that I didn't bother to build for good appearances.

The SIC24 boards generally worked well. They “just worked” when the power came on, they had sufficient smarts to run ABS, they were configurable enough to handle a couple of non-standard layouts on the place, and they didn’t require having a computer in the garage with the layout. Over the years, though, the SIC24 boards did start showing problems. One problem is that there’s no way to debug what’s going on; if the indications weren’t making sense, it was hard to diagnose exactly what was happening without attaching a voltmeter to inputs and trying to remember how I’d programmed the boards several years before. I ended up building a little circuit using an Arduino microcontroller board that could listen to the two cards talking and show on a tiny screen which inputs were changing, but that was clunky to use, requiring me to crouch under the layout, plug in the device, and look at a tiny 2" screen to understand what inputs were seen. Over the years, there were also times where it seemed that bits of the signal programming were getting lost. Because I don’t have any Digitrax equipment, reprogramming the cards meant detaching them from the layout, carrying them to a programming track, and attempting to reprogram the whole card from JMRI. I’d then have to reattach the card and see whether the change took - whether the signals now worked correctly. If they didn’t, I had to guess whether I’d mis-programmed the card or if the card was having problems. The several minute delay between making a change and seeing if it worked wasn’t fun, and caused me to give up on several bad signal problem.

I’d finally gotten frustrated enough to decide to replace the fifteen year old signal system a couple years ago. There’s plenty of choices out there, both commercial and home-made. The current NMRA Layout Command Control (LCC) standard defines how to build interoperable signal systems without a central computer. The LCC boards are expected to be scattered around the layout near the signals, then connected via a common bus to communicate. RR-CirKits is selling its Signal LCC and Tower LCC boards that work a lot like the SIC24s I’m currently using. However, they’ve still got the problem that debugging what’s going on requires a computer in the garage, increasing the work required for debugging. It also required me to get up to speed on a new technology, and I’d found some of the online manuals cryptic. Another possibility would be to go in the direction of Bruce Chubb’s centralized CMRI (Computer Model Railroad Interface). CMRI systems have a computer program control the signals, and defines how the different boards scattered under the layout all talk to the central computer.

Both of these are a bit of overkill for me. CMRI seems intended a larger and more complex layout than I have, and has expectations about having a desktop computer present running specific software. LCC has the decentralized and hardcoded logic that I liked from the SIC24, but has similar problems with monitoring and debugging problems, and required me to come up to speed on how LCC worked.

Unfortunately, my day job is as a software engineer, and so whenever I come across “do I buy something to make this happen, or do I just roll my own?”, I’ll often decide to go and build it. That’s often seen as a wasteful choice - why rebuild something that’s already available on the open market? However, for a small home layout, building my own makes more sense. I’ll know the design, know how to debug it when it breaks, and won’t be forced to do upgrades.

In a perfect world, I’d have a tiny Linux computer under the layout controlling the signals, I’d be able to write my own code for controlling the signals, and I’d be able to run a little web server to show the current status of the signals. That’s not a hard thing to do these days; I can buy a Raspberry Pi single board computer for $50. The only question was how to control the signals.

To keep my “no computers in the garage” rule, I chose to build from the Raspberry Pi. This is a little computer that’s the size of a deck of cards, but runs the UNIX operating system and can be logged into and programmed just like a larger computer. It’s easy to hide away, starts up within a minute, and is infinitely configurable. To handle the inputs from sensors on the layout and to power the LEDs for the signals, I chose Model Railroad Control System’s IOX32 boards, small boards with 32 inputs or outputs that can connect to a computer. The IOX boards are built for CMRI based layouts, but the way they talk to the computer, using the standard I2C wiring that lets different devices in a single computer talk, means they can be connected to the Raspberry Pi directly. I ended up getting a Raspberry Pi “hat” - an add-on circuit board that attaches to an expansion port on the Raspberry Pi - to provide the I2C connections. Finally, to help debugging, I bought a small two line display from one of the online electronics companies. This board also talks to the Raspberry Pi using I2C, and can be told to display short messages to help debugging.

Photo of new controller on the benchtop. I worked on the programming by logging into the Raspberry Pi over WiFi.

This photo shows the new signal controller mounted on plywood. The terminal strips for power, inputs, and outputs is at the top. The Raspberry Pi is the box with the red board in the lower left. The IOX32 boards are to the right of the Raspberry Pi, and the display and 5 volt voltage converter for the IOX32s is to the left of the Raspberry Pi. The crossing wires were needed to match the layout of the terminals on the old and new boards.

As can be seen from the photos, the signal system has a lot of wires going in and out. In order to make the replacement go smoothly, I set up the new system on a plywood board with terminal strips for all the connections, then wrote the software to control the signals and tested it on the bench. This also helped me confirm that the IOX32s could correctly drive the LEDs I use for signaling. More importantly, I made sure the terminal strips roughly matched the layout of the existing board so I could disconnect the old board, detach the old wires, put in the new board with controller, and reattach. I also made a few very good choices to help installation - painting the board with the electronics white for easier viewing under the dark layout, printing up very clear labels indicating the purpose of each terminal, and making sure I had good terminal strips for attaching the connections.

New signal controller in use. LEDs are for signals that aren't yet connected - I've added LEDs on the terminal strip to check their state.

Finally, I took a deep breath, detached and marked the existing cables, pulled out the old controller, and put in the new one. The new system required a bunch of manual work - soldering extensions on too-short wires, changing how some of the detector circuits were powered to ensure a safe common ground between equipment around the layout, and slowly reattached and tested that the signals still worked. This all happened within a couple long days, but it went well with no surprises.

The Raspberry Pi did make it easier to debug. Checking out the existing signals, I found one of my long-lived problems was an incorrectly-attached input for one of the switch positions. I also found some incorrect assumptions in my signal programming, and with a few lines of programming changes was able to get the signals working like the real thing. Debugging is, for now, looking at text logs spewing from a computer program, but I’m looking forward to writing some code to show the layout state on a web page next. I even added a lamp test action at start that flashes all the signals - this makes it easy to double-check that all LEDs are connected and are working.

The biggest drawbacks? The Raspberry Pi does have more complexity. It's a full fledged computer with a boot disk (stored in these modern times on a MicroSD flash memory card.) If the boot drive gets corrupted, then the signals won't work. I’ll need to keep a backup SD card just in case things break.

I must be happy with the Vasona Branch, because I’ve done a big wholesale replacement of the signal system. It took several weeks to get the home-brewed signal controller ready, but all the planning and preparation made swapping the old for the new an incredibly pleasant exercise. I now have much better control over the signal systems, can better understand why it misbehaves, and can quickly fix it so it works correctly in a prototype manner. There’s still lots to do before the layout is fully scenicked, Being willing to do this wholesale fix, though, reminds me how happy I am with the current layout, and how far I’ve come.

Bay Area Layout Design and Operations Meet: Feb 2-4 2024

2024-01-01T02:24:00.000-08:00

My favorite model railroad event, the Bay Area Layout Design and Operations meet, will be in Santa Rosa this year on the weekend of Feb 2-4, 2024. If you've got any interest in designing model railroads, railroad history, or operating a model railroad in a realistic manner, you'll find this to be a great event!

As in past years, it'll have an activity on Friday (visit the Northwestern Pacific archives), and dinner on Friday night to meet with other attendees, presentations on Saturday, tours of local layouts on Saturday night, and operating sessions on local layouts on Sunday. The presentations will be in-person at the Finley Community Center, but virtual admission will let folks watch the presentations online.

I love this event for so many reasons. It pulls together a bunch of other modelers interested in recreating realistic historical locations. I'll get chances to share notes with others doing research on railroads. I also love that local layout owners give folks interested in operations a chance to operate on a variety of model railroads. I'll have some great conversations. I also got my introduction to operations at this event, and really appreciate the hosts opening their layouts.

If you'd like to join in, get tickets at EventBrite.

See you in Santa Rosa!

Bay Area PCR Layout Design and Operations Meet: Full video

2023-02-13T10:15:00.004-08:00

Every year, the Bay Area has a model railroad meet dedicated to model railroad layout design and operations. As I've said many times, this is my favorite event. It's got a mix of interesting talks, layout tours, and chances for folks to participate in operating sessions on local layouts.

This year, as in previous years, TSG Multimedia handled simulcasting the show to remote participants, and shared the video on YouTube. If you're curious what sort of talks happen at a meet, check it out!

(Or view on YouTube.)

Movie Night XXIX: The Santa Cruz Mountains Come Down

2023-02-13T10:12:00.002-08:00

Winter was a hard time for the railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The region can get a lot of rain, often at biblical levels. The area's unstable geology also ensures that the mountains really want to get to the beach as soon as possible. Every season will have some mudslides, washed away roads, and hillsides moving in ways that hillsides aren't supposed to move. However, in the bad years - the year of the Santa Cruz line's closure in 1940, the winter of 1982, and several other instances - the Santa Cruz Mountains won't get back to normal for months... if ever.

This winter has been a wet winter - worse than most, but luckily not quite to the level of 1982 or 1940. The recent fires in the Santa Cruz Mountains don't help for ground or tree cover though. As a reminder of how bad this winter was, and how much the Santa Cruz Mountains don't want to continue being mountains, we can look at this "Tour de Disaster video by Larry Rairden. Larry biked around the Santa Cruz Mountains last month to check out the damage, and his photos and videos highlight last year's damage and hint at why the Los Gatos-Santa Cruz branch of the SP isn't around any more.

When you're watched that, check out this video from a PG&E lineman watching a full sized redwood tree and hillside moving in ways neither should move.

Read more about Larry's adventures in the San Jose Mercury News's article about his adventures.

Tech Bros and Orchards

2023-01-14T22:40:00.004-08:00

It’s Christmas, so it’s time for another anachronistic, inappropriate model!

If you’ve been in the San Francisco or Silicon Valley area in the last several years, you’ve seen long chains of large, unmarked buses during rush hour on our local freeways. These buses are the private buses for tech companies. Many of the large employers provide these buses as a way for their workers to commute. They’re especially important for convincing younger employees who want to live in San Francisco to come down to suburban office parks in the Santa Clara Valley. Facebook, Apple, Genentech, Salesforce, and others effectively run their own regional bus lines. The official term is usually “corporate shuttle”, but folks generically refer to these as “Google Buses” for the first company to run the buses.

Tech workers board a shuttle bus in San Francisco. From KQED article.

The “Google buses” are an interesting operation. They provide a way to get employees into offices that might be hard to reach because of the region's notoriously bad traffic congestion, allows the companies to fill the offices beyond what the parking lots or local roads can handle, and gives employees a nicer commute experience by giving them a way to work during the commute, minimize transfers, and be able to have confidential conversations without a competitor’s employee overhearing.

The buses are also a band-aid on Silicon Valley’s suburban growth. Because many of the tech campuses were built in former industrial areas far away from existing public transportation, the buses let employers use older buildings rather than fighting to develop large campuses near existing Caltrain, light rail, or BART, and allows them to recruit employees living in suburban areas that don’t have easy access to existing public transportation. The buses also cause conflicts in neighborhoods. Residents get frustrated by the large buses on previously-quiet streets, the buses often block traffic and city buses when waiting to start a route, and there have been many reports of rents going up in San Francisco neighborhoods when a corporate shuttle route arrives. Although there's less buses around post-pandemic, the corporate shuttles are still running.

Even though the corporate shuttles are much different than your typical city bus, the problems faced by corporate shuttles are the same problems faced by public transit providers. The companies need to create departments to decide on routes, negotiate for potential stops with parking, hire contractors to operate the bus, and negotiate with the cities when they complain about the new traffic. Employees get unhappy with route changes if a particular site refuses to keep providing parking and a bus stop, complain about the infrequent runs, and yell loudly when the Internet connection on the bus isn’t perfect when crossing a mountain range. Riding the buses can teach riders a lot about running a rapid transit service - factoring in the time between arrival at the destination and time needed to get back to the start for the next run, planning capacity and driver hours when most riders want only one or two preferred times, and noticing how most of the time for the route was spent on the surfaces streets before and after the freeway miles. The corporate shuttles also need to plan for disaster - handling broken-down buses, or re-routing buses. Google's bus system melted down one Friday when a concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater clogged traffic so much that the Google buses from the first campus stop couldn’t reach the rest of campus.

It’s hard not to see the buses around here during commute hours. You’ll see the white, silver, blue, and black buses on the carpool lanes, dashing around the streets near the offices, and clustered in parking lots during the day as they wait for the trips home. The buses started out as smaller 24 seat buses back in 2005 or so, but by 2010 most of the company was using full-size (and sometime double-deck) bus coaches. Back in 2012, some San Franciscans got curious about the big white buses going down their neighborhood streets, and started mapping the buses. They ended up drawing an unauthorized route map of the buses used by the different companies.

I spent several years working for one of those Silicon Valley tech companies with a corporate shuttle system, and most of my commutes to and from work was on a “Google Bus”. For the bus spotters among you, most of the routes I was on had the 2012-vintage Van Hool buses that a certain tech company had made to order, mostly single level but I occasionally was on routes served by the double-deck buses. Other routes and companies used the Prevost or even the Turkish-made Temsa. (All three companies are European; I’m sad that the Bay Area’s own Gillig never got into the Google bus business.) When my parents came to a “Bring your parents to work” event one year, they got to tool around between my company’s buildings on one of those same Google buses that I rode every day.

But, of course, I model the 1930’s, so a 2010-era bus carrying tech bros to former orchards and truck farm land in Mountain View isn’t quite my setting.

I’d known there were folks making model buses, but I didn’t know there were folks making accurate modern buses until YouTuber Interurban Era showed off one of Iconic Replica’s 1960’s era Flxable bus in Alameda County’s own A/C Transit colors. I’d seen these buses whenever we went to visit grandparents, so the models caught my interest. “I wonder if they have more modern buses?”

Yup. Iconic Replicas made models of Prevost coaches in HO in a variety of paint schemes, as well as the two level Van Hool buses. The buses aren’t perfect for a rivet counter; the single-level coaches lack the second exit door halfway down the sides seen on most corporate shuttles, and the models mostly tend to be available in eye-catching paint schemes. It looks like the company has made white buses occasionally, but they’re collectible and rare. They certainly haven't done the other colors often seen on Facebook and Apple shuttles.

Once I saw the models, I knew the layout needed some Google buses, regardless of how anachronistic they are.

I managed to find a pair of these models - the Prevost model in a Greyhound paint scheme, and a double-deck in a bright green “Tornado” paint scheme, and decided I’d try to convert these to Google buses.

The first challenge was disassembling. For the single-level model, there were screws on the bottom, and the clear plastic used for windows hinted that the model was actually a lower metal chassis with the upper half printed onto clear plastic. Unscrewing the screws wasn’t enough; it required a little bit of force to pull the two halves apart. The disassembled photo shows the latches holding the clear window section into the body.

Next challenge: how would I paint these? I tried several ways to remove the paint (alcohol, paint thinner, Dio-sol) and none moved any of the factory paint. I considered getting some real paint stripper and “doing the job right”, but decided this was a silly enough project that perfection wasn’t essential. I ended up masking both the chassis and windows carefully, primed with Tamiya primer, and painted with a gloss white from a Testor’s rattle can.

The final step was detailing. Most of the Google buses you see are stark white with a small reporting marks on the right side near the front door. (One common is "WEDRIVEU", referring to the contractor operating many of the buses.) I'd thought of pulling out the inkjet printer decal paper to make some custom, tiny decals, but decided anything I'd print wouldn't be readable. Instead, I grabbed some random text from a sheet of freight car info decals. Some black plastic parts (cargo hatches) break the monotony. I ended up dotting black paint on the model as appropriate, put some orange dots on the running lights I’d painted over, and called it a day. My spray can paint job didn’t hit the nose of the bus, so there’s still a Greyhound logo if you look carefully. I also couldn’t figure out how to strip the paint on the clear plastic, so my bus is going to “NEW YORK NY” instead of the more appropriate and cryptic “MPK” (Facebook) or “MTV” (Google). That's going to be a long commute from Campbell!

My Google Bus isn't my best modeling, but it was a fun project over Christmas. It's also reflects nicely on how Silicon Valley's changed from the 1930's to modern day, and highlights one of the iconic scenes seen in modern day Silicon Valley. I've still got a double-deck bus to do, but need to figure out how to strip the paint off the clear plastic safely first.

I’ll be interested to see whether I’ve modeled a Santa Clara valley detail which is just a reminder of the busy 2010’s, or a sight that future kids will immediately recognize. Although the corporate shuttles have returned to the Silicon Valley, they’re not to the volume of Before Times. Most of the tech companies are having trouble getting employees away from working-from-home and back into the crowded offices. There have also been plans to move tech offices closer to traditional public transportation. Former shopping centers near Sunnyvale’s train station were torn down and converted to office towers for tech companies. Facebook put in considerable effort to help rebuild the Dumbarton railroad bridge from Redwood City to Newark. They’d hoped the line could bring employees from San Francisco straight to their offices via the existing Caltrain line, or bring employees from Pleasanton, Newark, and Fremont across the bay. Google has been working actively on their Downton West plan for West San Jose, buying up properties and preparing for several blocks of offices near the Caltrain station. If I was redoing my layout to model 2020, I’d need to put in some Google office towers. All those projects could allow employees to use existing public transit, and make the Google Buses disappear just like the orchards did.

Got suggestion on how to strip the paint off Iconic Replicas models? Add a note in the comments!

Bay Area Layout Design and Operations Meet: February 3-5, 2023

2023-01-01T11:18:00.004-08:00

My favorite model railroad event, the Bay Area Layout Design and Operations meet, is happening this year in Richmond, California, February 3-5, 2023. Like always, the meet's a mix of talks about design and operation, layout visits, and opportunities to try model railroad operations on layouts in the Bay Area. Friday will have a tour of the real Richmond Pacific industrial railroad. Saturday's talks will be at the Golden State Model Railroad Museum at Point Richmond. We'll get to tour layouts in the East Bay on Saturday night. Operating sessions at local model railroads will be on Sunday. Like last year, you can also attend virtually if you're not in the Bay Area or want to enjoy the presentations from your home.

Get more information at www.bayldops.com. You must get tickets in advance at EventBrite. In-person tickets include a boxed lunch. Virtual tickets give you access to watch the presentations and ask questions via a Zoom video conference. In-person tickets also include the Zoom link in case you decide not to go up to Richmond.

I love the Layout Design and Operations meet because it pulls together a fun group of folks: interested in modeling specific locations, railroad history, imitating the real railroads' operating practices, and just interested in understanding what the real railroads were about. It's also a great meet if you're curious about any of these topics. The invites to operate on local model railroads got me interested in model railroad operations, and helped me understand the differences between running trains on my own versus working with a dozen other people to get trains moving on a large layout. Like past years, we'll also offer layout design and operations consulting. If you're considering a new layout, or thinking about operations on an existing layout, you can sign up for time to talk with others about what you're building and what options you might consider.

I'm planning to have the Vasona Branch open for a Sunday operating session, so if you're interested in visiting and joining in, sign up for the meet and put the Vasona Branch down as one of your choices for an ops session!

Hope to see you there!