We All Scream for Location-Accurate Buildings

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. Well, hopefully not, or the garage is going to be awfully loud.

I’ve slowly been filling out the Los Gatos scene. A few years ago, I added a shelf to cover the staging tracks, and used the space to add some much-needed houses along the railroad tracks in Los Gatos. I also had a bare spot immediately in front of the Hunt’s Cannery. Historically, the spot was some charming and quite pricey houses on University Avenue. However, expensive real estate wouldn't match the theme I'm trying to capture. I want to hint at the industrial side of town here, so the space deserved something utilitarian. My first cut was a low-slung warehouse made with board-and-batten siding. The warehouse never looked correct - too low, too plain.

I feel back to my usual tricks: look through old photos to see what was actually along the tracks. I knew there was a lumber yard along University Ave near the Old Town development which deserved a space. Looking at some of the 1940’s photos, I found what looked like a boxy cinderblock building with a strange contraption on the roof, just north of Elm Street. Captions mentioned this as the ice cream plant for Eatmore Ice Cream and Creamery at 46 N. Santa Cruz Ave. The building’s on the wrong side of the railroad tracks for me, but it’ll look fine on the University Ave. side.

The History

Eatmore Ice Cream was founded by Hans Nielsen in 1922, an immigrant from Denmark and new arrival in Los Gatos. Eatmore’s location was in the middle of downtown at 52 North Santa Cruz Ave. at Elm Street. Nielsen ran the place solo for many years, working “at night to make his ice cream and delivered it during the daytime.” The company must have done well; several of Nielsen’s helpers in the ice cream business turn up in the historic record. Eatmore also had several outposts, including a takeover of a San Jose manufacturer and an an ice cream factory in San Francisco at 1525 Union St. Eatmore lasted as an independent business for about twenty years. Nielsen finally got an offer he couldn’t refuse from Beatrice Foods in 1944 and sold out; he continued as manager for the newly rebranded Meadow Gold branded creamery. Newspaper articles describe the company as delivering 1100 gallons of ice cream a day through ice cream plants in Watsonville, Santa Cruz, San Jose, and Palo Alto. This sounds more like what Meadowgold (owned by Beatrice Foods) accomplished; census records show that Nielsen continued to live and work in Los Gatos after the takeover, so he sounds more like the small-town manager than the ice cream unicorn entrepreneur. Meadowgold lasted at least into the 1970’s, manufacturing ice cream right there in downtown Los Gatos.

The creamery on Santa Cruz Ave was a simple storefront on the main road through town. A photo from the 1930's shows a large "Eatmore" sign painted on the Elm Ave. wall of the building. (The photo also shows an Associated Gasoline station on the opposite corner - imagine trying to put a gas station on Santa Cruz Ave. today!) Sanborn maps show Eatmore sharing a building with a grocery next door. Although the creamery storefront was on Santa Cruz Ave., the ice cream manufacturing didn’t stay there for long. A cinder block building behind the creamery storefront shows up in the 1928 Sanborn map with 18’ ceilings, a two-story office at the front, and a boiler room at the rear.

The only photos I’ve found show the building from a distance; it looks blocky and unpretentious with only the cooling tower on top seeming out of the ordinary. Example photos include a 1950's shot from Charlie Givens in Arcadia Publishing's "Railroads of Los Gatos".

Meadowgold still shows up in 1950’s photos, and articles reminiscing about the old Los Gatos seem to mention Meadowgold and Eatmore more often than I’d expect.

Eatmore, 1944 Sanborn map

Manufaactured gas plant, 1930's SP Valuation Map. CSRM Collection.

The space wasn’t always an ice cream factory. Railroad valuation maps into the 1940’s still displayed the previous inhabitants - the manufactured gas plant for Los Gatos. Manufactured gas plants processed coal and oil to extract lighter-than-air hydrocarbons, and took the remaining coal tar and lampblack and either sold it or buried it out back for future generations to discover. The gas holder was at the front of the plot, facing Elm St., with a corrugated iron building at the back. PG&E shut down the plant in 1924 when a natural gas line from San Jose arrived. The ice cream plant seems to match the location and floor plan of the manufactured gas plant building; the two story office at the front appears to date from the ice cream era.

The Model

The model required a fair amount of guesswork. There were no good photos of the building, just distance shots showing a tiny featureless white box and dark cooling tower. The Sanborn map shows a bit more about heights and number of floors in the building, but I forgot to double-check the Sanborn map before I started construction. Instead, I looked at photos online for ideas about cinder block building from 1930’s. When those searches didn’t work out, I ended up searching for ice cream plants, and found some photos of Treat Ice Cream’s San Jose plant off Alum Rock Ave. Treat’s a local ice cream manufacturer that provides the store brand for our local grocery, and their plant is hidden at the back of a main street business on San Jose’s East Side. The cinderblock building and steel windows gave me the inspiration I needed.

The general construction was straightforward, but it’s definitely a 21st century project. I used styrene sheet for the walls and ceiling (using 1/16” styrene sheet from Tap Plastic - cheap and available in any size you want up to 4' x 8') and strip styrene for the front and side deck. The doors are Grandt Line parts. Rather than simulate concrete block, I fell back to a stucco look, and again used an acrylic gel with pumice from the art supply store to give the walls a slightly rough appearance.

I couldn’t find any windows I liked, so I instead fell back on the 3d printer. 3d printed windows never print as nicely as the commercial windows - tiny muntins just don’t print well. To avoid a trip to the store, I made the windows solid, with muntins and panes embossed into the solid casting. I painted the windows glossy black to simulate glass, then painted the window frames. I used a similar trick with baggage wagons in the past, making the wheels solid with raised spokes rather than trying to make spindly and open wheels.

The 3d cooling tower was another challenge. Some folks have modeled cooling towers for ice plants; Suydam’s cardboard kits have one example. The models always look a little rough, both because of the material and its toughness. Instead, I fell back on the 3d printer. I figured out my design from looking at previous HO models (such as Suydam's) and also checking old trade journals such as Refrigeration World for photos of past equipment. (For example, here's the Burhorn cooling tower.)

Although the design seems complex, it's geometric and pretty straightforward. The model's designed as two copies of the same part, each printing two sides. Real cooling towers appeared to use corrugated iron for the fins; I held off on adding that detail from impatience. If you want one of your own, the 3d model can be downloaded from Thingiverse.com.

My final touch was milk pails, a combination of 3d printed and commercial (Tichy) cast parts. Photos of Eatmore's San Jose plant showed the classic tin milk pails all over the place. Although common in industry, tin milk pails aren't a common sight on railroads in California - I've seen little evidence for milk trains in the Santa Clara Valley. Pauline Correia Stonehill's Barrelful of Memories: Stories of My Azorean Family" described life in growing up on a Central Valley dairy. She remembered her father using a wagon to carry the day's milk to the Los Banos dairy. A combination of good roads and nearby processing plants may have made remarked how many dairies delivered milk via wagon and truck. There may have been milk trains elsewhere in the Bay Area; the Niles Depot website claims two or three milk trains a day through Fremont.

How Big Was the Heating Oil Tank at J. S. Roberts?

"You don't need to know how many cars could fit on the team track at the San Jose Western Pacific freight depot to build your layout. The answer is "three", by the way."
--Byron Henderson

Not every model railroader is interested in history, but there's enough so that some potential model railroad builders get stuck trying to learn every possible detail about their prototype before they ever start building. Byron's quote highlights that we don't need all those details to have fun modeling.

But his quote also highlights how obsessive some of us can get learning about particular places. I'm guilty of that; to build my model of the Vasona Branch, I've done way more research than I really need. One particular source of my obsession has been the packing house at 740 West San Carlos Street, once occupied by J.S. Roberts in the 1930's, but occupied by Abinante and Nola in the late 1940's. I've written about Abinante and Nola many times in the past, and about working on the scene as it would have looked in the 1930's.

But, hey, how could I model that packing house without knowing everything about it? What about their oil tank used for supplying steam to the dried fruit packing plant. Was it 6,000 gallons and filled by the local oil dealer, or bigger, and supplied by rail?

I can answer that sort of question now. Heck, I can even tell you what that tank looked like. You see, I went off for lunch at Paradiso's Deli on Auzerais St., just behind the former Del Monte cannery. After some tasty ravioli and meatball, I wandered off along the Los Gatos Creek trail for sightseeing, and saw a backhoe digging off on the other side of the railroad tracks.

1902-era redwood heating oil tank being dug up.

What were they digging up? Turns out they did an environmental survey on the property at 740 West San Carlos, and discovered that the old oil tank for the packing house had never been removed. Yesterday, they'd exposed it, and found it still had 9,000 gallons of heating oil in it, and pumped out the thickened oil. Today, they were pulling up the tank to check underneath for spills. Odds are the tank was placed in the ground in 1903 when the packing house was built for Ernst Luehning and his San Jose dried fruit outpost. It was in really good shape for a hundred year old *redwood* tank that had been holding something similar to diesel fuel for all these years. The joints were still tight on the tank, and was little sign of fuel leaking through.

More importantly, the Sanborn map lied; it wasn't a 6,000 gallon tank, but closer to 12,000 gallons - probably just the size to deserve a carload of heating oil a few times a year.

Now, I'm not a stranger to the idea of shoving oil in the ground - when we lived (briefly) on the east coast, we lived in two houses with heating oil; in both cases, we had to remember to call the oil company to dump a thousand gallons of oil in our front yard so we didn't freeze to death. In our last house, we didn't quite trust the landlord to compensate us for oil we left in the tank on moving, so we tried to stretch the tank for the whole season... and ran out just before a huge snowstorm hit. Ugh. After that mistake, I really can't imagine anyone moving out of the packing house without taking those 9,000 gallons with them. But I guess landlords were much nicer in San Jose back then.

If you're ever over to see the model railroad, look over just to the right of the packing house, and with luck I'll have added some piping and vents for a certain 12,000 gallon oil tank that I know occupies exactly that spot on the model railroad.

And if you're one of those folks doing the environmental impact surveys, try aiming a couple hundred feet west. The Zicovich Winery was out there in the 1890's, and with some luck you might find some barrels of wine that survived the Great San Carlos Street Fire of 1899. Much more tasty than half-century old oil.

Photo of tank being dug out of lot at 740 West San Carlos taken by me, August 19, 2015. Thanks to the crew doing the removal for talking with me about the fun of discovering an removing the old tank. Thanks to the crew doing the digging for chatting with the strange obsessive model railroader about their site.

Scenery for Moody Gulch

Work's definitely going in fits and starts here; after a couple months with no work on the layout, my visit to Desert Ops, the Phoenix-area operating weekend, must have inspired me. My challenge: get some scenery in the Moody Gulch scene.

The scenery on the shelf above Los Gatos has always been problematic, and I haven't wanted to rush decisions. There are hidden tracks below (for the lowest reverse loop and staging), so covering the tracks always seemed... risky. When I'd put in the Alma siding, I also added room for a future, at that point undefined, industry, so I was unsure about what scenery would be appropriate. The scenery between Los Gatos and Alma also deserves to be impressive - that stretch of track goes through the narrowest part of Los Gatos Canyon. If I was being fair to the railroad I'm modeling, I'd have track clinging to a sheer cliff face... which wouldn't fit when Los Gatos is only a few inches below the track.

When I last tried building scenery for Alma a couple years ago, I thought a crossing of Los Gatos Creek might be appropriate; I had a bit of styrofoam, so I mocked out half of the scenery, used the tail end of a bag of Sculptamold to make it solid... and stopped as I ran out of material. The scene just didn't work; the creek wouldn't be low enough to be believable as Los Gatos Creek, there was no space to expose the creek bed on the fascia in front of the scene, and the tracks descending on a 2% grade across that bridge just seemed unrealistic. The scene's been sitting there half-done ever since.

Today's adventure was doing that scenery right. I'd learned in the past that if I can completely finish a scene, it's much more likely to turn out well *and* end up being permanent, so luckily I'd stocked up on a couple bags of Sculptamold and a sheet of 2" styrofoam insulation from Home Depot. (My local Home Depot in San Jose even had a sheet of 2" pinkboard, though I was just using beadboard.) I pulled out the hot glue gun and the hot wire knife, looked over a couple of inspirational photos in books, and started building.

The two photos here show the progress tonight. (Sorry for the poor quality and the chair leg in the photo; I should have taken the pictures before cleaning up.) I've had the best luck building scenery with sheet styrofoam. I cut pieces roughly to fit, and glue layers together with a hot glue gun. The hot glue does melt the foam, but at least some of the glue holds the foam together, and I can usually start trimming the layers within minutes of gluing, avoiding the need to wait a day as I used to when using contact cement. I then start trimming the hills with the hot wire cutter to get the rounded look of California hills, correctly angled cuts, and the like. The result are hillsides that look very California-appropriate. As soon as the hot glue is cooled and the styrofoam armature is in place, I use a thin layer of Sculptamold as the final shape of the scenery. Once the Sculptamold dries, the scenery is rigid enough for further layers of spackle or Sculptamold, and is ready for the paint and dirt that will make the hills look like... well, hills.

This scene really draws attention to the branch to Moody Gulch at the expense of the mainline. The Moody Gulch spur looks correctly cut out of the hill with minor filling and depressions along the way. The main line is still looking a bit unrealistic as it drop below the Moody Gulch spur then dives into a tunnel. That tunnel wasn't on the real SP between Los Gatos and Alma, but (1) there was a tunnel in the narrow gauge South Pacific Coast days, and (2) the tunnel is a heck of a lot more realistic than some strange cut might be.

Next steps: get rid of the bare plaster hills. The hillside along here should be a mix of chaparral (typical for the south-facing slope near Moody Gulch) with occasional redwoods in the distance. I'm also starting to think about Moody Gulch structures; I've got ideas about some additional oil well details as well as a small warehouse for supplies for the drillers.

Los Gatos: the Midland/Odessa of the Santa Clara Valley

Another Moody Gulch article from a bit of Google searching, this time with a photo and progress update:

"Moody Gulch Oil Well Daily Expected to Come In" (San Jose News, June 24, 1930).

I also found this description of the 1880's Moody Gulch oil well infrastructure in a text version of Pen Pictures from the "Garden of the World", or Santa Clara County California":

Moody's Gulch, which is a branch of the Los Gatos Canon, at wells Nos. i and 2 (which are about one hundred feet apart), runs about north twenty degrees east. Altitude at this point, eleven hundred feet. At the bridge a little above, fine-grained sandstones and shales strike about north sixty degrees west, and dip sixty-five southwest. Within two hundred feet east of this bridge and seventy-five feet or more above the bed, and still higher up the hill, is well No. 5. East of this and yet higher is well No. 8. On the opposite side of the gulch and about two hundred feet from it is Logan No. I. Altitude, about thirteen hundred and eighty feet above sea-level. About three hundred feet south, twenty degrees west, from Logan No. i, is Plyler No. i. All the oil obtained from these wells is a green oil, known as parafline oil, and has a specific gravity of forty-four degrees. It is piped a distance of about a mile to the mouth of the gulch, where it is received in a tank that stands on a side track of the South Pacific Coast Railway. The first well, named Moody No. i, struck oil at about eight hundred feet. Unfortunately the detailed record of operations has been lost, but that of subsequent wells is complete.

Two Thumbs Up for Oil Wells in Los Gatos Canyon!

It's amazing what turns up in old newspapers. This article, for instance, from the June 24, 1929 San Jose News, breathlessly reports that drilling had started again in Moody Gulch, right around the time I model. It may still be unrealistic to think that the SP would have built a branch across Los Gatos Creek and up Moody Gulch, but it's sounding a lot more realistic.

And if Fred Voorhees thinks that the wells are going to produce, I'm willing to lay the track to get that promised oil to market.

In other news, the Hotel Saint Claire's 65 cent luncheon doesn't sound too bad, either.

"What this place needs is a good, producing oil well."

I've shown my fascination for oil wells in the Santa Cruz Mountains before, but oil in the Bay Area isn't just under Cupertino and Los Gatos.

This USGS map shows all the oil wells dug in the Santa Clara and San Mateo areas from the 1870's on. Most of the interest has been around the known finds - Moody Gulch in Los Gatos Canyon, the La Honda and Half Moon Bay fields, and the Sargent field. None have been huge producers, but there's still the potential for a big find. If you're looking at a vacation home out in the redwoods, or a 3/2 rancher on 5000 square feet in Cupertino, make sure to get mineral rights!

If I don't give Alma any signs of the Moody Gulch oil production, I'll be very disappointed with myself.