Rebuilding Glenwood

A string of maintenance-of-way gondolas heads uphill.

Like I mentioned last time, long-suffering Glenwood got some serious rework recently. I had some good reasons to finally return to Glenwood. The ProRail invitational was going to be in San Jose in April (before COVID-19), and the visitors from around the US deserved to see the layout at its best. I needed a distraction from work, and wanted some projects that could fill a weekend.

I also had several years of pent-up frustration waiting to be unleashed. Glenwood’s also an old part of my layout; I laid the track on the upper level about two years into the layout, and roughed in some scenery. The model doesn’t accurately capture the real location. It’s not up to my later standards for prototype scenes. It's not eye-catching enough to be a focal point for the layout. Glenwood’s also in a darker corner of the layout, and in a location that’s not central to model railroad operations, so it’s never gotten a lot of scrutiny. Glenwood deserved better.

But being generically dissatisfied is one thing; I need a list of things to fix. Let’s run through the problems at Glenwood.

Glenwood before the rework.

Problems with Glenwood:

• The road’s unrealistic, just badly-levelled Sculptamold on foam scenery, with sheer drops and no shoulders.
• The building just above the tracks isn’t prototypical; although there was a small house there, the building on stilts doesn’t match the location, nor does it look realistic for the 1920’s. It also draws attention away from the prototype portions of the scene, hiding that great curve into the cut and tunnel.
• I'd built a station building, but it’s a coarse plastic model. There’s none of the maintenance of way buildings or outbuildings seen on the maps.
• The grassy hillside doesn’t quite match reality; prototype photos show more trees. The grassy hillside doesn't hide the unprototypical terrain, and misses the chance for trees as a view block to frame the scene.

So my plans? Tear out the hillside, improve the tunnel entrance, make the scene more realistic overall, and detail the station area.

Redoing Scenery

Step one was ripping out a bunch of bad scenery - taking out the hillside, the cut, and the house-on-stilts.

Before any of that, I took a pass at a bunch of other unfinished business. The turnout in front of the tunnel was a frequent derailment site. I ripped out the track, leveled it out with spackle, and relaid the track. The old Tortoise switch machine was a problem; it stuck out too far below the bottom of the deck, and was difficult to adjust. I swapped it out for one of the tiny MP-5 switch machines. I also took this opportunity to check on the track in the tunnel, pulling up even more track, using spackle to again ensure the roadbed was as level as possible, laid the track better, and sealed in the tunnel so that stray light didn’t ruin the illusion of a tunnel through a mountain.

With the track done, I hit the rough scenery.

The new hillside started out with the focal point: the road climbing over the hill and curving around the top of the tunnel portal. This road’s actually the Glenwood Highway, the first paved road across the Santa Cruz Mountains, and first state highway over the mountains. The Glenwood Highway, built between 1912 and 1921, split off from the current Highway 17 on the ridge between Glenwood and Laurel, dropped down into the Bean Creek canyon, then headed through Glenwood towards Scotts Valley. The concrete road, 15 to 17 feet wide, had banked curves and oiled shoulders. It was the height of modern highway design. When the Glenwood Highway was widened in 1939, the town wasn’t big enough for the highway and the railroad; the SP lost that battle, and the depot was torn down to encourage more space for cars. The current route of Highway 17 later won out, but the jazz-era Glenwood Highway still remains if you drive through Glenwood today.

Road during rework.

Road after rework.

Old photos show the key details of the Glenwood Highway: precise curves and straightaways, the odd slalom around the top of the tunnel portal, and an even descent. I followed an approach I’d used elsewhere. I’d started by roughing out scenery to match the rough slope I wanted, and tore out as much of the old road as I could. As I’ve done elsewhere, I used 1/16” styrene sheet for the roadway, scribed with expansion lines. I cut the styrene at the workbench so I made sure curves were accurate and straightaways were smooth. I glued the sheet to the scenery with Liquid Nails contact cement, and used weights and straight lumber to keep the road flat until it dried. Once the road was glued in place, I used Sculptamold and spackle to finish the fills and shoulders.

Time for detailing the scene.

SP 84 heading out of Glenwood tunnel towards Santa Cruz.

SP 31 coming out of tunnel.

This photo of train 84 coming out of the tunnel shows that the bottom of the canyon had a bunch of pine trees in the 1920's. I'd always intended to capture scenes like this: the conifers in the canyon, oak trees higher up, and the privacy screen of trees between the highway and the railroad tracks. Rearranging the hillside and roadway helped this a bit. Filling in undergrowth and deciduous trees is easy; I've been using either Supertrees or Woodland Scenics Fine-Leaf Foilage. The redwoods and other conifers were more of a problem. I'd covered the hillside around Wrights with Woodland Scenics conifers, but I'd found these slow and tedious to build. I'd started trying to do the same at Glenwood, but eventually figured out that gluing tufts of sponge to the plastic armatures was not how I wanted to spend my hobby hours. Luckily, I'd gone to a model railroad train show right before COVID-19 struck. Grand Central Gems out of San Diego was there with their pre-made trees; I bought a few bags of tall pines, and loved how quickly I managed to get the scene finished. I bought a couple more bags later, quickly filling the hillside. I've always been cheap and unwilling to buy pre-made trees, but spending less than a locomotive to get this scene finished was worth it. With enough trees, it was also easy to give the look of separate areas of fields separated by tree lines. Static grass and a barbed wire fence made of wood posts and fishing line completed the scene.

Turntable:

In the earliest track plans for the Vasona Branch, I’d sketched in a location for the pit for the former South Pacific Coast turntable. Glenwood had been a key spot for narrow gauge lumber traffic; many short trains would carry lumber up to Glenwood; from here, a single engine could pull a longer train through the summit tunnel and down to the Santa Clara Valley. One of Bruce MacGregor’s South Pacific Coast books mentioned the filled-in turntable, so I added it to the track plan as an interesting bit of history. I’d cut a half-moon hole in the homesite for the turntable at a convenient location when I first laid track.

In the last episode, I mentioned finding the valuation maps and spotting the actual location. There were actually two turntables. The one at north end of town that apparently was filled in and tracked over during standard gauge times. The other turntable was at the far end of the siding, hanging over creek edge. Neither matched my guess when I'd first sketched the track plan.

I’d already cut the notch in the layout for the turntable in… oh, 2005, and wasn’t up to moving it. Stories claim the turntable was mostly filled in, but I took the existing hole, added stained balsa wood around to support it, added some debris on the bottom, and called it a day. It'll be a good location to throw whatever clutter I happen to have kicking around.

Glenwood Station:

I scratch built the Glenwood depot using some existing plans, and inference from photos. Gary Cavaglia published plans for the Glenwood depot in the March/April 2003 Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette. His drawing laid out the original narrow gauge depot building from the 1870's. That building contained a waiting room and tiny baggage area, and was completely sided in shiplap siding. All the photos from the times I model show a different structure. Apparently, the station was extended some time before standard gauging. The 1920's station extended the office portion of the station, built on a long addition for baggage and freight, and added a large raised freight platform matching SP's standard station designs. The station, however, kept many of the details seen in other SPC depots in Alviso, Agnews, Alma, and Wrights: similar doors, roof supports, and roof peak decorations.

Cavaglia’s drawings of the depot gave me the rough shape: walls were 12 feet tall; the gable peaked at 17 feet, and end walls were 14 feet wide. The drawings also laid out the rough sides of the passenger section. During the reconstruction, a door moved; I assumed the windows stayed in the same location. Using these measurements and various expectations (doors 30” wide, windows three feet off the ground) I could infer other measurements. The waiting room originally had two windows with a door between; later photos show a solid wall and a door to the right. Apparently, the reconstruction kept windows in the same locations but blocked up the original door location.

The later extension to the freight side of the depot was board-and-batten which made guessing at lengths easier - the battens appeared to be spaced 12” apart, so I could make guesses about the overall length of the extension. I sized the freight dock to the space available on the layout, rather than the size of the prototype’s.

SketchUp model of Glenwood Station

I sketched the whole model in SketchUp because I could do so quickly - I already had 3d models for the SP-style windows, so putting together the rough shape was fast. Once I had a rough model, I could compare it to photos and confirm that it looked about right. I could have done the same with pencil sketches or with a cardboard model.

I built the model using sheet styrene, window and door castings from my hobby stash, and vacuum-formed shingle material from Plastruct. I was lucky that all the supplies were already in my hobby stash, for I started the model just as the Covid-19 shelter-in-place started here in Silicon Valley. Like many of the SP stations I built, I used the Grandt Line 5031 windows (12 pane double-hung windows) to match the main windows, and the narrower Grandt Line 5029 windows for the sides of the operator’s bay. (I use those windows a lot, so my box-of-windows-for-projects usually has some on-hand.) I scratchbuilt the freight doors from styrene sheet. It doesn’t take a lot of styrene to be able to knock off one of these models; I usually keep a couple sheets of board-and-batten material, a couple sheets of shiplap, and then strip styrene in 1x4, 6x6, 2x6, and 2x8 dimensions, and that’s all that’s needed for most buildings. I also keep large sheets of 1/16” sheet styrene from TAP Plastics because it’s cheap and useful for bases or backing support. I also had some very beefy .156 x .250 sticks of styrene; these turned out to be really handy for building up a base for the loading dock. I could have done the same with Plexiglas, but that would have required shopping, and also required using power tools in the garage. Building from styrene let me build quickly with just a #11 X-acto knife, a square, and a straightedge.

Overall, scratch building a model like this is quick - probably a week of evenings including design and painting. The worst part is cutting out the window openings. If you haven’t tried scratch building, find some simple building, get $25 in plastic from your favorite hobby store, and start cutting!

Maintenance of Way Buildings

Who was around in Glenwood? Even with the large station, Glenwood never attracted the business one would expect; it didn’t become a wine center, didn’t have a major lumber industry, never attracted farmers. The August 1916 Southern Pacific payroll on ancestry.com showed Campbell station had an agent, warehouseman, and clerk, and apparently had a part time “fruit checker”. Wrights had an agent and warehouseman in their little hamlet. Meanwhile, Glenwood’s large station only had Alfred Feldt, operator, making $80 a month. Feldt eventually moved to San Lucas; in 1920, Edom N. Davis had the agent role. The abandonment proceedings in 1939 declared that only 196 people lived in the Glenwood area.

The section gang was a big chunk of that population during the teens and twenties. 1916 payroll records show six laborers and a foreman in Glenwood, reminding us that the section housing and work sheds deserve to be prominent. The August 1916 records show similar section crews at Campbell, Los Gatos, Wright, and Santa Cruz. The 1916 crew included V. Simoni as foreman, P. Simoni as watchman (perhaps for the tunnel), and G. Simi, M. Mariani, J. Jilla, A. Scarponei, U. Balleroni, and G. Berlacgua on the crew. The 1920 census showed a similar crowd: Benjamin Capp, Vigellio Elli, Toni Gianti, G. Luciano, Joseph Menta, Sam Chientilli, and Angelo Fideli. The railroad apparently was a good gig for the new immigrants. A separate continent of Mexican workers listed their occupation as wood choppers in the same census pages. Valuation maps don't show housing for the workers, but a few 1920's photos show what appear to be bunk cars on the siding next to the tunnel. Twenty years later, a Vernon Sappers photo of the Felton depot in 1935 shows maintenance of way bunk cars on the siding behind the Felton station, suggesting the maintenance of way workers moved closer to the bright lights of civilization.

I'd hoped on hinting at the folks who worked in Glenwood. I've got some bunk car models (care of Jason Hill of Owl Mountain Models fame), but I hoped I could include the section house where the foreman lived. Unfortunately, I'd started figuring out a location too late - I already had the station and an Atlas water tank in their rough locations. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out an arrangement that didn't appear too crowded. Instead, I added a tool house built from a A&LW Lines laser-cut kit, and an outhouse next to a privacy fence.

Scenery improved? Check. Unrealistic buildings removed? Check. Prototype station in place? Check. Tons of trees? Check. Glenwood was always a place I modeled because I wanted to capture the real look - the curve into the tunnel, the redwoods, and the interaction of the new highway and the old railroad. It’s now got that look I intended.

Bring in the Photographers!

Full disclosure: all photos here are mine documenting the weekend, not the shots the pro guys made.

Well, that was an interesting weekend. As part of preparations for the NMRA 2021 National Convention, Rails by the Bay, I got a chance to get my layout photographed for articles about the convention. Model railroading’s a lone wolf hobby for me, so I’ve never had anyone else doing serious photos of the layout. I instead got to sit and see how others thought of my layout, and how they worked to get great photos. I also changed a bit how I think about the layout as a result.

So let’s talk about aiming for good photos in terms of planning, preparation, and the photos.

If model railroading taught me anything, it taught me project management. Building a model railroad always involves a long effort to build something significant: deciding what to build, sequencing all the work, rolling with the voluntary and involuntary changes, and ending up with a completed model railroad. I found out about the photo sessions at the beginning of the year, and realized I had some time to finish a couple scenes that had been lingering. I used my usual tricks for deciding what to figure out what to do: fix what annoyed me the most, and fix what I was in the mood for.

Two projects won. First, long suffering Glenwood’s scenery finally got redone. I’ve written a bit about that previously, but to recap: it has the potential for an eye catching scene, the prototypical curve makes it easy to stage reproductions of historical photos, and who doesn’t like model trains in mountain scenery? I’d first ripped out the old scenery and fixed some notoriously unreliable trackage near and in the summit tunnel. I redid the hills and Glenwood Highway to better match the terrain. I then covered the area in trees. Normally, I try to build trees from Woodland Scenics kits, but this time I bought from Grand Central Gems at a recent train show, and had a redwood forest ready in days. I ballasted track, detailed the former turntable pit, and built a quick reproduction of the Glenwood station from styrene. (I’ll talk more about the station another time.). Glenwood needed a water tank, so I quickly grabbed one of the venerable Atlas kits and put it into service.

By the time the scene was done, COVID-19 had hit and the original deadline for the work - the Prorail operating event had been cancelled. We rescheduled the photoshoot for August, which gave me motivation for another project. This time, I decided to go after downtown Campbell. The Campbell scene’s always been a focal point for the layout, but the scenery and structures have been half-done for years. I’d built the station model years ago and scenicked the station side of the tracks. However, the opposite side of the tracks was still temporary buildings and little scenery. That included downtown Campbell, Sunsweet, the Hyde Cannery, and Ainsley cannery. This area provided some great scenes - space to photograph long trains, switching action, and lots of canneries. I started on a big push a couple months back to redo everything. For downtown Campbell, I redid the road and building bases, and started trying to pull all together.

I’d already done four of the five buildings for the downtown Campbell Ave., but had held off on the most impressive of the group - the Growers National Bank building that had been downgraded to the local movie theater by the 1930’s. (The building still exists in 2020, though I think they're still fighting about whether to allow it to become a night club.) I’d made a couple attempts at starting the bank, finding a suitably regal plastic model, but the space on the layout was tiny - only about twenty feet wide - and the model wouldn’t fit. Unable to do things perfectly, I just gave up and decided I’d do the model another day.

That day finally came as I cleaned up Campbell Ave. I tossed out my ideas of a "perfect" model and decided to just start building and see what turned up. Like the Dutch signal box, I finally got annoyed enough to just start building. Like that model, I used styrene sheet primarily. Again, large dimension styrene rod worked really well - the 2 foot inset for the doorway was simply 0.250 styrene bar, simplifying the construction. A leftover door and window served for entry. I used brick sheet for the walls; the detail along the roofline were strips of board-and-batten siding standing in for carved stone. I crafted the theater sign from styrene sheet. I would have liked to 3d print it to get the lettering perfect, but my older SketchUp software doesn’t seem to want to render 3d characters.

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Campbell Theater

Bank of Camera Close-up

With Campbell Ave. in, and the road glued down, my next project was fixing the Ainsley Cannery. The Ainsley site’s had a posterboard mockup ever since the layout was built; I still remember Byron Henderson complimenting me during an early operating session because the freight door spacing matched my 40 foot freight cars. Back in 2006, I had a great solution for the cannery - I’d found a YesterYear Models “fruit packing house” - actually a former Sunkist packing house from Riverside, California. The box has been gathering dust ever since as I waited for just the right inspiration to use it for the cannery. This was finally the time to pull the kit out of storage. The overall shape of the buildings are similar - both were a row of wooden barn-like buildings. Like Sunkist, the Ainsley cannery had an office in the end closes to Campbell Ave, and a loading dock dominating the front of the building. As a result, the rough arrangements of windows and doors would work fine as-is. One big difference was that Sunkist’s building had two joined wooden sheds, while the Ainsley cannery had two corrugated iron sheds and two wooden sheds in a line; historic accuracy went out the window in order to get a "good enough" model done as I ignored the corrugated iron sheds. I ended up cutting the Sunkist building in half, and using both ends side-to-side, and ignoring the different materials in the various sheds.

The Drew Cannery, formerly Ainsley

Preparation

All that major work took me up to last week. However, I still hadn’t done much of the preparation work, so I kicked into a big cleanup mode. Our photographers recommended doing a serious cleaning so extraneous dust or debris visible on photos. I also got rid of all the little problems I'd ignored over the years. Some was operating session damage - having folks handle models is always going to trigger a bit of damage. I fixed broken signs and bumped trees, repaired damaged cars, fixed scratched paint or bent grab irons, and filled in ballast holes triggered by past cleanups. I dusted off a set of “good cars”, and stashed away cars that were the wrong era or had visible damage. I fixed long-lingering projects -holes in scenery I’d never addressed, half done patches, and rough surfaces. Some were really quick - I’d never patched scenery when I’d rearranged the Wrights tunnel. Some were larger, such as finishing half-done spackling in the Meridian Road scene.

Most of the preparation work was the same I’d do for an operating session. For operating sessions, I’d also be worrying about reliability, cleaning car and locomotive wheels, testing that engines were working fine, testing couplers and trucks. None of that sort of work mattered much here - the trains would be stationary in the pictures. I was pretty relieved not to be doing a serious cleaning. Serious cleaning's always a huge time sink, and I always want to over-prepare - I’m always worried before operating sessions whether a balky engine or dirty track will make for an unpleasant operating experience.

Another great advantage of photos is that locomotives don't need to run well. The real Vasona Branch likely had small 0-6-0s switching the canneries. On my model, larger 2-8-0 locomotives instead get the job. I really like the little 0-6-0s, but can never use them for operations. They tend to be balky runners and stall way too easily. When operators are focusing on how to solve a switching puzzle, the last thing they want to do is deal with a stalling or broken locomotive; it interrupts the illusion of working on the railroad, and usually ends up with waiting for the layout owner to clean track, fix the engine, or provide another locomotive. With photos, however, a balky or stationary locomotive isn't a bad thing, for the trains don't need to move in a good photograph. I cleaned one of the rarely-used 0-6-0s, and it got a few chances to be on center stage. To be fair, it's still good to have working locomotives if only to quickly pull cars around the layout to a new photo site, but a photo session removes a lot of the worry of mechanical problems.

While some tasks such as wheel-cleaning and locomotive tuning don’t make sense for photos, other tasks not needed before operating sessions were needed. I’m usually a bit hesitant about putting detail on the layout. It’ll often get damaged during operating sessions. I’ve hoarded some details so they’re available when I need to fill in a scene to be photographed. The layout hasn’t always been at a stage where it’s ready for detail.

But hey, if the layout’s going to get photographed for real, this is the time for all that detail. I pulled out my box of various details I’ve hoarded during my time in the hobby. Every Woodland Scenics pallet I’d ever gotten from a detail kit went on the layout. Extra parts from a Fine Scales Miniature kit that couldn’t handle more crowding. All the 3d printed boxes, bags, lugs, and can stacks I’d printed went on any available loading dock. I plopped down figures where they were appropriate. I took a pair of 3d printed flagmans shanties and phone booths and placed them wherever they’d fit. I took the large fruit bins from the YesterYear kit and made a box yard for Del Monte #3, just as can be seen in photographs.

I also put in a bunch of telegraph poles along the right-of-way. I’ve had these on the layout before; they tend to get a lot of abuse, but they’re eye-catching. This time, I spent an evening assembling and painting a set of telegraph and power poles from Rix Products and Atlas. I also painted them a bit more carefully than before. Previously, I’d just painted the telegraph poles a quick brown and added a bit of green for insulators. This time, I made the colors stronger than last time - darker posts, silvery supports, green insulators. In place on the layout, they really catch the eye. For the Meridian Road scene, I also made a point of doing a power/telephone line paralleling the road which helps to make the scene even more realistic.

And thanks to some crazy times at work, I crammed a bunch of this work into the last week, and into a mad three days. We were also in the middle of a serious heat wave here in San Jose, so the hardest part was avoiding heat stroke in the garage, but on the plus side the matte medium dried really, really fast. The roof of the Ainsley cannery got painted just as soon as the glue holding the paper tarpaper on appeared to stick. I laid ballast in a bunch of places that had never been ballasted, and managed to paint and clean the rail in time. I decorated new scenes - bushes hiding a farmhouse along Meridian Ave, a path to the bathroom around the edge of the Rio Grande gas station, and a row of posts to keep parked cars away from the Campbell depot. I was bouncing back and forth between touching up scenery, weathering cars, and touching up structures. When I was checking old photos to get the sign on the Ainsley cannery declaring it to now be the Drew Cannery, I noticed a speed limit sign, and quickly printed up several of those to control the HO scofflaws. I was still touching up ballast and fabricating a set of stairs for the Glenwood depot a half hour before the photo session.

I never completely believed those model railroad magazine articles where someone built a well-detailed layout in a year or two. I couldn't imagine they had time to decide on models, do the construction necessary, or add the details. This week's mad rush convinced me it was possible. All I needed was some definite ideas of what should be built, an urgent deadline, a bit of wiggle-room on what counted as "good enough", some well-stocked supplies, and way too much manic energy.

And the Photographers Arrive

Dan and Doug, the photographers, were spending several days just photographing layouts in the Bay Area. They've also done this before for previous conventions and other layouts, and came fully prepared. Although I've read about model photography in magazines, this was my first chance to see pros in action.

They came prepared: lights, power cords, and various secret photographer paraphenalia. The extension cords helped when the breaker blew on the garage circuit - our 1960's house wasn't designed for this kind of model railroad lighting, and we quickly found another circuit to share the load.

Lighting the whole length of the layout

Dan also had lots of cool tricks so he could get into the scene with his SLR - mirrors to capture scenes the camera couldn't reach, beanbags to hold the camera steady on the layout, high tripod for the upper level photos.

And they took photos different from me, too. Some of that was expected: they visited the Vasona Branch for only a couple hours, so they were very careful to make their plan of shots, then slowly move around the layout to hit each.

Big difference number one from my attempts at model photography: they bring in lots of light. The Vasona Branch has a mix of lighting: the garage lights are cool white fluorescent strips, but I've got various cool white LEDs and warm white fluorescent fixtures lighting the lower deck. I'll usually just use the existing lighting when I take photos; if I'm really taking care, I might borrow a couple bright lights from one source or another. As a result, my photos often have weird colors if a scene has a mix of LED and fluorescent lights. Dan and Doug used two or three photo lamps. Their lights quickly overpower any layout lighting. They also didn't seem to worry about the narrow space between decks - bounce light off objects was enough to light the scene. Their biggest concern seemed to be getting the scene evenly lit, and avoiding shadows on the backdrop. In places where they couldn't get lights, they assumed they could photoshop in some sky into the black background of the garage door.

Dan and Doug use mirrors and a hand-held photo light to capture a train approaching Alma station.

Big difference number 2: The big surprises for me was just seeing what caught their attention. I haven't seen their photos yet, but they understandably looked for interactions between trains and the world. Signals were a common tool to add some action, as were road crossings. My best guess is that model photos need the extra busy-ness and action, and really need some focal point other than the train. The Vasona Branch's semaphore signals were common places for photos. (That was also true on the prototype; one real photo that inspired me is a 1920 photo of a passenger train coming into Glenwood. That photographer, like Dan, made sure to catch the train as it "split the semaphores".

SP Train 84, coming out of the tunnel at Glenwood

I also heard a bunch of interest about the farmhouse and orchard sitting in the blob where the tracks turn from San Jose to Campbell. This scene's always been half done and cluttered - details not glued down, ground not quite sloping correctly, the orchard too small to be realistic. I'd done a big cleanup of the scene in preparation for the photos - pulled out details, removed structures, and generally made it innocuous. But interest kept drifting back towards the farmhouse and barn. I'd started thinking about details as I was doing cleanup; I'd added a hedge to protect the farmhouse from the busier road. But the interest makes me think I should more seriously plan the scene out.

Dan and Doug also focused on the large details - freight cars and car models - rather than smaller details - not surprising because of the short time. They did spot one broken crossbuck that would have detracted from the scene; we pulled it out.

And that was pretty much it; they got ten good photos, and moved onto the next layout. I got to stare at the layout for a while; it's always fun to see the layout when it's been cleaned up for an open house or an operating session, and doubly-good when all the usual clutter in the garage has been relocated. Even though I'd crammed a bunch to get the layout in shape, I was still excited enough at seeing the layout in good shape that I finished off a couple projects that hadn't been done in time, replacing a remaining broken telephone pole, putting in some gravel around the Ainsley cannery, and fixing up the famous black walnut tree that sat at the start of Campbell Ave.

What did the photos show? I've seen the first photos, and they're great - Dan uses Helicon to combine photos taken at different focal lengths to get more depth of field. Looking at the photos, I see a few things to do differently.

• I'm vertically challenged. In a few of the photos, it's obvious I've been less than good at making sure everything's standing up straight. They're close, but as soon as several objects are in a photo: semaphores, building, water tank, telephone poles - it's obvious each has a slightly different idea what "up" is. I'll need to work on this, both ongoing, and fixing the more obvious offenders before I next take photos.
• Prepare for the story. I'd made sure to have cars set up in sample trains, but hadn't been good about choosing cars or trains to illustrate themes I'd want in an article about the layout. For example, large industries and lots of indistinguishable red boxcars is a big part of my layout, but I neglected to have a switcher ready at Plant 51, and also didn't make sure that the cars there were the uninteresting ones. I need to sketch out the story I want to tell beforehand, and share it with the folks doing photography.

What's next? The layout's clean and in good shape, and I'm excited to do some more building. Finishing Campbell is an obvious next step: the Hyde Cannery buildings are screaming out to be build. I'd held off on building the Campbell Theater and Ainsley Cannery because I wanted to make sure I did them right. However, my quick-and-dirty building rush seemed to work with these. Maybe I should just go build Hyde and see what happens?

The orchard scene's another obvious project.

Once both of those are done, there's obvious holes to fill. One advantage of cleaning the layout was that I got rid of all the building placed on the layout "temporarily" for lack of better space - a couple of farmhouses that never found locations, a drive-in market built for fun, a bunch of cars that needed repair. Now that the layout's opened up, I'm reminded that the area between Campbell and Vasona Junction is still completely empty. The Del Monte Plant #3 property's also still occupied only by foamcore buildings. There's also a stretch of bare plaster up on the upper deck near Alma. I'll need to take a pass on any of these scenes going forward.

If the last week's any indication, I know how to get those scenes done quickly: lock down my idea of the scene, build something that's "good enough" rather than waiting for perfection, and pull a bunch of all-nighters during a heat-wave.

Replacing the Wrights Bridge: Part I

Sixth Crossing, Los Gatos Creek

I love research because it convinces me to throw away perfectly serviceable parts of my layout.

Wrights, located at the top of Los Gatos Canyon, is a key scene for my model railroad. It has a photogenic location at the top of Los Gatos Canyon, with the tracks suddenly jumping across the canyon to dive into a tunnel. Photogenic structures - the old general store, tiny station, and abandoned warehouses - fill the scene. A siding, originally intended to go to the Sunset Park picnic grounds in the 1890’s, provides a way to hide a reverse loop at the top of the layout.

Original scene

The Wrights scene is also one of the earliest bits of scenery on my layout. During the first nine months of building, I focused on getting track laid all the way to my upper level so I could confirm that I knew how to build my two-level benchwork. Once the track was in, I decided I ought to do the messy scenery on the top level first; I’d hate to dump plaster on a good-looking scene below.

The resulting scenery was a mix of good and bad. I matched the rough terrain of the location deep in the canyon, and captured the look of both the redwood-covered hills above the tunnel and the creek deep in the canyon. I reproduced the wooden trestle from narrow-gauge era photos. I also made the model a bit "more interesting" with trestle bents that weren’t perpendicular to the rails, and a split-level concrete foundation matching an odd trestle bent I’d seen on Jack Burgess’s Yosemite Valley railroad. I also rushed construction of supports for the road bridge just upstream of the railroad trestle, plopping down plaster onto the hillside and shaping it to look like a massive concrete block supporting each bridge end.

Of course, then I started reading more about the actual location. Later photos showed a different bridge - a wooden truss bridge - in place of the trestle across the creek. I found some maps hinting that the road from the new Wrights station, on the other side of the creek, dipped under the bridge to make it to the road bridge and the road up-canyon to farms in Austrian Gulch and beyond. Adding that road was one of the few improvements to the scenes since 2006.

Then, last year, while searching up at the California State Railroad Museum, I found a little stapled set of blueprints, set up like Powerpoint slides. (I wrote a bit about those blueprints and maps I found back in August.) I’ve been claiming (without proof) that the booklet must have been the work of some summer intern in the engineering department. That intern had remarkably good lettering skills...

That booklet showed pictures and drawings of the actual bridge… which didn’t look anything like the actual bridge I’d made. Now, that’s not uncommon; I’ve found plenty of scenes on my model railroad that turned out not to match reality. In some cases, I ignore the mistake. Perhaps I needed to swap two scenes to fit my garage, or perhaps I believed the difference wasn’t noticeable. In other cases, I'm annoyed by the difference - but not so annoyed by the mistake that I’d do something about it.

And in some cases, I get annoyed enough to rip out completed, decent scenery, just to match details that the summer intern sketched out a hundred years ago, and stapled in a cool little booklet.

The Prototype

For the railroad, the bridge at Wrights was the “sixth crossing of Los Gatos Creek”. Los Gatos Canyon was an awfully narrow place to survey a railroad, and the railroad reached the headwaters by bouncing from bank to bank to keep grading costs low. Two of the bridges were just above downtown Los Gatos in the narrows at Lexington Reservoir. The third was near Alma. The fourth was near Aldercroft Heights. The final two crossings - just below Wrights, and just above Wrights - were the fifth and sixth crossings.

The South Pacific Coast Railroad laid all that track back in the 1870’s in their attempt to break the SP monopoly and get access to the lumber traffic from the Santa Cruz mountains. The SPC was narrow gauge - smaller trains and bridges kept the fledgling railroad’s costs low. Their original bridges met their “cheap” image, with most bridges being trestles with piles driven into the unstable soil holding them up.

The sixth crossing of Los Gatos creek, up by Wrights, was originally a trestle built on pilings by the South Pacific Coast. The tracks, on the east side of the canyon, suddenly made a right turn, cut across the creek and rolled across a filled-in gulch before diving into the mile-long summit tunnel. Photos from the 1880’s and 1890’s show a trestle that looks like it would have caught ever bit of debris rolling down the creek in the winter storms.

The SP leased the line in 1887, planning to make the line into a solid, first class railroad… eventually. When the plans to standard gauge the line started in earnest in the early 20th century, the SP widened the route and put in some slightly more solid bridges. SP finished dual-gauging the tracks to Wrights by 1903. The Wrights bridge, according to the intern’s slide deck, was replaced in the same year with a straining truss wooden bridge, built just as the tracks up to Wrights were being standard gauged. The intern described it as:

Old Structure. 80 ft. Straining Beam Deck Span on frame piers, with concrete footings with trestle approaches. Designed for narrow gauge track and equipment. Constructed 1903.

The plans to complete the standard-gauging of the line from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz got interrupted on April 18, 1906 as the Great San Francisco Earthquake hit the region. Landslides buried the track on both sides of the mountain, and the summit tunnel at Wrights was cut in the middle.

After the earthquake, the Southern Pacific spent three frantic years rebuilding the Santa Cruz branch. In Wrights, the railroad cleared and widened the summit tunnel, moved the station across the creek, and standard gauged the line. They didn’t replace the bridge, though, leaving the 1903 improved crossing in place.

And then we come to the project described by the intern. In 1915, the SP finally got around to improving both the 5th and 6th crossings of Los Gatos Creek. It wasn’t quite a new bridge; the intern noted that the new bridge was “Second Hand 50 ft Deck Plate Girder from the Santa Clara River (Montalvo Bridge). (Our 1915-vintage Sixth Crossing bridge was very lucky to get replaced and yanked out of Southern California. The bridge that superseded it was washed out to sea when the St. Francis Dam burst in 1928. Cue obligatory music.) The old wooden piers disappeared, replaced by a pair of concrete piers placed on the existing concrete foundations. Even if the bridge wasn’t local, the concrete was; gravel for the new piers came from Campbell, and the cement came from Davenport.

Road crossing under the bridge

The SP spent $6,556.98 on that new bridge: $3500 in labor and the rest on material, spreading the work over fourteen months from November 1914 to February 1916. The intern even broke down the costs - $1500 for the piers, $600 for the pilings for the trestle approaches, $700 to install the new steel bridge, $700 for the trestle approaches themselves, and $200 for ties and guardrails for the bridge. They also accounted for the corporate expenses - $500 for falsework, $300 for use of the work train, $600 for rental of equipment, and $180 to haul the materials up to Wrights.

Now, I just needed to figure out how to build that bridge to match the intern's drawings.

Coming up next time, I'll talk a bit about how I built the scene, and how many of the key parts of the scene were actually 3d printed.

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Excerpts from blueprints were taken from "Sixth crossing of Los Gatos Creek Near Wrights", a booklet created by the Southern Pacific Coast Division engineering department to describe the project. Original in the California State Railroad Museum library, Sacramento.

Progress on San Carlos Street

J.S. Roberts, 1934

The San Carlos Street viaduct is one of the key scenes for the Vasona Branch. The SP paid for the viaduct in the early 1930's as a last step before main line tracks could be removed from Fourth Street and the business district of San Jose. The viaduct jumps over the former South Pacific Coast tracks heading towards Campbell and Los Gatos, but, more importantly, it provided space for the new mainline tracks to head under the viaduct and around town.

As a model, the viaduct's important; it's a well-known location around these parts, it adds interest to a boring turn, separates the West San Jose and Auzerais Street scenes, and has the potential to add clutter and action. Sadly, the area's not gotten much love; I've been collecting photos and ideas for reworking this area, and I've been building a new version of the packing house just under the viaduct, but I'm finally getting some modeling done.

Here's photos of the scene after a busy week. The packing house is in place (with some resin-cast prune boxes on the platform). The sweet looking CalPak sign text is a guess, but there's a sign with similar outlines from the back in one of the photographs of the area. The bridge supports almost match the actual bridge - a mix of two-legged piers (for piers that weren't liable to be damaged), partial walls (near railroad tracks), and full walls (for the Dupont Street underpass I'm not modeling).

The storm drain pipe with water was an afterthought, and a nice way to quickly add a bit of interest and action to the scene.

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John S. Roberts photo taken from a John C. Gordon photo in the San Jose State University special collection.

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.

Movie Night V: Trains in the Canyon

Following last year's exciting Vasona Branch time-lapse video, here's another video... and this time at regular speed!

After last month's tree-making, the hills between Alma and Wrights look much more realistic. This video shows off two trains in the scene as well as the Wrights trestle and station scene, Alma station and siding, and a bit at the end of the Wrights General Store, summit tunnel, and fruit packing shed. Apologies for the shaky video; camera phones aren't great for steady video.

Enjoy!

The soundtrack is Paul Whiteman and his orchestra playing "California Here I Come". Folks who've operated on the Vasona Branch know I have 1920's era pre-show music playing in the background. Some of the music is vintage (copied off one of the sites providing out-of-copyright 78's, though the Library of Congress also has a copy online), while other music on the playlist just sounds old, but might be played by a bunch of college kids from San Luis Obispo.

The Best Day to Make Trees Is Two Years Ago, Or Today

Yep, even in dry California, I never have enough trees on the layout. This weekend's hot weather encouraged me to go on a tree-building kick, pulling out the Supertrees, the matte medium, and the tarps for an afternoon of sunburn and ground foam stuck to my hands.

It took me years til I figured out how to make trees that I found at all realistic. As a teenager, I found Woodland Scenics' metal armature trees a pain to make and unrealistic, both in color, shape, and size. I never understood why their trees were so small til we drove through Texas one year and I saw what counted as trees out in North Texas. Heck, we've got chaparral bigger than that. I didn't have any better luck stretching the foilage over the plastic armature trees, and the results never looked like my favorite places in California (whether up in the drier hills, as seen in the first photo in this set, or down in the canyons near the redwoods).

In the last few years, I've finally found the styles I'll stick with - Woodland Scenics' plastic armature pine trees for the redwood forests around Wrights, their small plastic armature trees for my orchards, and a combination of Supertrees and Woodland Scenics fine-leaf foilage for small trees and bushes. The Supertrees work well for the larger deciduous trees - the buckeye, laurel, and sycamore - start with the cone-shaped tops of the Supertree weed armatures, and get pale green ground foams. The round coast live oaks are shaped from the lower portions of the armatures, and get the dark green Noch leaf flakes.

I got about 40-50 trees done over the afternoon, and would have done more except I ran out of clothespins to hold them while drying. More clothespins are on my shopping list before next time.

All the trees went along the tracks between Alma and Wrights. This stretch had been completely empty and distracted from two nice scenes on either side, but now it's a continuous stretch of trees. Here's some photos of the completed scene.

[Real California scenery photos both from Almaden Quicksilver County Park.]

Update: BUSTED! (Was: New Scenery Products for California Modelers )

Ouch - I'm embarrassed to have to say this, but it turns out California Natural Scenery Co. was too good to be true - it looks like their product isn't made from the real California plants as they claim.

I was really excited about their HO-301 Toxicodendron Diversilobum (that's Poison Oak, for those of you who didn't learn the latin names when you went to summer camp), and I like the look of their bushes… but they didn't actually make it from Poison Oak like they said. I figured this out when I accidentally put my elbow in the pile of bushes I was planting on the railroad last night. When I didn't get the characteristic rash by this morning, I knew something was up. A closer examination of their product shows it's actually mostly ground foam, and not Poison Oak.

I am very disappointed, and apologize if I got anyone else excited about their new products. It's too bad, for the Pampas Grass looks pretty good in my Vasona Junction scene, as seen here. They're a little short, but they'll do.

And if you do see some of California Natural Scenery products in the store, make sure to test it before you buy any significant amount. Rub a bit of one of their bushes on your skin, and if you start itching uncontrollably the next day, you know they're really making the product they're claiming.

[First photo: What I thought I was getting - real Poison Oak, as seen on a hike in New Almaden a while back.]

New Scenery Products for California Modelers!

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know my pet peeve. I've always been frustrated that there aren't enough model railroad structures and scenery products that are appropriate for California. You can buy brick downtown buildings appropriate for New York and short trees suitable for Arkansas, but finding appropriate Coast Live Oaks or Mission-style downtown storefronts is more of a challenge.

Luckily, some manufacturers are working on this. Our local hobby shop just got some new products from the California Natural Scenery Co., and they're definitely filling a greatly needed niche. While Faller or Scenic Express might have cabbage fields and flowers, California Natural Scenery is going for the California plants we're most likely to see along the railroad tracks. I just bought their Scotch Broom (HO-303) (which looks more like Spanish Broom, in my opinion), and Pampas Grass (HO-302) - both very common plants near disturbed soil or abandoned areas, and perfect near a railroad line.

Best of all, they're also selling the plant that every California schoolkid learns to identify early, the amazingly-common Toxicodendron diversilobum (HO-301). T. diversilobum is great for a model railroad - often seen in disturbed and unkept soil, and great from a model perspective because it can be a bush, a small tree, or a vine, and is equally suitable in woodlands, on hillsides, and in sunny patches near the tracks. California Natural Scenery captures the reddish leaves that are so representative of the plant in the late summer. Even though my layout is probably more an early-summer layout, I'll deal with the slight anachronism.

Best of all, California Natural Scenery is using the actual plants to make their T. diversilobum, so it's not only realistic, it's real and certified organic. That'll require a bit of care when putting in the scenery and working near the tracks (and they do explicitly warn on the package that you really should use gloves when handling it), but I'm willing to go through the effort to really make some great scenery. I suspect it'll also be a great way to encourage visitors not to touch the layout!

Here's a photo of the Alma hillside area with some quick applications of the new products. Both T. diversilobum and Scotch Broom are really common in the Santa Cruz mountains, and anyone who's hiked in the area can certainly notice the extra realism in this scene. The Pampas Grass will be going in the abandoned lots down in the Valley. I don't have a place for the bushes yet, but definitely wanted to buy them before they sold out.

I'm really happy with California Natural Scenery's new product line, and I can hardly wait to see what they come up with next! (My wish-list would be thistles and ice-plant.) California Natural Scenery Co. doesn't appear to have a website yet; check with your hobby shop to see if they'll carry the brand, or drop the company a note at P.O. Box 7325, San Narciso, CA 92011-7325.

And don't forget to keep your elbows off my layout from now on!

Tricking Myself Into Finishing Scenery

It's amazing what a little push can do.

On my list of projects for 2012, I'd added "Patch holes and gaps in the scenery and fascia", and I was mostly thinking of the orchard scene on the curve between San Jose and Campbell.

This area had some of the earliest scenery on the layout as I defended against derailing trains falling to the floor. I tried hardshell based on childhood memories and quickly went to foam and sculptamold about halfway through this curve. I'd also gotten the fascia height wrong early in the layout, and the scenery on the curve either ended an inch above the top edge of the fascia, or sloped away unrealistically from the track. Although I'd added the start of an orchard scene on the inside of the curve early-on, the scene had languished for years. This wasn't one of my favorite scenes, and it wasn't one of the more attractive parts of the layout.

I also had my first real test of whether I was going to stay close to my chosen prototype, or was going to use the "San Jose - Los Gatos branch" as inspiration only. Channeling my teenage modeler, I thought "oh, some elevation change would be nice in this corner!" and started building a dip or gully in the corner of the layout. About halfway through and elbow-deep in plaster, I realized that the actual scenery south of San Jose would have been perfectly flat. Sudden soul searching - am I modeling a specific prototype, or just whatever scene I wanted? I made the explicit choice that day to keep going on prototype modeling; the gully got filled in, and the scenery looks like the Valley floor between San Jose and Campbell. More importantly, I kept making decisions to keep the layout as prototypical and accurate as possible, and I've been happy with that choice. But if you look under the layout, you can still see the shape of that inappropriate gully in the underside of the scenery.

[Before photo]

So, thanks to the ProRail deadline, it was time to gut all that scenery. Over the last couple weekends, I ripped out some of the scenery, replaced the fascia, and put down a new scenery base. Today was the more photogenic day; the new scenery got covered in dirt (sifted from the garden), ground foam, and trees. The photo just above shows the layout before all this work; the photo at the top shows the scene today.

The amazing part is that I really was intending to get rid of the holes in the fascia to give the layout a more finished look. However, as I've found before, sometimes if I just get started on some project - especially one with a smaller, less challenging goal such as "replace the fascia but don't worry about the scenery", I'll have the momentum to keep going and deal with the bigger, nastier problems -- how to design the scene and getting past the fear that the scenery might not come out looking very good. Getting moving on a lingering project like this often means that I get inspired to keep going... and finishing the scene is the result.

Details

The road through the center of the scene is supposed to be Meridian Road, just south of San Jose. The canneries are about a quarter mile up the road on the right hand side. The gas station on the right is a model of the Barnsdall / Rio Grande gas station in Goleta, California. Although there wasn't a gas station on this location, it's a model that deserves display. The buff gravel driveway also adds color to the scene.

The left side shows an orchard, barn, and drying yard. The barn on the left side of the road (just being built this weekend) is DeLoney's Barn from Showcase Miniatures - very detailed, very California-appropriate, and it's been falling together quickly. The tank house in the back is scratchbuilt, as are all the drying flats of apricots in the back. The shed in the left foreground is a cutting shed that will have a scene of women preparing the apricots. The grass in front is a Silflor "California Gold" sheet - it's pricey, but pretty stunning in smaller areas like this. Once the scenery dries, I'll be adding the Silflor clumps to disguise the edge of the sheet.

The backdrop at the back of the scene ended about an inch above the top of the finished scenery. That was partially poor planning, but I'd also had problems getting larger sheets into place when the benchwork had already been built and track was already in. To cover the gaps, I cut 2 inch wide strips of styrene, cut rough tree-shaped scallops into the top of it, painted it a bluish-green, and glued the strips to the backdrop to hide the gap. I also added ground foam and Woodland Scenics fine-leaf foilage to the tree strip to further disguise the backdrop.

The orchard ate a lot of trees; the temporary trees formerly in the orchard only filled three rows, so it's time for me to start building trees again. I use the Woodland Scenics bendable tree armatures for the orchard trees because they're cheap and are short enough to look orchard live. The wilder areas (Alma and Wrights) gets Supertrees. Although the Supertrees are more fragile, there's less reaching into scenes up there, and the lacier trees look good in a forest scene.

New Photos

BTW, for your amusement,

Del Monte's Plant 51

East end of Glenwood siding, with some fine-looking static grass.

Note to Self: *Lots* More Orchards

Although I've been pretty focused on the cannery and fruit packing buildings in the Santa Clara Valley for the layout, I do remember that they're just a very narrow strip of what the Valley looked like in the 1930's. Most of the Santa Clara Valley at the time was orchards and farms, with only the thinnest strips along the railroad looking so industrial.

This panorama, for instance, is a nice reminder. This is a drying yard somewhere near Campbell, stuck in a depression on the edge of the property with railroad tracks cutting across the back of the photo. There's nothing but orchards visible. At a first guess, I'd suspect those are the SP tracks in the background, and two signs might hint at that. The post to the right has an "X" - a whistle post - indicating there's a road crossing somewhere off the right of the photo. The left shows two white boards nailed to a telegraph pole with "50" written on each, probably a railroad milepost. Milepost 50 on the Los Gatos Branch was about where the tracks crossed Hamilton Ave. near the current Highway 17 in Campbell, and was about 0.7 miles northeast of the station in Campbell.

There's also the chance that the Interurban line to Los Gatos used SP mile numbers, but I'm guessing this is the SP line. A better SP historian would know if that odd shaped whistle post was an SP prototype or not.

It's nice to know what the mileposts and whistle boards looked like so I can duplicate those. It's also good to see the orchards and the shapes of the trees. Best of all are the details from the drying yard - the prune dipper at the far left for dipping the fruit in lye before laying it out for drying, the piles of fruit boxes, and all the drying flats scattered around. But I'll have to scratchbuild it; I don't think I've ever seen a prune dipper kit in HO.

Cleanup at Plant 51

One of the great things about the model railroad hobby is that I sometimes just get distracted from the high-priority projects on my list, and can instead just dash off on some other lark for a little while.

This weekend, for example. My to-do list (both at home and on the layout) is pretty long, but I was poking around at photos I'd catalogued on Lookback Maps, and took another look at this photo of Plant 51 from the 1920's. I'd gotten a little annoyed when I first found this photo because it showed lots of details I wasn't modeling.

Here's a look at some of the detail in that photo.

Re-examining that photo got me excited about making the building more correct - modeling the ivy, roof over the docks, and larger building just behind with the large California Packing Corporation (aka Calpac, aka Del Monte) lettering. The to-do list went out the window, except for mowing the lawns. I adding all those details in: washing the building with white paint for mortar, started building the dock roof and a flat for the background building, and added ivy on the building. There were also two painted signs visible along the loading dock - a Del Monte logo, and a list of their products. After a bit of work with the printer and some do-it-yourself decal paper, I had those signs reproduced on the model. I also ballasted the track leading into Plant 51 (or, more precisely, buried it in dirt sifted from the backyard).

Here's the before-and-after photos showing the progress this weekend. I still need to finish the dock roofs, add the background building, and add some weeds around at appropriate places.

And regardless of whether I made progress on the to-do list, I'm feeling a bit better about this corner of the layout. More news on the Plant 51 changes as they develop...

Backdrop validation and verification

If I ever had questions about whether my Google Earth-derived backdrops were appropriate, I've now got the source material. The Santa Clara County Pioneers have uploaded a promotional video for Redwood Estates from 1927, and there are some nice panoramas of the hills as well as detail shots of Los Gatos Creek and the area around the Redwood Estates vacation subdivision. The hills look a bit more brush-covered, but it looks like the current backdrop won't need to change.

And if the prospect of clean living and a windmill wasn't enough to get you to buy a lot in Los Gatos Canyon, they also have video of Los Gatos proper. Video of the Los Gatos train station starts at 8:00.

The Blossomtime in Santa Clara County is also worth watching. It dates from the 1950's, but highlights how I ought to be thinking about what's under the trees. I've been leaving it as bare dirt but the videos show orchards with high grass (winter), short grass, and plowed earth. The San Jose Chamber of Commerce must've really liked those time-lapse blossom-opening videos, because they're sprinkled liberally through the film.