What This Layout Really Needs is a Dutch Functionalist Signal Box

The Conundrum

Well, if I needed proof that I’m a structure modeler, not a freight car modeler, I’ve got proof.

I’ve talked in the past about my rules for structures: build only appropriate buildings that will fit on the layout. I’ve got a small model railroad. I don’t need bunch of models I can’t fit on the railroad, whether structures, freight cars, or locomotives. I want to model historical locations, so I don’t need models that aren’t appropriate for 1930’s San Jose. That means no generic kits, and no models inappropriate for the era or the location. I can’t always build what seems like fun. While there were lots of photogenic art deco, modernist, or mission-style buildings around San Jose, they weren’t always along the railroad tracks. My model railroad shows the back side of the old warehouses and canneries, not the attractive downtowns.

Even with that rule, I’ve got lots of interesting structures for inspiration, all clustered in a folder labeled “Inspiration”: a 1920’s car hop restaurant in LA, that pocket gas station in Hollywood next to D.W. Griffith's movie studio, the old freight house at San Jose, a bit of the facade of Golden Gate Packing in San Jose, a moorish revival storefront. They catch my eye, they seem interesting as models, they’d fit on the layout, and they’d fit the era and the location. I keep thinking any of these would be fun; sometimes I might even pull one out as a potential project.

No matter how earnest I sound, I’ve broken the structure rule occasionally. I built one of the classic Fine Scale Miniatures kits just to see what was special about them. The model's much-complimented instructions on weathering the building taught me some handy new tricks. A while back, I showed the 3d-printed model of that 1915 Hollywood gas station. I don’t have a place for it on the layout now, but I liked the look, and I knew it had potential to be on the layout. But other than a few examples, I don’t build inappropriate structures. Nope. If I’m building it, it better have a place on the layout.

But hey, this hobby’s about having fun, and sometimes that means breaking our well-thought out rules to do something wacky.

As part of entertainment during the current shelter-in-place, I’ve been following a bunch of European modelers. One, Tim Dunn, had been publicizing the Twitter Model Train Show, an online event to substitute for a cancelled model railway show in London in March. Tim’s also a broadcaster and is currently doing a TV series on railway architecture on Britain’s equivalent of the History Channel. For one episode, he mentioned the work of Sybold van Ravesteyn, a Dutch architect well-known for his modernist buildings. He shared a few photos on Twitter, including this photo of a very non-traditional switch tower / signal box:

And just like that, I’ll toss away all my principles, and start building a model that doesn’t match my era, my location, and won’t fit on my layout. It’s a pretty sweet model, though!

(For more on van Ravesteyn, read the detours.eu article on his projects.)

The Prototype

van Ravesteyn’s prototype signal box was in Utrecht in the Netherlands, between Rotterdam and Amsterdam. It's an eye-catching structure with sweeping curves, those odd round windows, and the notched roof looking a bit like Don Quixote's shaving bowl hat, all built from concrete. It's like some sort of modernist aerie that might fit well in the hills of Los Angeles, or a couple of brutalist college campuses I can think about.

Yeah, I had to build a model of it.

A bit of research told me more of the history. The signal box was built as part of a revamp of Utrecht’s central station in 1937 and 1938. Similar signal boxes sat on the north and south ends of the station, but the surviving photos are for the signal box on the north end, just where the Leideveer underpass dives under the railroad lines. The signal boxes were designed for electric interlocking machines, with the operators on the top floor, an equipment room in a middle level, and the bulk of the building perched on top of a 15 foot high concrete shaft. The real signal box was never actually used "because of World War II", though that doesn't say whether Utrecht was damaged, if the line didn't get enough traffic to require the interlocking, or if the building was just impractical. It appears the building was a residence for a few years, but torn down in the 1950’s. Some online photos show the tenants on the stairs up to the signal box.

The Model

I’d initially thought of 3d printing this model in order to reproduce the curves and the round windows. However, it’s a bit of a waste to go straight to 3d here. The switch tower would take a fair amount of resin to print - probably the equivalent of a couple freight cars, and I’d require a couple tries to print it reliably. 3d printing’s also best for a model that’s going to be made multiple times. This switch tower’s a weekend boondoggle; I don’t even need one, so 3d modeling for multiple is overkill.

I still did a 3d model in SketchUp to figure out the measurements. I created the 3d model by studying a bunch of photos online, and estimating dimensions from the spacing between tracks, size of windows, etc.

For most traditional buildings, figuring out how to build a model isn’t that hard: lay out the walls, cut holes for window and door castings, glue walls together, add a roof. I learned all this from kits I built in high school, and models I’ve scratch built and kit bashed ever since. The curved lines of the signal box didn’t suggest an obvious way to build. I ended up using a model airplane-like approach, with forms supporting a skin.

I drew out the end shape on 0.060” styrene sheet (cheap and plentiful in large sheets from Tap Plastics!), cut out two pieces to match the signal box’s silhouette, and drilled holes for the round windows in the equipment room. I then added spacers with 1/8” x 1/4” styrene rod to hold the two ends out the appropriate 12 scale feet apart. (The thick styrene rod is available from Evergreen Scale Models, just like your scale 2x6 strips and clapboard siding. The bigger pieces always seem like an extravagance compared with plexiglas or wood scraps. However, the styrene rod is easy to work with - just score and snap, same as the thinner styrene - and easy to glue.) I also added 0.125” square styrene along the edges of the pieces as a gluing surface.

Once I had the rough form, I cut out 0.020” styrene sheet for the curved walls, and carefully bent them to match the curve of the walls. A bunch of rubber bands and clamps held everything in place until the plastic glue dried. I sanded the corners so they were a bit less sharp, added filler, and primed the whole model to double-check the surface didn’t have flaws. I built the roof similarly - two sheets of 0.062” styrene for the flat roof with the concave notch, and a half-barrel roof made from half-circle forms with thin sheet over the top. One important step was gluing some 8-32 nuts into the base of the model. This is a really top-heavy model that won’t stand on its own, so I needed to secure it to a base just so I could paint it and work on it without the signal box falling over.

Once the rough walls were formed, I added more of the structural details - the entry platform, and the horizontal table outside the observation windows, all cut from styrene sheet. I used styrene strip to frame up the observation windows, and a platform for the roof. I primed and painted the model white, and added some weathering to make the curves more obvious.

I also made one bad move: I tried to add some texture to the walls to better look like concrete. The "pumice gel" I'd used to simulate stucco looked way too rough, and I spent a couple hours scrubbing and scraping the texture off so the model would look "cleaner".

The steps and handrails came from Central Valley’s “Fence and Railings” and “Steps and Ladders” packs. I couldn’t reproduce the curved railings by the entrance to the signal box, so for now the model has some unfortunate straight railings. I’ll try later to do a more accurate set of railings.

So where’s the completed model going to go? It’s not appropriate for the Vasona Branch. The WP’s West San Jose tower already has an accurate model. Even if I wanted to imagine that a modernist switch tower might have ended up at the location, economics and the unfashionable location suggested that there was no way a fancy switch tower ever would have been at the location. WP shut down the tower by the 1930’s anyway, so it's unlikely they would have spent money for a modernist jewel box out behind the Del Monte Cannery. Instead, my little Utrecht tower will probably be going to my desk at work just so I’ve got something railroad-related to be thinking about in between tasks.

I’ve got a rule: I only build appropriate models that will fit on the layout. Except when I don’t. The Utrecht signal box was a break-the-rules, fun, more-than-a-weekend project. The signal box wasn’t appropriate for my 1930’s San Jose layout, nor does it give me a chance to explore my interest in California history. However, this little modernist signal box from half a world away does capture my interest in modern architecture, and gave me a chance to try some unusual techniques in styrene. I imagine I could have learned the same lessons in plastic by scratch building a Vanderbilt tender, or a passenger car. But I like buildings, and so if I was going to do a project just for fun, it’s pretty obvious it would have been a modernist little structure model.

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Thanks to Tim Dunn for sharing the original picture and inspiring me to build this project. Arjan den Boer's article on van Sybold van Ravesteyn gave more detail on the arrangement of the signal box, and the architect's evolution of style. Thanks to all the kit manufacturers who gave me enough model building skills so I could knock off this model in a couple of long days.

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.

"Hapa's Brewing Doesn't Do Things By Halves!" Says Edith Daley

It’s a crazy time in Silicon Valley right now - lots of construction and new office space, lots of traffic, lots of folks moving in. The 1970’s tilt-ups around our current office are failing to the bulldozer and getting replaced with four stories of apartments and AMD engineering cubicles. Our office manager just moved west from North Carolina, and I can’t imagine how crazy this place seems to her - wide open skies, brown hills, and too damn many verification engineers and JavaScript ninjas. Neighbors fighting neighbors over coding style conventions. French bulldogs with LinkedIn profiles. It’s a common story - if this was the turn of the century, we would have had a bunch of Italian immigrants, fresh off the boat, looking for cannery or farm work, and we would have overheard arguments about the correct way to fix a canning line without stopping the line or losing a finger. If this was the 1950’s, we’d be fighting for seats at the Burger Pit against IBM and Lockheed engineers, while a bunch of drunken Fairchild engineers argued about the best way to dope germanium. Instead, we avoid getting run down by Nvidia self-driving cars or a Google bus, and fight for space at the bar with senior product managers with pugs on leashes.

Silicon Valley overheating means things are changing. In our neighborhood, we’ve lost a couple former orchard farmhouses that survived surprisingly long in the middle of subdivisions- the triple size lots are too valuable for a 1920s 2 bedroom house. The trendy bar out in the country by Saratoga is getting torn down for executive-level houses. The occasional 1950s strip mall goes post-modern, with a bunch of hipsters at Philz waiting for a bespoke cup of coffee to finish dripping. (Geez, just pour the d*mn coffee already!) If you're a friend of older San Jose - whether the 1920's, the 1970's, or the 1990's - this isn't a bad time to be taking a good look at the old stuff you like before it turns into a new apartment complex.

But progress also means some things are getting reused. Paradiso’s Deli, out by the former Del Monte cannery, looks like it’s been reinvented and reopened. Santa Clara is slowly working to reinvent its downtown. And in the former Salsina cannery building off on Lincoln Ave. in San Jose, redevelopment has cleaned up this underused building in what used to be San Jose's western cannery district and turned it into a bike repair, gallery, and beer hall.

Salsina Cannery, 2019

I've written about this building before. It was built in 1918 as Salsina Packing, a cannery founded by Carlo Aiello and Alfonso Lambroso to make tomato paste for the American market, though they quickly branched out into apricots and peaches. Edith Daley, my favorite San Jose Evening News columnist, visited the cannery in 1919; her story led with the headline "Workers at the Salsina Plant Smile Easily". Edith was impressed by the new and impressive building, the friendly management (William Leet bought ice cream for the entire canning staff on the day of her visit), and its well-ventilated interior - a big deal for the usually-hot cannery. She was also a mite confused by the name, asking for Mr. Salsina before being told that Salsina (tomato paste) was the product, not the producer! Salsina hit challenging times in the post-World War I recession. The company was sold to Virden Packing in 1922 to build William Virden's goals for a fruit-and-meat-packing colossus. Virden Packing, over-extended, failed in 1926 and got broken up, but the building appeared unused for quite a while after that date.

Back side of cannery - much more utilitarian

In 1935, the former cannery building appeared as the home of Saint Claire Brewing Company the first local brewery to open after the end of prohibition. Saint Claire disappeared by 1936, and the building was used for a series of businesses: warehouse space for the San Martin winery, a drayage company, and a good ten or fifteen years as a discount furniture store.

But the neighborhood's changed; the former cannery district is now mostly large apartment complexes. Salsina's well-ventilated cannery became studio and retail spaces a couple years ago.

Working end of the brewery

So here I am, sitting in the same cannery where Edith Daley saw “Billy" Leet buy ice cream for the entire cannery crew back in 1919. It’s now Hapa's Brewing. My chance to sit inside shows it's a stylish building both from a model railroad and canning perspective. Concrete floors for ease of cleaning and storing a seasons worth of tomato paste. The sawtooth roof adds interest from above. Concrete walls on the street side, worn corrugated iron on the railroad side. Huge beams holding up the roof so there’s more space for canning equipment. Light rail rolls by much more often than the "Friendly" SP ever serviced the Los Gatos branch. Today's Saturday afternoon crowd provides the background noise to hint at how active the building sounded at its birth. The Sainte Claire Brewing folks who had the building in 1935 would be pleased that the buildings still a happy provider of alcoholic beverages.

Edith’s pleasant description of the building still holds true - “The plant is sunny, well-ventilated, and a pleasant place in which to work.” Definitely true - the sawtooth roof brings in a surprising amount of light, and open loading doors keep it light and airy in today’s moderate May weather. I wouldn’t mind being stuck here in July. I'm not at all displeased about sitting at the bar today.

Freight door from original cannery

A hundred years ago when Edith visited, she found a San Jose where the cannery mostly had Anglo workers. “There’s a dignified high school professor from San Francisco happily at work on the fruit grader. There are sons and daughters of doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief, and they are making from $20 to $25 per week.” Mrs Addington was forewoman, J. Turner watched the incoming fruit and tomatoes to ensure it met Salsina’s quality. With the demographics she saw, perhaps it’s not surprising that Edith found the “little Italian girl- the most prolific of the bunch” so surprising in Campbell a few weeks before. Even for an Italian-run cannery, Italian immigrants on the line were either not easily identifiable, or not newsworthy to Edith’s eyes.

Fifteen years later when the Sainte Claire Brewing company started making local beer, a good fraction of the groceries in San Jose had Italian names... at least for the markets that wanted to sell local beer from San Jose.

(Side notes about the people Edith met in 1919: Mrs. Ludy Addington, 132 Topeka Ave. in the Burbank neighborhood, was a midwest transplant; her husband, Charles, ran a service station at Race and San Carlos in later years, though he listed his occupation as "oil and gas merchant" in 1920. Charles was a Southern Pacific brakeman in 1913. Jacob Turner, from Ohio, listed his occupation as cannery superintendent in 1920. He lived at 529 N. 19th Street with his wife and eight children. By 1930, he was running his own plumbing business. Running a cannery made one very good at quick plumbing repairs, I expect.)

And once you get to modern days, Salsina’s demographics have changed again. All the nearby apartment buildings means that the place is filled with the local twenty-somethings on a Saturday, maybe working at Splunk in Santana Row packing web log data into attractive canned formats, contracting at Google but angling for a full time role at Facebook, or maybe figuring out ways to profit from supporting the masses coming to make the Santa Clara Valley a productive bread basket of technology. The faces are the usual Silicon Valley mix - some Anglo, some Asian, some Hispanic, highlighting just how varied the Santa Clara Valley is. Like Edith, what I’m seeing doesn’t match the true demographics of Silicon Valley; it’s less Hispanic here than San Jose as a whole. The place also doesn’t look like my co-workers - the collection of chip engineers at work who may have been born in India, but decided long ago that the Santa Clara Valley would be their home. Over in Fremont, they’re replacing the Portuguese Holy Ghost parade with Indian festivals. If you show up at Holi, you might get covered in colored pigment. The stories the immigrants tell are the same - new immigrants risking it all to move to the US, the dangers of starting anew in a land without friends and family, and figuring out how to mix traditions from the old country with their new home.

Billy Leet isn’t serving ice cream in the 21st century, but at least Hapa has a taco truck, helping to keep this century’s puff piece writers well-fed.

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Hapa's Brewing is at 460 Lincoln Ave in San Jose. It's a popular place, so folks other than me must think their IPA is tasty! No food in the restaurant, but they invite food trucks to stop by many days - check their events. Compare the photos from a few years ago to see how nicely the place has been fixed up. After your beer, walk around the neighborhood and check out the former Standard Oil depot at Auzerais and Sunol, and meander along the Los Gatos Creek trail beside the apartments that replaced the Del Monte cannery.

The Hollywood Gas Station, or Robert Breaks His Unbreakable Rule Again

Final model

Robert’s Rule of Making Structures in a 3d Printer is simple: don’t make HO scale buildings with a 3d printer. Buildings aren’t particularly interesting for 3d printing; you don’t need multiple models, the models are too big for the printer, and the buildings usually have plain surfaces that are easier to make in other materials. The prohibition doesn’t hold for details - window or door castings can be used for other projects. Smaller parts that are hard to fabricate might be worth a quick 3d print. But don’t try printing a whole building.

Though even if it’s my rule… that doesn’t mean I won’t try.

The inspiring photo

The Hollywood gas station

Years ago, I’d run across this photo of an early gas station in Los Angeles. It appeared in Larry Harnisch’s “Los Angeles Daily Mirror” history blog; he’d found the photo in a back issue of the Daily Mirror from 1915, showing the filming of a new movie at D.W. Griffith’s Fine Arts Studio. Griffith later filmed his silent masterpiece, Intolerance, and the sets for that movie are visible in the background of the original photo.

But between the crowd scene and the sets for the future movie, there’s this tiny little gas station. It’s the dawn of the auto revolution in Los Angeles, and cars need gasoline. This corner (Hollywood and Sunset) is on the edge of suburbia - the sets for Intolerance over there are being built in a former fig orchard. Photos of the studio behind the photographer show scattered buildings and empty lots. In a few years, this will be a very urban corner. Little gas stations like this would have been scrapped for the huge service stations that would appear in the 1920’s.

One sign of its age is the lack of any gas pumps visible in the photo; it's almost as if the pump machinery was hidden in the posts.

There's little sign of the gas station remaining. The site of this photo was almost certainly 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, right where Sunset and Hollywood Blvd come together. The former movie studio is now a Von's supermarket, and the nearby Monogram Pictures is now a Church of Scientology video studio. The corner does have a small gas station, but the style doesn't match (art deco), plus it's triangular instead of square. I'm guessing our little gas station got torn down when a road was widened... or when newfangled gas pumps couldn't fit in the arch.

For a model railroad, and a model railroad set in the 1930’s, it’s a neat bit of architecture. The building itself is remarkably simple - a fifteen foot square office and similarly sized roofed porch covering the fueling area. There’s a lot of ‘teens era gas stations that appeared to be simple boxes to protect the attendant when he wasn’t checking your oil or putting air in your tires. (What a crazy time!) As a modest gas station, it’s also appropriate for the area down by the railroad tracks - this isn’t a high rent building.

However, unlike those dusty country corner gas stations, the Hollywood gas station dresses itself up by stealing details from every flavor of Spanish Revival it can. The most obvious feature are the silhouetted bell gables on each side, traditionally from Romanesque architecture. The fueling area has looks like the arched porte cocheres seen in any of the stucco spanish revival bungalows getting built out in Westwood. The wooden beams sticking out are vigas, straight from New Mexico and Pueblo Revival architecture. Floor to ceiling windows light the office; I’m guessing there are similar french doors on the front side to enter the office.

Man, I’m really a sucker for Spanish Revival. Show me a Spanish Revival gas station, and I’ll try to build a model of it.

Construction Like all my 3d printed models, I designed this in SketchUp. The model is one piece - walls, bell towers, and port-cochere. I omitted the roof - it’s easy enough to do with sheet styrene or cardboard. The viga beams are styrene, set into sockets in the walls. The posts are hollow to limit the amount of resin needed.

Beyond the issues of architecture, this was an interesting model because it reminded me of the challenges of 3d printing and manufacturing. Getting this model printed involved a chain of challenges; as easy as 3d printing seems, there’s always snags trying to make more than one.

I’d initially sketched up this model after seeing Harnisch’s photo. I’d liked the model and thought it would be a good exercise to practice in SketchUp. That initial model messed up a few angles, making the model have some minor holes in it. When we try to print a 3d model, the slicing software needs to figure out which bits are the inside of the model (where the plastic or resin goes) and which parts are outside. A good 3d model is “watertight” - all the exterior faces touch, there’s no holes that will make the software confuse the inside and outside of the model, and there’s no extraneous faces to make the software question which counts as the exterior surface. Cleaning up the holes in an existing model is always a tedious process as you try to get rid of some incorrect angle or out-of-parallel plane without tearing apart the whole model.

It's a lot like real home improvement, except with more straight lines and flat planes than reality.

The next big challenge was how to print the model. By default, the Form One wants to print models on a support structure. You take your model, choose the face-up direction, and the Form One automatically chooses how to place supports (sprues) to support the first few layers as the surface is built. Support structures are important because it lets us build items that aren’t flat; it also lets us build hollow objects without pressure from the liquid resin pushing walls out. However, support structure require a lot of material - sometimes as much resin as the model, and the bottom of models isn’t always flat.

First attempt

I’d printed an initial version of the gas station on a support structure, but it doubled the amount of resin needed, and I ended up with a not-quite flat base. If I instead printed straight on the build platform - ok for surfaces with a flat bottom large enough to hold the model to the build platform - I could cut resin use and get a flat bottom surface.

So I tried it - I printed one directly on the build platform, but fluid pressure (as the build platform peeled the part away from the tank then put it back against the tank) caused one side to blow out, and the window muntions to break. If I did things the way the manufacturer intended, and wasn't trying to cut corners to save resin and time, I'd have better results, but if I'm concerned about economics, I might try pushing the machine a bit harder than it really can take.

On a second attempt, I gave up and printed again on support structure. The windows again didn’t print perfectly, but I made new windows by drawing white lines on clear plastic using a technical drawing pen.

Failed print

That final model was good enough for me, but if I wanted to sell the models, I’d need to do a lot more work on the process so the models were perfect coming out of the printer. Making these efficiently would also mean cutting the resin needed, and that means limiting the support structure. Finishing On the first model, I used my usual trick of white glue and gesso, stippled onto the model. It dries quickly and adds a lot of texture, but I found the surface much too rough to my eyes. I ended up coating the second model with an acrylic gel with pumice (from Golden Acrylics) which was much more subdued. In both cases, I had to be careful to only coat the stucco surfaces with the fake stucco.

Just like resin building kits, cast structures are great for assembly, but frustrating to paint. My first attempt at the lanterns left black paint everywhere. For the second try, I painted the lanterns orange, then used a very fine tip to color the metal parts black. Similarly, painting the bells, inset into the walls, definitely required a bit of care.

So now, I've got two very cute 1915-era gas stations that mix up way too many architectural styles. They don't quite have a place on the layout, and I don't really need two, but they'll be great reminders not to break "Robert’s Rule of Making Structures in a 3d Printer".

A Model Twenty Years in the Making

Original Rio Grande Oil model, from 2001 or so.

It's amazing how long some projects take to build. Take, for example, this gas station. The original Barnsdall Oil company filling station, located outside of Santa Barbara, showed up in a Model Railroader magazine article back in April 1979. Teenaged-me probably saw the article just as I was getting serious about model railroading (and still reading issues at our public library.) It took me well into the 1990’s before I tried building a model of the gas station myself.

I'm really proud of that model. The cupola, dome, and roofline required some fiddly work. I'm also particularly proud of the beam ends and post detail on the roof over the gas pumps. I still see all my flaws, though. The actual building had alternating blue and white tiles - too hard for me to paint. The dome, carved out of balsa, isn’t very round and I didn’t really get the feel of the multicolor tiles covering it. I also showed the cupola as four-sided, when photos of the actual gas station show height lath-covered openings.

Worst of all, I didn’t bother to reproduce an elaborate set of detailed terra cotta panels along the roofline. The original Model Railroader article highlighted the geometric patterns on the terra cotta, and suggested lines could be carved into plaster applied on the model. I tried a different approach during the original build; one of my junk boxes still has the sample panels made of Fimo clay, hand-scratched with lines approaching the design. The Fimo result was too coarse, so I gave up on the detail and instead just cut out plain styrene to hint at the outline of the panels. I hated the lack of detail, but at least the model was done.

Why Bother With That Detail? Why did I bother to put all that detail into a little plastic model for my layout? Because even though the actual gas station is far away from San Jose, the design is eye-catching and very representative of the 1920’s in California. The gas station's style is called Spanish Colonial Revival. The style had a bunch of origins - interest in Spanish California starting in the 1880s (with publication of the novel Ramona) and hotels in Florida, but the style really exploded after the San Diego Panama-California Exposition used it for all the exhibition buildings. You can still see them in Balboa Park in San Diego. The style dominated Northern and Southern California in the 1920’s and 1930’s, for commercial and residential structures — just like mid-century modern took over thirty years later, or post-modernism changed our shopping malls and houses to brightly-colored stucco in the last 20 years.

Spanish Colonial has several branches, borrowing inspiration and details from the California Missions, classic Spanish architecture, and the architecture of Mexico and other Spanish colonies. Buildings tended to be low to the ground, with simple rectangular shapes, thick stucco walls, and hand-build details - doors with board detail, hand-forged ironwork and lamps, and tile roofs.

But many buildings went one step further - to the Churrigueresque style from Spain. Churrigueresque - definitely not a word you see much - refers to a very decorated and ornamented style often seen in Spain in the 17th century. Churriguesque buildings had facades absolutely covered carved or cast detail. Patterns could be abstract (like Moorish architecture), natural, or include human sculptures, shields, and the like. The Balboa Park exhibition buildings are particularly good examples of the style.

The Barnsdall Oil station, like most Spanish Revival buildings of the time, borrowed from many of these influences. The tile roof, rafter ends, plain stucco walls, and primitive bathroom doors all scream Mission Revival. The alternating-color tiles might be Moorish - or might be just practical. However, the two-story tower is completely twentieth century, built so the station would be visible as a Ford Model A driver accelerated up the hill from Goleta. And all that terra cotta at the roof line? Churriguesque.

This gas station isn’t the only building I know with that kind of detail. Another model I'd love to build is the Borchers Brothers building supply store, located next to the old Market Street station in San Jose. When Borchers built it in 1923, they built a brick building, but borrowed a bunch of Spanish Colonial Revival styles, then topped it off with a large window framed with similar elaborate terra cotta churrigueresque detail. I’ve got a great place for a model of Borchers Brothers, but I never knew how to pull off that window. I suspected 3d printing might help, but all my attempts ended up in the trash.

Inspiration

Rio Grande Gas Station, Goleta (Elwood) Calif.

So fast forward to a few weeks ago. We were driving back from a family trip to Disneyland when I realized we’d be passing that famous gas station, and I managed to convince Dear Wife that we ought to stop to stretch our legs. The gas station's still there along old Highway 101, just west of Goleta. It's boarded up and has obviously been unused for years, but somehow managed to survive. I got quite a thrill spotting all the details I got right - the rafter ends, carved detail in some of the posts. I also saw the elaborate terra cotta panels on the tower. There were bits missing, but the majority of the panels were still there

Detail of terra cotta panels.

The photos in that 1970's Model Railroader article were good, but they didn't really highlight the detail on those panels. Being there in person meant I could see the pattern, and also reminded me just how the tiles were the centerpiece of the whole building. Back home, I realized that my existing model - with flat styrene in place of the panels - really missed what was special about that gas station. Time for me to try again to capture the model.

The Panels The key for reproducing the panels would be getting the basics of the pattern correct. Terra cotta details for a Spanish Revival building can go a bunch of ways. Patterns could be geometric (as in Moorish Revival). Others, like the Borchers Brothers building, have floral patterns - acanthus leaves from Corinthian columns. Looking closely at Barnsdall Oil, I realized most of the patterns were swirls and spirals - volates, as the art historians would call them. Most patterns actually have two spirals going in opposite directions joined by a short segment. Many were paired together, looking like a U or shield.

I tried two approaches. First, I tried avoiding all that nasty 3d drawing, and instead tried to get a line drawing of the art from the photo. My plan was to take the detail as line art, emboss it so that the details stuck up, then 3d print the result. Photoshop and similar photo editing packages have ways to take a photo, square up the image, and adjust contrast enough to highlight the detail. However, I wasn't able to convert the photos into the shapes on the panels.

Instead, I simply started trying to reproduce the curves in the design in SketchUp, the 3d drawing program I use most. Once I spotted the volutes, the drawing process was straightforward. I just needed to build up some of the repeating shapes from multiple spirals, then plop in a few extra to fill in. To be fair, it’s actually more difficult than that - there’s several different spiral shapes and carvings.

SketchUp isn't great for compound curves, but three nights of work gave me a decent first version. I was also able to reproduce that round window, sunk well back in the wall. My original version of the model used a round Grandt Line window set just behind the wall - decent, but not faking deep adobe walls like the real gas station faked.

3d Printed Terra cotta panels, O scale

Once I had a 3d design drawn out, I 3d printed a set on the Form One printer, test-fit them to my model, and found I'd misjudged the dimensions of the tower. I stretched the design, printed again, and got some decent versions. Finally, I took a deep breath, picked up my original model, and pulled off that plain styrene sheet trim, cursing how well I'd glued it on the whole time. I even had to break out the Dremel to grind off some particularly well adhered bits. A bit of superglue attached the new, detailed panels. I repaired the stucco with the same technique I'd used originally - a mix of white glue and gesso. The combination dries really quickly, so I brushed it on then stippled it with a brush so it would have a stucco-like finish. A fresh coat of white paint (gesso) made the new stucco match the old.

I also printed a full set of panels for an O scale model, just in case I want to build another model of this gas station from scratch. Being able to scale up the part and print it for a different scale is easy to do with a 3d printer, but impossible with any of the 1970's approaches to making the gas station.

The Finished Model

Original model with new terra cotta panels.

Here's photos of the gas station with its new detail. There's still some incorrect details - the terra cotta "point" isn't quite the right shape, and the pattern isn't a precise match to the actual gas station. Still, I'm really pleased with how the extra work came out. I'm more pleased that 3d printing helped me solve a problem I couldn't fix twenty years ago.

When Canneries Attack!

Buildings on model railroads often tend towards the offbeat and eye-catching. I might complain that many models aren't... well, boring and utilitarian... enough, but that doesn't mean the wacky buildings don't exist, and that they should be avoided. I just don't want every building on the model railroad to be the work of a crazed architect or builder.

Here's one wacky building example I particularly like: canneries devouring houses. This first photo is from the Salsina cannery at Lincoln Ave and Auzerais in San Jose. The original building was built in 1917 or so for a new tomato paste producer, with thick concrete walls and a sawtoothed roof for better interior lighting. That cannery must have been hungry, for a later addition swallowed up a small two story house that had been on the property.

I went inside the cannery a couple years ago when it was still occupied by a discount furniture outlet. The main factory floor was packed with dinettes, end tables, and bar stools. Behind the furniture on the back wall, I could see the outline of a cute two story house peeking into the building. They'd repurposed it as the business's office, so it still looked like a separate building, swallowed up by its neighbor.

Now, canneries eating houses might seem odd, except that I've found other cases of it. Here's a photo of Del Monte Plant #3, just a couple blocks away, swallowing up what I suspect was the superintendent's house.

Now, canneries swallowing up houses probably isn't that common, but these photos hint that canneries, with enough growth in volume and too little land for expansion, are likely to use every bit of land they can. If an accessory building happens to get in the way, it's not going to be free-standing for long.

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Photos of Salsina Canning taken by me earlier this year. Photo of Plant #3 from a John C. Gordon panoramic photo of the San Carlos St. bridge add Del Monte plant, taken around 1932. Original photo in the San Jose State University Special Collections.

Market Street Station: The Pride of San Jose

"Southern Pacific Market Street station" float. Courtesy History San Jose.

Whenever I talk about the battles and intrigue involved with Southern Pacific's bypass around downtown San Jose in the 1930's, it's usually from the point of view of the critics. The SP's first routing went a bit too close to the new homes in Palm Haven, causing that new suburb to rise up in arms. They got their neighbors to agree with them, prompting the Willow Glen neighborhood to rise up and incorporate as its own city in 1927.

Thanks to some lost court battles and additional re-routing, the new line was finally built in the 1930's, and the old Market Street train station closed down on December 30, 1935. If they hadn't succeeded, we'd still be having trains running down Fourth Street right in front of San Jose State.

Old newspaper articles hint at the disdain for the old railroad station on Market Street, describing it as old, sooty, murky, smoky roundhouse. The above photo, though, highlights how old-fashioned some folks thought the old station was. They also apparently believed the depot would never be replaced, and we'd be stuck with the murky old station until its hundredth anniversary in 1986.

There's some obvious inaccuracies in the float's version of the station. From the floor plan I've seen, only the men's bathroom entrance was on the exterior; the "modern" women's restroom was reachable from the women's waiting room. The single waiting room door isn't correct either. The main public area, according to a 1910 floor plan was divided into a "men's" and "women's" waiting rooms, with the ticket seller's area separating the two. The sack nailed on the wall suggests that SP's trash bins were a bit primitive. I don't know if the half-moon cutouts were prototypical, but for safety, I'll add them to my model.

Or perhaps I should just park an HO model of the float out in front of my station?

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Thanks to History San Jose for permission to republish the photo.

Don't Trust Robert's Advice on 3D Printed Buildings

In the past, I've declared that 3d printing isn't great for buildings. Most buildings are easy to make using sheet styrene or sheet wood - I can probably build them faster than I could draw them on the computer. I only need one copy of a particular building, so the ability to print multiple copies isn't so interesting. Buildings tend to be large; they're either slow to print, or won't fit at all in the 3d printer. I'll admit I've used the 3d printer to make details (such as the architectural details for the Market Street station, or the freight doors I borrowed from the Guggenhime packing house. But buildings? Not worth the trouble.

Well, actually, sometimes the 3d printer can help with buildings, and two recent projects highlight when the printer might come in handy.

J. S. Roberts and clerestory windows Early 20th century buildings often used clerestory windows - raised sections of roof with small windows - as a way to bring light into the center of a building. We usually think of this with sawtooth roof factories, but you'd also see this in frame structures. The J. S. Roberts packing house off San Carlos Street got light into the fruit sorting area on the third floor with a raised roof and some small windows, all above the barn-like building's normal roof line.

J.S. Roberts clerestory windows

Clerestory windows like this are a pain to scratchbuild. There's not a lot of good, tiny window castings if you're trying to model a strip of two foot high windows. Because the clerestory roof is often only raised a couple feet, building the walls around the window can be difficult. If the clerestory is on a peaked roof, then I've also got to cut the ends to match the roof slope precisely. The last time I did a model like this, I used some 3d printed blocks to form the clerestory section, but still had to cut the lapped siding sheet to fit. For that model (the Earl Fruit Company packing house on Ryland St.), I wasn't completely happy with the overall clerestory look (too few windows, clerestory section too tall), but I decided it would do.

When I completed the main section of the J.S. Roberts packing house, I knew I needed to make another clerestory roof to finish the project. However, the 1930's photos I'd seen showed a very short space between the two roofs. I couldn't think of any commercial windows that would work, and I knew the whole assembly would be tedious to build.

Clerestory 3d model

Roof and access hatch

Instead, I cheated - I sketched the whole clerestory roof - siding, windows and all - as a single piece. I didn't have to worry about cutting the angles against the roof (as long as I measured the angle correctly.) I could size the windows to exactly match the space. I did have to draw out the location of *every single board* for the siding - tedious, but doable on this relatively small model. The result was too big for the printer, so I split it in two, printed two copies, and glued the pieces together to make a completed clerestory assembly. After painting and attaching corrugated siding for a roof, I was done. The windows, although solid, got some black gloss paint to make it look like there really was glass in those panes. The result was just right - a roofline that matches the prototype and I didnt have to cut any fussy angles.

In fact, I was happy enough with the result that I did another 3d print for the access hatch on the roof. Again, by 3d printing it, I didn't have to worry about cutting the correct angle into plastic siding, and didn't have to worry about fabricating a tiny box perfectly square.

Campbell passenger shelter for the Peninsular Railway

The Sourisseau Academy, one of the local history organizations in San Jose, posted a picture recently of downtown Campbell in the 1920's. The photo, showing the area around the railroad tracks and Campbell Ave., reminded me that the former Peninsular Railway, an interurban line, used to go from downtown San Jose to downtown Los Gatos via Campbell. The tracks cut through the new suburbs of Willow Glen and turned here and there through orchards. Just before the tracks reached downtown Cambpbell, they curved off Campbell Ave. and onto Railway Ave to pass next to the old S.P. depot. The Sourisseau's photo shows Campbell Ave. at Railway Ave. - the curve of the interurban tracks, the overgrown mess of the SP's former garden at the intersection, and a small passenger shelter at the intersection which must have been handy both in the rain and on really hot days in summer. (The photo is visible in the Sourisseau February 2015 video, showing the interurban tracks turning south onto Railway Ave.)

Now, the passenger shelter wasn't much - a bench for a couple people, simple siding, and some minor architectural details to please the town burghers. It's also exactly the sort of model that's easy to make in styrene with a couple hours work. I was still curious whether I could make one in 3d, and did some quick sketches.

Applying the siding was the annoying part; rather than just pulling some lapped siding sheet out of a drawer, I had to draw each board: correct spacing, correct overlap at the bottom, etc. The rest was pretty trivial, with the hardest part being the choice of how to print the model. (I chose to print it upside down, with the roof having the bad surface where the model attached to the 3d printer.) Some filing, and some Campbell shingles completed the model. It's not much, but it showed me that I could create small structures quickly. More importantly, I got to play around a bit with the design and experiment with the decorative eave ends. For my layout, 3d printing the shelter is a bit of overkill, but if I needed three or four, it might have been a suitable project for 3d printing.

I still think 3d printing isn't particularly useful for 3d structure models, but these two projects reminded me that 3d printing could still be handy either for work that would be challenging to do by hand, or where I wanted to experiment with details or shapes.

Everything's On the Internet These Days: Tracking Down the Lick Mill Mystery Industry

[Just found this half-written article hidden in my Blogger account. It's a year late, but worth sharing.]

Last year, I posted a link to the Dome of Foam’s wx4 Whatzit? Contest where E.O. Gibson posted some photos of some strange tanks behind the Lick Mansion in Santa Clara. (Go take a close look at the photos before proceeding; the research hints will make more sense.)

wx4 Whatzit? Contest Photo

E.O apparently has multiple winners, for at least two good answers got sent by Bill Foley (who posts all the videos on Youtube for the Society of California Pioneers) and me. Now, the interesting about the search is that we both did our research in different ways. How we did the searches might be useful for anyone considering a future in the lucrative business of historic-web-blogging. Most importantly, the research really shows how much information's out there on the Internet... if you just know the right way to look for it.

Robert’s Approach When I started on E.O.'s challenge, I started from recent days and went backwards. All the piping in E.O.'s photo - especially the insulated pipes and strange machinery - suggested oil refinery or chemical process to me, so I started by checking recent (1960's) phone directories on ancestry.com for chemical companies in Santa Clara in the right area. No luck. I used Historic Aerials to try to track down a street address, and figured out the address of the plant was off Montague Expressway… but still no matches appeared.

Finally, I decided that if there’s one thing true of every chemical plant in the Santa Clara Valley, it’s that the place probably leaked chemicals in the groundwater, and they probably got caught. That means there’s bound to be a record of the cleanup, whether as a federal government superfund cleanup site, or as a local one. So, I started searching on “superfund santa clara”, “groundwater link mill”, and got my first clue: a reference in the EPA Superfund database mentioned groundwater contamination from “International Minerals and Chemicals, solvent distributor”, but provided no other details other than that the case was handled completely by the state of California. It did describe the site as “Mansion Grove” which turned out to be a key search term to use.

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Now, I’d assumed from E.O.’s initial posting that the chemical plant was near, but not part of the Lick Mansion site. The Mansion Grove name turned out to be linked to the Lick Mansion, and encouraged me to learn more about the mansion itself. I finally checked Wikipedia and find that the Lick Mansion had been used for more than just paper making: “An 1882 fire destroyed the mill and in 1902 the Lick Mill complex was converted to the manufacture of alcohol. A series of owners, including Union Distilling, Western Grain and Sugar Products, Western Carbonic Gas, American Salt and Chemical, and Commercial Solvents and Chemical, manufactured a wide variety of products at this location.” (The quoted text sounded a little stilted, and a search on the exact words confirmed it had been cribbed from the Library of Congress’s Historic Architectural and Engineering Survey. HAES had done a survey, photos, and drawings of the plant in the 1970's, and so plans for the Lick Mill site are actually available online.

The reference to Commercial Solvents and Chemicals gave me another term to search for, and I found that company had invented processes for acetone and butanol, and was bought by IMC in 1975.

Finally, I found the details of the contamination at the site (now covered with apartments). The five year report declares that the site was used for solvent and alcohol production and recovery. So all that piping and distilling equipment makes sense - they were creating, distilling, and recovering alcohol and other solvents.

So, to recap: the piping suggested chemicals, but no chemical companies were listed in contemporary phone directories. After reaching a dead end, I started searching again looking for material that would get into permanent records: groundwater contamination reports and legal proceedings, and found both the name of the last owner as well as a report on the site. Wikipedia and the Library of Congress Historic Architectural and Engineering Survey then turned up nice summaries to help me track the property back.

Bill’s Approach Bill started from the other end - he had access to a good online source of old newspapers and local history books, so he started by searching for Lick Mill and turned up a distillery (the Lick Distillery) and a co-located chemical company.

“Lick Mill Chemical Company was hiring workers and a few laborers (blacksmiths and pipe-fitters) in May of 1918, (and a few laborers).  the factory seems to have taken the place of the paper and flour mills, and  used some of the buildings that didn't burn when the flour mill did in 1880.  Lick's buildings were supposed to be over-engineered, and Arbuckle's History of San Jose (p1390 claims that it cost $380,000 to build, and that "a former piano maker and artificer in woods, Lick adorned and finished his main structures with imported hardwoods.  His skill with these materials won for his mill the sobriquet "James Lick's Mahogany-Wainscoted Mill."

“The property also may have been shared by the Lick Distillery (initially known as the Union Distillery Company), which was in operation from 1902 through at least 1918, though an article at the latter date states that it could not handle pulp and had no tanks at the time.

The distillery made alcohol from sugar beet molasses.  Not too much of a stretch to say that prohibition may have curtailed those activities and made the chemical side of business more lucrative.  the distillery itself, however, was supposed to be making $100,000 right off the bat (article included).”

It also turns out that there are folks interested in distilleries, so someone’s recorded legal warehouse records for the Lick distillery. An old newspaper also noted that the distillery operated on waste material from sugar production (probably sugar beets). The San Jose Mercury News also included additional tidbits about the plant, noting “two cars of molasses arrived at the Lick Distillery yesterday”, helping us model railroaders understand both the loads arriving at the plant and the number of cars it received.

Interestingly, they weren't the only ones working with the waste product from the sugar refineries; the Stauffer Chemical on South First Street used sugar beets to produce Accent flavor enhancer (MSG). I made a joke to a former GE San Jose plant worker about headaches from MSG fumes, and she surprisingly confirmed that the Accent plant did put out not-quite-pleasant fumes that were detectable by the GE Nuclear workers.

Bill also checked some local museums, and found that the property flooded many times, including in 1902, 1903, 1907, 1938, and 1940. He even found photos of flood damage. One of the photos showed the tall smokestack used at the plant. Local history books also helped; Phylis Butler's "The Valley of Santa Clara" (1975) says that "for more than 50 years, it (the former distillery) has been the headquarters for a variety of chemical companies". Bill also went to Historic Aerials and noted that the plant had been leveled around 1986. He also found articles in the Mercury News in the mid-1980’s about plans to turn the site into a park. That didn’t happen; like much of that part of the Valley, it’s all a sea of apartments now.

"The property was leveled in about 1986, as you can see in Historic Aerials. San Jose Mercury News articles from 1987 indicate that a failed attempt was made to preserve the whole site as a park, but it was instead developed as apartments.  During construction, remains of an Ohlone barbecue site with charred elk bones was found.”

So to recap Bill’s approach: he started by searching on the initial connection - the Lick Mill, then moved forward in time looking for alternate company names. He then dived through the other sources he had - local history books, newspapers, and some friends who’d worked in the area to fill out remaining details.

Your Turn And so that’s how we tracked down the solution to the wx4 Whatzit? Contest. If you’ve done your own historic research (whether for model railroading or for general history), much of this might seem very familiar. Some of the tricks here would probably work for you:

• search with keywords related to the parts of the history that would end up in legal or newspaper records
• search both from the modern day back and early days forward
• when all else fails, try out wild-ass guesses like the chemical plant searches.

SP Concrete Telephone Booths: The Results

I decided against redoing the design of the telephone booths - the existing models were quite good enough for my layout. Even the ones where the individual flat faces were visible weren't that bad. And, thanks to 3d printing, I've also got around 15 telephone booths finished and painted when I only needed... oh, maybe two. So, no work on a better door, no improvements to hinges. But I've got finished models. One's already in at the far end of the Glenwood siding and looks great!

SP modelers, expect me to be handing out phone booths as party favors for the next couple months.

3d Printing: Not for the Claustrophobic

When I was a kid, I loved exploring - climbing the big cypress near our house and finding paths to the top, or figuring out ways to reach the roof of our house. I even crawled under our house a couple times, and only once because my dad needed help getting the TV antenna wire under the house. That kind of fun stuff isn't just for kids. I remember when my aunt first started using a computer, she was playing a 3d game and managed to get into a place that was *just outside* the virtual world. Suddenly, she was seeing the back side of all the scenery and models, and could see how the scenery is constructed.

I'm getting to do that crawling around and exploring with 3d modeling too. SketchUp, my favorite tool for 3d modeling, started as an architectural sketching tool. Although it can do three-dee models, one weakness is that it doesn't always make perfect models suitable for printing. Most 3d printers expect the model to be watertight: no holes in the faces making up the model, or gaps between faces. Most 3d printers also expect that there's no hidden faces embedded inside the model. These two requirements are needed so the various algorithms for figuring out the 3d shape can figure out what counts as inside the model, and what counts as outside. One of the simplest ways to determine inside/outside is to draw a line through the model, and count the walls you encounter. If you find an odd number, then your end point is inside the model; even, and you're outside. Extra faces and holes mean the software loses track of the model shape, and you end up with a model with either odd faces, or even odder parts missing. SketchUp doesn't enforce either of those rules, and while there's software to check and fix models for you, it's a pain to have to use the external tools to do a sanity check after each bit of creative drawing.

That means my three-d modeling habit involves a lot of what I did as a kid: crawling around in strange places looking for signs of extra faces that should have been deleted. The picture at the top shows the 3d model of the telephone booth model in SketchUp. I've deleted the faces making up the bottom surface of the model, but you can see the outer wall, the hollow inner surface (light gray), as well as all the inner surfaces marking the limits of where the printing material goes (in light blue). On the left is the reverse image of the doorway; the four cylinders sticking out are actually the ventilation holes on the right side of the model. Although the original model only took about 90 minutes to draw, probably half that time was trying to fix faces that were either on the hollow inside, or were incorrect faces on the inside of the model.

So if you ask me what 3d printing means to me, it means an awful lot of crawling around in confined spaces. Good thing I'm not claustrophobic.

SP Concrete Telephone Booths

Here's the result of that laser light show - a lot of Southern Pacific concrete telephone booths. These were placed out at the ends of sidings out in the boonies, and gave the crews a way to contact the dispatcher in the days before radio.

These are great models for 3d printing - they're small, geometrically simple, annoying to scratch build, and rare enough so they're unlikely to be at the hobby shop. (To be fair, there are two manufacturers making the more modern versions of these, so I'm exaggerating a bit... but you get the idea - little, railroad specific details like this are perfect for 3d printing.) I'm not even the first one printing these; someone's selling 3d-printed N scale models on the Shapeways site. Building the 3d model in SketchUp took probably an hour and a half, and I was looking at finished models later that evening. There are even plans and drawings available in the Common Standard Plans books.

3d printing really comes into its own when you need a bunch of these. As the video showed, printing twelve of these wasn't a stretch. The first run had one obvious problem - SketchUp, because it's intended for architectural models, draws curves surfaces as a set of flat facets. By default, it uses 24 faces for a cylinder, or six faces for a 90 degree turn. On the first models, I could see the pattern on the model. Redoing the model with 48 faces/cylinder appears to make surface look perfectly curved. (Hint: when drawing a circle, type "48s" in the text box at the bottom of the window to change a circle to 48 sides.) Even with that problem, the models came out awfully nice, with the doors crisp, and some added coarse detail for hinges, latch, and handle all being visible under the magnifying glass. The models did get the characteristic vent holes in the door, though it's hard to see on the model. Although the upper panel in the door looks solid, it's glass in the real model. Rather than create an opening, I'm planning to paint the panel gloss black to look like glass.

And so now I've got something like 24 telephone booths, when I need maybe four on my layout.

I printed these telephone booths upside down. Because I print the model hollow, printing it from the bottom up would have trapped resin in the body; printing upside down gives the resin a chance to escape. The photo shows the support structure added by the 3d printer to handle the uneven surface; I cut off the support with diagonal cutters and finish with an x-acto knife and file.

Even though I've got twenty-four phone booths, they're not quite right. The second version got rid of the stair-step pattern and made the door more obvious, having it stick out two inches instead of one for better definition. Looking at real photos also shows some problems. This photo, for example, shows strap hinges. It's also obvious that the door's set back into the concrete cylinder. That little detail would be worth adding, but doing so would add the challenge of trying to highlight the separation between the door and the frame. That's the sort of decision that folks worry about in mass-production: what do you need to do to make the detail stand out, or make it easy to paint the model, or make it easy to build? (Think of the exaggerated detail of hood doors on diesel locomotives.) While setting the door and frame into the cylinder is realistic, I'd need to add a line between door and frame that'll need to be out of scale.

I also have to figure out how to finish them appropriately. I'm suspecting I'll be giving these out as party favors for a while, so figuring out to mass-paint a bunch of these would be a big win. I'm out of my normal concrete-gray spray can, so I'll show some painted models after my next trip to the hobby shop. I'm also starting to run out of my favorite Polly-S colors now that Testors stopped making the railroad colors, so I suspect I'll be in the market for new railroad paints soon.

Coming soon: the 3d flat cars are still going; I've tweaked the designs a couple times to match photos, and I've painted and decaled one. Because I had very few spare sets of decals with 1930's weights and dimensions, that decaling was painfully fiddly. Because I know I'm going to print at least 6 or 7 flatcars, I'm hoping to custom-print decals to make the job go faster. More news later...