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This year, as in previous years, TSG Multimedia handled simulcasting the show to remote participants, and shared the video on YouTube. If you're curious what sort of talks happen at a meet, check it out!
(Or view on YouTube.)
Monday, February 13, 2023
Bay Area PCR Layout Design and Operations Meet: Full video
Every year, the Bay Area has a model railroad meet dedicated to model railroad layout design and operations. As I've said many times, this is my favorite event. It's got a mix of interesting talks, layout tours, and chances for folks to participate in operating sessions on local layouts.
Movie Night XXIX: The Santa Cruz Mountains Come Down
Winter was a hard time for the railroads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The region can get a lot of rain, often at biblical levels. The area's unstable geology also ensures that the mountains really want to get to the beach as soon as possible. Every season will have some mudslides, washed away roads, and hillsides moving in ways that hillsides aren't supposed to move. However, in the bad years - the year of the Santa Cruz line's closure in 1940, the winter of 1982, and several other instances - the Santa Cruz Mountains won't get back to normal for months... if ever.
This winter has been a wet winter - worse than most, but luckily not quite to the level of 1982 or 1940. The recent fires in the Santa Cruz Mountains don't help for ground or tree cover though. As a reminder of how bad this winter was, and how much the Santa Cruz Mountains don't want to continue being mountains, we can look at this "Tour de Disaster video by Larry Rairden. Larry biked around the Santa Cruz Mountains last month to check out the damage, and his photos and videos highlight last year's damage and hint at why the Los Gatos-Santa Cruz branch of the SP isn't around any more.
When you're watched that, check out this video from a PG&E lineman watching a full sized redwood tree and hillside moving in ways neither should move.
Read more about Larry's adventures in the San Jose Mercury News's article about his adventures.
Saturday, January 14, 2023
Tech Bros and Orchards
If you’ve been in the San Francisco or Silicon Valley area in the last several years, you’ve seen long chains of large, unmarked buses during rush hour on our local freeways. These buses are the private buses for tech companies. Many of the large employers provide these buses as a way for their workers to commute. They’re especially important for convincing younger employees who want to live in San Francisco to come down to suburban office parks in the Santa Clara Valley. Facebook, Apple, Genentech, Salesforce, and others effectively run their own regional bus lines. The official term is usually “corporate shuttle”, but folks generically refer to these as “Google Buses” for the first company to run the buses.
Tech workers board a shuttle bus in San Francisco. From KQED article.
The “Google buses” are an interesting operation. They provide a way to get employees into offices that might be hard to reach because of the region's notoriously bad traffic congestion, allows the companies to fill the offices beyond what the parking lots or local roads can handle, and gives employees a nicer commute experience by giving them a way to work during the commute, minimize transfers, and be able to have confidential conversations without a competitor’s employee overhearing.
The buses are also a band-aid on Silicon Valley’s suburban growth. Because many of the tech campuses were built in former industrial areas far away from existing public transportation, the buses let employers use older buildings rather than fighting to develop large campuses near existing Caltrain, light rail, or BART, and allows them to recruit employees living in suburban areas that don’t have easy access to existing public transportation. The buses also cause conflicts in neighborhoods. Residents get frustrated by the large buses on previously-quiet streets, the buses often block traffic and city buses when waiting to start a route, and there have been many reports of rents going up in San Francisco neighborhoods when a corporate shuttle route arrives. Although there's less buses around post-pandemic, the corporate shuttles are still running.
Even though the corporate shuttles are much different than your typical city bus, the problems faced by corporate shuttles are the same problems faced by public transit providers. The companies need to create departments to decide on routes, negotiate for potential stops with parking, hire contractors to operate the bus, and negotiate with the cities when they complain about the new traffic. Employees get unhappy with route changes if a particular site refuses to keep providing parking and a bus stop, complain about the infrequent runs, and yell loudly when the Internet connection on the bus isn’t perfect when crossing a mountain range. Riding the buses can teach riders a lot about running a rapid transit service - factoring in the time between arrival at the destination and time needed to get back to the start for the next run, planning capacity and driver hours when most riders want only one or two preferred times, and noticing how most of the time for the route was spent on the surfaces streets before and after the freeway miles. The corporate shuttles also need to plan for disaster - handling broken-down buses, or re-routing buses. Google's bus system melted down one Friday when a concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater clogged traffic so much that the Google buses from the first campus stop couldn’t reach the rest of campus.
It’s hard not to see the buses around here during commute hours. You’ll see the white, silver, blue, and black buses on the carpool lanes, dashing around the streets near the offices, and clustered in parking lots during the day as they wait for the trips home. The buses started out as smaller 24 seat buses back in 2005 or so, but by 2010 most of the company was using full-size (and sometime double-deck) bus coaches. Back in 2012, some San Franciscans got curious about the big white buses going down their neighborhood streets, and started mapping the buses. They ended up drawing an unauthorized route map of the buses used by the different companies.
I spent several years working for one of those Silicon Valley tech companies with a corporate shuttle system, and most of my commutes to and from work was on a “Google Bus”. For the bus spotters among you, most of the routes I was on had the 2012-vintage Van Hool buses that a certain tech company had made to order, mostly single level but I occasionally was on routes served by the double-deck buses. Other routes and companies used the Prevost or even the Turkish-made Temsa. (All three companies are European; I’m sad that the Bay Area’s own Gillig never got into the Google bus business.) When my parents came to a “Bring your parents to work” event one year, they got to tool around between my company’s buildings on one of those same Google buses that I rode every day.
But, of course, I model the 1930’s, so a 2010-era bus carrying tech bros to former orchards and truck farm land in Mountain View isn’t quite my setting.
I’d known there were folks making model buses, but I didn’t know there were folks making accurate modern buses until YouTuber Interurban Era showed off one of Iconic Replica’s 1960’s era Flxable bus in Alameda County’s own A/C Transit colors. I’d seen these buses whenever we went to visit grandparents, so the models caught my interest. “I wonder if they have more modern buses?”
Yup. Iconic Replicas made models of Prevost coaches in HO in a variety of paint schemes, as well as the two level Van Hool buses. The buses aren’t perfect for a rivet counter; the single-level coaches lack the second exit door halfway down the sides seen on most corporate shuttles, and the models mostly tend to be available in eye-catching paint schemes. It looks like the company has made white buses occasionally, but they’re collectible and rare. They certainly haven't done the other colors often seen on Facebook and Apple shuttles.
Once I saw the models, I knew the layout needed some Google buses, regardless of how anachronistic they are.
I managed to find a pair of these models - the Prevost model in a Greyhound paint scheme, and a double-deck in a bright green “Tornado” paint scheme, and decided I’d try to convert these to Google buses.
The first challenge was disassembling. For the single-level model, there were screws on the bottom, and the clear plastic used for windows hinted that the model was actually a lower metal chassis with the upper half printed onto clear plastic. Unscrewing the screws wasn’t enough; it required a little bit of force to pull the two halves apart. The disassembled photo shows the latches holding the clear window section into the body.
Next challenge: how would I paint these? I tried several ways to remove the paint (alcohol, paint thinner, Dio-sol) and none moved any of the factory paint. I considered getting some real paint stripper and “doing the job right”, but decided this was a silly enough project that perfection wasn’t essential. I ended up masking both the chassis and windows carefully, primed with Tamiya primer, and painted with a gloss white from a Testor’s rattle can.
The final step was detailing. Most of the Google buses you see are stark white with a small reporting marks on the right side near the front door. (One common is "WEDRIVEU", referring to the contractor operating many of the buses.) I'd thought of pulling out the inkjet printer decal paper to make some custom, tiny decals, but decided anything I'd print wouldn't be readable. Instead, I grabbed some random text from a sheet of freight car info decals. Some black plastic parts (cargo hatches) break the monotony. I ended up dotting black paint on the model as appropriate, put some orange dots on the running lights I’d painted over, and called it a day. My spray can paint job didn’t hit the nose of the bus, so there’s still a Greyhound logo if you look carefully. I also couldn’t figure out how to strip the paint on the clear plastic, so my bus is going to “NEW YORK NY” instead of the more appropriate and cryptic “MPK” (Facebook) or “MTV” (Google). That's going to be a long commute from Campbell!
My Google Bus isn't my best modeling, but it was a fun project over Christmas. It's also reflects nicely on how Silicon Valley's changed from the 1930's to modern day, and highlights one of the iconic scenes seen in modern day Silicon Valley. I've still got a double-deck bus to do, but need to figure out how to strip the paint off the clear plastic safely first.
I’ll be interested to see whether I’ve modeled a Santa Clara valley detail which is just a reminder of the busy 2010’s, or a sight that future kids will immediately recognize. Although the corporate shuttles have returned to the Silicon Valley, they’re not to the volume of Before Times. Most of the tech companies are having trouble getting employees away from working-from-home and back into the crowded offices. There have also been plans to move tech offices closer to traditional public transportation. Former shopping centers near Sunnyvale’s train station were torn down and converted to office towers for tech companies. Facebook put in considerable effort to help rebuild the Dumbarton railroad bridge from Redwood City to Newark. They’d hoped the line could bring employees from San Francisco straight to their offices via the existing Caltrain line, or bring employees from Pleasanton, Newark, and Fremont across the bay. Google has been working actively on their Downton West plan for West San Jose, buying up properties and preparing for several blocks of offices near the Caltrain station. If I was redoing my layout to model 2020, I’d need to put in some Google office towers. All those projects could allow employees to use existing public transit, and make the Google Buses disappear just like the orchards did.
Got suggestion on how to strip the paint off Iconic Replicas models? Add a note in the comments!
Sunday, January 1, 2023
Bay Area Layout Design and Operations Meet: February 3-5, 2023
Get more information at www.bayldops.com. You must get tickets in advance at EventBrite. In-person tickets include a boxed lunch. Virtual tickets give you access to watch the presentations and ask questions via a Zoom video conference. In-person tickets also include the Zoom link in case you decide not to go up to Richmond.
I'm planning to have the Vasona Branch open for a Sunday operating session, so if you're interested in visiting and joining in, sign up for the meet and put the Vasona Branch down as one of your choices for an ops session!
Hope to see you there!
Monday, July 5, 2021
Visiting the Vasona Branch: NMRA 2021 "Rails By the Bay"
Virtual visitors for the NMRA 2021 “Rails by the Bay”: Welcome to the Vasona Branch!
Thanks to the challenges of organizing a national convention during a pandemic, the National Model Railroad Association’s annual in-person convention in Santa Clara was cancelled. However, the local Pacific Coast Region has arranged an all-virtual convention, Rails By the Bay" this week, July 6-10, 2021. Sign up to attend (just $49!), watch presentations, ask questions of the presenters, hang out in the meeting rooms, and continue to watch clinics until August 7.
The Vasona Branch layout is one of the layouts on the “virtual tour”. For all you virtual visitors, here’s a quick good-parts summary of the layout. If you've got questions, ask in the comments below!
Check out the NMRA Magazine's November 2020 issue for a summary of the layout. (More on prep for the article and Dan and Doug's photographs of the layout.)
Layout plans: Lower deck, Upper deck.
Watch videos of the layout:
- (video) Time lapse of an operating session on the Vasona Branch.
- (video) Building the Wrights Bridge scene. (Read more on the bridge project.)
- (video) Alma to Wrights in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
I’ve also written lots on the history of the real branch on my Vasona Branch blog. Some sample articles include:
- (article) Sunsweet Plant #1 in Campbell
- (article) How much would you pay for this fine cannery?
- (article) The Tomato Paste Land Rush
I’ve used 3d printers to make lots of freight cars and passenger cars for the layout:
- (slides) Mass Producing Freight Cars at Home. Slides from presentation at 2017 PCR convention in Bakersfield.
- (article) 3d Printing Hart Convertible Gondolas
- (video) Flat car models using the Form One printer
- (article>3d Printing a Crowd of Passenger Cars: Harriman 60-C-1 cars
- (video) 3d Printer in Operation
- (article) 3d Printing Layout Details
The Vasona Branch models the real crossing with the Western Pacific Railroad, and uses a real interlocking machine from Australia’s Modratec to control the crossing.
- (video) Building a Modratec Interlocking Machine for West San Jose
- (video) Operating the interlocking machine on the layout
- (slides) Vasona Branch: What Went Right, What Went Wrong?. Slides from presentation at 2010 Bay Area Layout Design and Operations meet.
- (article) Photos of operations at the 2012 ProRail event
- (article) Experimenting with train orders on a small layout.
Monday, February 15, 2021
A Life of Railroads
Bill Bowdidge
My father, Bill Bowdidge, died a few months ago.
When my grandfather died, my father stood up at the funeral, remarked that most people there had only seem small aspects of my grandfather’s life, and proceeded to just share the full story of my grandfather - tragedy, immigration, family, work, garden - to assembled friends and family. I remember sitting in the audience and being aware that some day I’d have to do the same.
I wasn’t able to give that eulogy for my father. COVID restrictions, elderly friends avoiding groups, and a majority of friends who have already passed away meant that we didn’t hold a funeral service for my father, and I wasn’t going to have the opportunity to share about my father’s life.
There’s a lot of ways I could tell his story outside of a funeral - share stories of his career with friends and co-workers, recount family stories, ask friends for hiking stories. This venue, though, might appreciate the important fact is that my father was a railroader. He worked for the Western Pacific when U.S. railroads were connected to every American business. He was a model railroader. He helped me catch the same bug, getting me interested in railroads, model building, electronics, and computers. If there’s a true story most suitable for this blog, my father’s story story is it.
The Bay Area, Orchards, and Canneries
My father was born in the Bay Area, child of a British immigrant and a rule-breaking Irish girl from San Francisco. My grandfather had emigrated from England to New Zealand in the 1920’s, and kept going ‘round the world. He ended up in California, met my grandmother, overstayed his visa, left, returned, and settled down for good in the San Francisco Bay area where he spent his career as a newspaper printer. My father grew up in San Leandro, playing around former orchards as suburbia invaded. My father had been interested in trains from the early days; British relatives got him hooked on trains by sending railway books from the UK and teaching him about the Flying Scotsman, the Great Western Railroad, and remote branch lines. Like many young boys growing up in the 30’s and 40’s, Lionel trains were the best toys to receive. To give him a place to set them up, my grandfather bought some recycled lumber left over from the 1939 Treasure Island World’s Fair and extended the garden shed to make a train room. My father eventually moved on to HO; I’ve got his Varney F7, custom painted and lettered for the Western Pacific.
His grandfather, on the ferry boat.
His grandfather was a ferry captain on San Francisco Bay, sailing auto ferries for the Southern Pacific Golden Gate ferry company. Occasionally, my grandmother would take my father over to San Francisco, and they’d try to time it to be on one of Grandpa’s vessels. My father remembered trips down to the engine room with the noise and the huge machines moving about ominously.
In the 1940’s and 1950’s, the Bay Area was still full of orchards and canneries. Bay Area kids knew that summer jobs at the cannery were always a good paying option. Dad spent multiple summers at Hunt’s and Del Monte’s canneries; his stories of those summers made me think about the cannery business as I was planning the Vasona Branch. One summer, he unloaded empty, loose cans from boxcars. He remembered using a long fork that could pick up a dozen cans at a time so they could be put on a conveyor heading into the warehouse. Another summer, he punched the piecework tickets for women filling cans with fruit. He also remembered an assignment watching an experimental automatic peach-splitting machine to make sure it would correctly center on the fold on the side of the peach. Dad also remembered the challenges of getting the popular jobs - connections and who you knew still mattered at the canneries. He’d remembered going to Del Monte and asking about jobs, only to be told he needed to be in the union. The union said they wouldn’t take him on unless he already had a job. Luckily, a neighbor who worked for Del Monte managed to get him in the door.
Dad went off to Cal Berkeley in 1948, commuting for the first few years, then finally living in Berkeley for the last year. He’d planned to be a Chemistry major, but problems understanding the thick accent of his Chemistry 1 professor convinced him it wasn’t the right path. He also met other railroad-crazy friends, going off on railroad club adventures on the Sacramento Northern and Northwestern Pacific with friends including Dudley Wesler, a prolific Bay Area railroad photographer and railfan. He ended up graduating in business administration. When he graduated, he did a stint working for Tidewater Oil. He found the job was “just an office job” which he found boring. He started looking around for alternatives. Railroads seemed exciting, but the “Friendly” SP wasn’t interested in him. Luckily, he’d done a report for a class on the Western Pacific Railroad. He contacted a rates and legal office manager he’d talked with, Tex Wandsworth, and got an offer to “join the railroad.”
Railroading And Two Martini Lunches
We usually think of railroading from the operations side: engineers, brakemen, folks working in the yard. Dad was always on the business side. His first job was as a clerk in an off-line sales office in Portland, Oregon. In those days, Portland was practically a foreign country. My grandmother wasn’t sure she’d see her son again when he got the job so far away. Traveling to see family involved two days of driving US99 in the days before freeways. “Bill and Kathy’s” restaurant in Dunnigan was his usual stop when heading back in his ’48 Chevrolet. But he liked the work, made life-long friends, and loved life in Portland
Oregon City excursion with social club.
Although he wasn’t on the WP, the small office meant he had a lot of freedom and different tasks. He helped an older gentleman arrange railroad tickets for a fraternal order’s tour of the East Coast by train, and got a commendation letter from the customer sent to his manager. He got to interact with the other railroads in Portland when tracing WP loads in their yards. One time, the Western Pacific had an order of new boxcars sent from Seattle; the cars had the new load restraining “DF” equipment. The San Francisco head office didn’t want to bring them to California empty, and asked the Portland office to find loads for them. My father contacted canneries in the Willamette Valley who were eager to use the cars for California-bound loads.
He also learned about railroad operations, albeit by visiting the railroads that had operations in town. From an April 1954 letter soon after he arrived:
“Today I went out to the Union Pacific’s Albina Yard. My business card really came in handy this time. The watchman was ready to kick me out of the yard until I gave him a card. Then he took me over to the yardmaster. He seemed pretty happy that I had enough interest in my job to come out there so he spent about an hour explaining how they switch cars. He gave me his card (and I gave him mine) and told me if he could ever be of any help to me to please call him. I am going to try to get to every yard in the city. I am on my own in the office usually + I get most of my help from the fellows in the other railroads [also in the American Bank Building]. They really have been a big help. I have been taking the tariffs home at night and studying them.”
When I was cleaning out my parents' house, I found that yardmaster's business card - he was "M.V. Newton", the general yardmaster. My father had saved that card (as well as cards for a bunch of the other clerks for other railroads clustered in the Pacific Building in Portland.
More importantly, my father learned about railroad rates, and started serving as a rate clerk, navigating all the strange Interstate Commerce Commission rules and regulations about how much railroads could charge. In those days, freight rates needed to be approved by the ICC, and all railroads needed to hold to the same prices for the same commodities. Classifying freight the wrong way would result in nasty fines to the railroad and the shipper, so correctly interpreting the rate books was a key task.
My dad managed to score some nice artifacts during his time in Portland. When he showed up in Portland in late 1952, there was a document in the trash describing a “manager’s tour” of the railroad to help sales agents in distant locations understand the WP infrastructure, and also the industrial parks they were hoping to develop. The local sales agent didn’t care about that document after the trip, but my dad saved it. I ended up scanning a copy when he showed it to me a few years ago.
Eventually, though, the position in Portland wasn’t the right place for an ambitious young man. Multiple folks told my dad that he’d better go elsewhere unless he planned on staying in Portland his whole career. Being in a job “on-line” was the only way to be taken seriously on the railroad. When a rate clerk job opened up in Sacramento, my father took it and moved south, leaving some happy memories in Portland and a disappointed girlfriend.
He arrived in Sacramento on a Friday in summer. He immediately went in to meet his manager, a curmudgeonly old railroader who warned him “Bowdidge, if you expect this to be like that sweet pension job you had in Portland, you’ve got another thing coming!” His desk, sitting in the corner of the depot looking out over the railroad tracks, was covered in amendments and insertions for the rate books; his predecessor had left three months before and the office was a mess. Dad didn’t like that; he went in Saturday morning, filed all the files, inserted the insertions, and got his desk cleared. On Monday morning, the salesmen were ecstatic - the office had been unorganized for so long. But quickly: “Bowdidge!” The rate clerk was a union job; someone had seen my father working on a weekend and filed a grievance.
Being on-line was more exciting; he could watch the WP trains pass his office window. He could see the cars he was filling. The Western Pacific carried lots of steel coil cars from Geneva Steel in Utah to the U.S. Steel rolling mill at Pittsburg, California. My dad remembered these cars were so heavy that they would shake the depot as they rolled by. Years later, on a family vacation in Sacramento, we went to the Old Spaghetti Factory in Sacramento, located in the former WP depot. Dad pointed out the location in the bar where his desk had been.
He also got to see the operations. WP’s dispatchers were also in the depot (or nearby). He saw their office a few times - older gentlemen chain-smoking as they avoided running trains into each other. Dad met Peter Josserand, one of the WP’s dispatchers and author of the “Rights of Trains”, the bible of dispatching practice. When I took a shift as train order operator at the La Mesa club’s Tehachapi layout, I brought my copy of “Rights of Trains” to read during the slack times and learned I could ask the dispatcher for a read back when I made extra copies of an order intended for all trains. The model dispatchers went through a lot less coffee and cigarettes than the prototype dispatchers.
In the late 1950’s, my father transferred to the WP headquarters on Mission Street in San Francisco. He’d always point out the building when we headed to San Francisco for Christmas shopping. He’d started out as a rate clerk in San Francisco. He also upgraded his role, becoming a salesman responsible for businesses in Oakland and San Francisco. Dad spent his days visiting WP shippers, encouraging sales, keeping up relationships and solving their recent problems. Encouraging shippers to use the WP was always a challenge; the SP dominated the California market, but Del Monte and other shippers would would send a token percentage of shipments by the WP just to make sure that the Southern Pacific wouldn’t take them for granted.
The ICC rules meant that railroads couldn’t compete on price, but instead had to work on service, so lunches at all the San Francisco restaurants - Schroeder’s, the World Trade Center, and Tadich’s Grill - was a key part of his job. Dad said he often got called on the carpet for not taking enough customers out to lunch during a month. Unlike what we might expect from Mad Men, two martini lunches weren’t common. My father remembers one shipper encouraging him for a second drink at a restaurant at Oakland’s waterfront, and my father remembered that wasn’t wasn’t a day to return to the office.
My father remembered white-collar San Francisco business well, even after he was working in the suburbs. When I was a teenager, he took me up on a “businessman’s lunch” day to see San Francisco at work, and made a point to take me to Schroeder’s and talk about how women hadn’t been allowed in the restaurant at lunch until 1970. He assumed that the working world I’d be in would likely be downtown, and likely suit-and-tie. Instead, my working world has always been suburban and much more t-shirt and jeans.
San Francisco’s “men-only” policy wasn’t only in the restaurants. Lela Paul was a longtime employee in the rate department at the WP. The WP didn’t normally hire women on the business side, but she’d gotten in the door during World War II and refused to leave quietly. My father remembered she got more than her usual share of abuse from her male co-workers and managers, but stayed her ground to keep her job.
With his mother on the Denver and Rio Grande narrow gauge.
Dad also enjoyed life as a single young businessman in San Francisco. He lived with a bunch of guys in “the bunkhouse”, an old house on Divisadero in the Richmond. He’d work late at the WP, eat at the communal table in family-style restaurants in North Beach like La Pantera. (He’d talk about how hard it was to cook at home as a single guy because all the meat markets would close at 6pm.) He hung out with a youth social group at Old St. Mary’s Church near San Francisco’s Chinatown, and went hiking and skiing with the crowd. One of the other hikers was a coffee broker who was getting frustrated with the corporate coffee business. In the mid-60’s, that fellow hiker, Al Peet, quit the broker job and opened his own coffee house in Berkeley where he roasted the beans the way he thought they should be roasted. My father remembered Al talking about growing up in Indonesia, and and life under Japanese occupation during World War II.
Among all the customers, my father visited the Oakland Army Terminal frequently. The base handled all material going to army bases in Asia, and received a lot of freight traffic. My father would drop in on the officer in charge of rail shipments in order to hear his problems, offer solutions, and hopefully pick up some WP-routed loads in the bargain. My father figured out that if he showed up at 10:00, the office waiting room was packed with vendors hoping to talk to the officer. Instead, my father would stop by the office at 7:30. The officer was in but there was no competition, so my father would get right in and would get extra time. In 1964, that officer gave my dad a hot tip - he’d be receiving a lot more traffic soon because of troops being sent to Vietnam. “Where’s that?” my father asked - Vietnam wasn’t a household name yet. After he visited the officer, he’d head over to the WP offices. He’d show up from his early-morning sales call just as the other salesmen arrived for coffee before beginning their own calls.
That Oakland Army Base transportation officer also encouraged my dad to take night school classes in order to get the ICC Practitioner certificate - giving him the right able to argue rate and tariff cases. It always seemed like halfway to being a lawyer for transportation rates. My dad took the classes at Golden Gate University and became an expert at rates and how to argue for exceptions. Dad was only one of maybe six people at WP with an ICC license - half were probably the company lawyers. It’s all a lost art now; all the ICC rules and tariffs disappeared during deregulation in the 1980’s.
Dad’s rate knowledge also helped romance. When my father was courting my mother, my grandparents probably had all the usual questions of whether this young man was suitable for their daughter. However, my grandmother had spent several years as the accountant for a vegetable packer, and she’d spent a lot of time working with the railroads to route cars to vegetable brokers back east. When she found out my father worked for the railroad and knew rates, she found him quite an acceptable son-in-law.
While Dad was in San Francisco, those steel coil cars came back into his life. He also was the salesman responsible for U.S. Steel. The steel company had an office in downtown San Francisco, and one of the staff there was the “traffic manager”, responsible for making sure the railroad cars of steel sheet arrived regularly at the Pittsburg mill. The WP had a dedicated set of short gondolas for the steel service; if there weren’t enough in Utah, then steel couldn’t be loaded. If there weren’t enough at the rolling mill, the plant would shut down, tin can production in the Bay Area would stop, and the Santa Clara Valley’s apricots wouldn’t be canned. Keeping the cars moving was essential. The U.S. Steel traffic manager in San Francisco kept tabs on all cars, and would complain to the WP if there were any hitches.
Sacramento Northern ferry, probably with one of the Cal railroad club's excursions.
The U.S. Steel rolling mill at Pittsburg wasn’t on the WP - it was actually on the Sacramento Northern’s trackage. The WP used to hand the cars over to the Sacramento Northern at Sacramento; they’d be pulled across the delta by the SN, and then taken by barge across the Sacramento River to Pittsburg. In 1951, though, a key Sacramento Northern trestle collapsed, severing the line from Sacramento to Oakland. The WP instead negotiated trackage rights with the Santa Fe to take WP trains on the ATSF tracks from Stockton to Pittsburg to serve the steel plant. It was a pricey move for a single shipper, but U.S. Steel was worth it.
One day, though, there were some car delays and the Pittsburg rolling mill began running low on coil steel. The U.S. Steel traffic manager demanded a special run to carry over a few cars of steel. It wasn’t one of the days for the WP run on the Santa Fe, so scheduling a special train would be expensive and troublesome. My dad took the traffic manager out to lunch, heard the problem, and noted that the steel was certainly going to be able to arrive the next day, and asked for U.S. Steel to wait a day for the steel. U.S. Steel agreed to the one day delay. My dad submitted reimbursement for lunch; his manager called it the “$500 lunch” because it saved WP so much expense and aggravation.
Full story here: The $500 Lunch
Damming Conduct
My father left the Western Pacific in 1966. The WP had its economic challenges as a small railroad. They’d had several years of potential mergers considered and dashed, first with the Santa Fe, then the Southern Pacific. The railroad was also a bit slow and stuck in its ways. He got a call looking for a traffic manager to handle rail and road shipments for Guy F. Atkinson, a large dam-and-freeway construction company, and he jumped at the offer. Many of his friends weren’t so lucky; many stayed in rate roles at either railroads or shippers; when deregulation hit, there no longer was a place for them.
A few years back, I was at one of the NMRA meets in Sacramento when I got talking with another attendee. He’d worked for a railroad - which one? WP! Oh, where did he work? San Francisco! Oh, did you know my father ? He was in the rate department. Yes, he certainly did remember my father - they worked in the same department! “Your dad made a smart move leaving the railroad. Your father’s problem at the WP was that he was smarter than everyone else there.” What more could a son want to hear?
Dad spent the rest of his career handling shipments of large construction equipment around the world. He sent construction equipment to build California freeways, Israeli airbases, Chilean and Canadian dams, Washington nuclear plants, and Arizona irrigation projects. He dealt with truckers carrying oversized loads, roll-on-roll-off ships hauling the largest bulldozers, and finding appropriate unloading spots for rail shipments. He also was responsible for all the personnel moves. He had a constant stream of moving company salesmen stopping by for a chat, and collected a pretty impressive collection of Allied, Mayflower, and United moving van models for his window sill. He’d constantly have a chain of frustrated spouses wondering where the moving van with their entire household was.
The railroad knowledge paid off multiple times in his career. When Guy F. Atkinson won the bid to build New Don Pedro Dam in 1967, Dad worked with the Sierra Railroad to find convenient spurs for unloading construction equipment. As part of that relationship, he manage to score tickets for several “shippers specials” on the railroad over the years, and we headed up to Jamestown several times for a ride on the railroad. He dealt with the Canadian Pacific to get equipment to Mica Dam above Revelstoke, B.C., and had a promotional photo of the spiral tunnels at Kicking Horse Pass in his office. As a kid, my knowledge of geography tended to be much better around the location of Atkinson job sites.
He also had some great adventures. Atkinson won a contract to build the Colbun dam in Chile, and he took multiple trips to plan sending equipment down to Chile, and bringing it back afterwards. He was particularly proud he’d practiced his Spanish enough to talk with some of the government officials to talk about importing rules, and so he was able to talk with the vendors. We’ve still got an advertising banner from one of the Chilean truckers that hung on the Atkinson loads. My father wanted to travel, but never did as much as he hoped. The multi-week trips to Chile were high points of his life. On the return from one trip, he stopped over in Peru and visited Machu Picchu, the city of the Incas high in the Andes.
When my father returned from that trip, he had such great memories; he’d tell us about all the people he’d worked with. He visited Santiago and the walked streets named after the great liberator of Chile, Bernardo O’Higgins. He enjoyed the stay in Talca, the town closest to the job site and remembered the hair-raising drive to Talca. He remembered business lunches in the port cities of Valparaiso and Concepcion. He remembered the gruff owner of one of the trucking companies, Señor Gordo. He struck up a friendship with the representative of the joint project’s local company, and saw more of Chile as a result.
He’d often tell about the great deal they’d gotten for the ship returning the construction equipment from Chile. They found a roll-on-roll-off ship that was taking cargo down to South America that was motivated to give a good deal to avoid coming back empty. Dad loaded millions of dollars worth of equipment on that random ship, though he had some nagging concerns that a random ship and a random captain might run off with the company’s bulldozers and trucks. When the ship reached the U.S., my father got a call from the import broker at the port. “I’m on the ship and sitting with the captain, but he won’t turn over the bills of lading.” The bills of lading were important; without them, the process of importing the equipment couldn’t begin. My father called the ship broker who put them in touch to understand what the hold-up was. “Mr. Bowdidge, what we have here is a lack of trust. The captain doesn’t trust that you’ll pay him, and you don’t trust him that he’ll provide the bills of lading.. I suggest you both trust each other a bit.” Both sides backed down, handed over paperwork, and the ships were unloaded without incident.
All his stories had been really positive at the time, ten years after the military coup had deposed Allende. In recent years, I heard the other side of those stories; he remembered one lunch with some vendors where one of the men was treated more distantly by the others. It turns out that man had been part of the right wing in Chile at the time of the coup. As the rest of the table sat silently, the man proudly shared stories of torturing dissidents.
When I asked folks from Atkinson for memories, they told me about all my father had done for the Chile project. Folks remembered the complications getting dump trailers re-imported into the U.S. The project manager for the Colbun project mentioned my father’s stories of Peru convinced them to also visit Machu Picchu. One person in the purchasing department remembered typing up my father’s yearly review. One of the questions was “what improvements could the company do to help you do your job better?” My father responded “Get out of the office more understand more about the job sites.” She was always impressed he had the courage to say that.
My dad's favorite story, though, was the time he had to ship a horse to Venezuela on short notice. He wrote up the story, which I'll share in its entirety:
The Day I Flew a Horse To VenezuelaOne afternoon, Ron Shumway called me and asked how much it would cost to fly a horse to Venezuela. I was puzzled, but put some numbers together and got back to him.
A year or so later at about 4:00 pm on a Friday, [Atkinson Construction Company's president] George McCoy called and said the horse was a go. "What breed, where is he?" George says to call Sgt. Edney at the San Francisco Police Stables to get details.
I was going to wait until Monday, but something told me to call now. The sergeant says "I've been waiting for someone to call. I'm sure glad you called! The horse "Dudley Do Right" has to be in a parade in Caracas on October 14 (about four weeks away), and worse yet various tests are required for the Vetinary Export permit required to export a horse and take weeks to incubate and have to be sent to labs in Iowa, Kansas, and Southern California."
It seems George McCoy was on the San Francisco-Caracas Sister City Committee, who donated the horse to Caracas for crowd control. Atkinson was to pay the freight and my services were volunteered to ship the horse.
Well, it was a real scramble, but we got the horse there for the parade. I found a good freight forwarder in Long Island who made the arrangements and consolidated several horses to fill out the pallet and share the cost of the groom. Because of the short fuse, I started the horse towards Miami with a trucker specializing in horses before we had all the veterinary permits, the export and import permits which gave the forwarder gray hairs. "You don't do anything before all the permits are in hand" they kept telling me."
Nothing new. We always faced time constraints with Atkinson.
Making a Model Railroader
Author, in front of Flying Scotsman locomotive, San Francisco, 1970.
When I was growing up, I remember the train case on the wall containing the special models for my father - the Varney F7 he painted himself, his British and European trains he picked up on different visits, and the Pennsylvania GG-1 he got after an east coast trip. As soon as I was old enough for trains, he made sure I had a Lionel layout; it rolled under my bed, and I ran it incessantly. A neighbor had salvaged a former Lionel display layout from a store, and my dad saved the baseboard and restored a bunch of the signals. That got my dad hooked on trains again, and he passed it onto me.
The Lionel trains got me interested in electricity and electronics - understanding how to power the trains, and also how to power the accessories. I scotch taped wires under the layout to light up a station. We had a Lionel crossing signal that didn’t flash; my father talked with one of the electrical engineers at work, and came back with a handful of transistors and capacitors to make a flip-flop circuit - it seemed like magic to me. He also wanted to learn how to make the signals work, so he bought a copy of Linn Wescott’s venerable “How to wire your model railroad”. I quickly usurped it, and read the whole thing cover-to-cover. I tore it to pieces, learning about switches and relays, detection circuits, block power, and strange combinations of rotary switches to allow multiple trains to be controlled automatically. Dad also had bought a couple Model Railroaders, and eight year old me wore those magazines out as I read about zip texturing and brass locomotives.
Dad also gave me a lot of freedom. He showed me enough about tools to work safely, then turned me loose with his tools. I ended up building two model railroads, first in my bedroom, then re-using the old Lionel display layout for my larger HO layout in the garage. I made quite a mess there with scenery and wiring. After reading about the Sunset Valley’s engine terminal in Model Railroader (thanks, home town public library, for having the MR subscription!), I decide to build a 1x4 foot extension for a diesel engine terminal. My father stopped me with that attempt at usurping space, and highlighted the extension had to be removable and moved out of the way when I wasn’t operated. He regularly took me down to Trains-Nothing-But-Trains in San Mateo as soon as I was doing HO modeling. When he took me to the dentist, we always made a stop at Berkeley Hardware for a boxcar - some of those kits are still on the layout.
Yosemite, with author's grandmother. My dad remembers vacation trips to Yosemite with me and my sister as highlights of his life.
All that shaped who I was - I got interested in electricity, electronics, and digital logic. I got comfortable with tools early, and stole a bunch of my dad’s for my tool box. (Somewhere, I’ve still got side cutters I liberated years ago, as well as some jeweler’s screwdrivers from his tool box.) The model railroad electronics got me interested in taking electronics classes in high school, which taught me how to scavenge components from the junked electronics at the back of the lab.
Dad also encouraged my interest in computers. I’d used some of the early microcomputers at school. When Dad took a computer class at the local junior college, I’d go with him to evenings in the computer lab, and would write my own programs on his account. The instructor would delete programs unrelated to the class because of disk space limitations, so I learned how to use the teletype and punch out my program listing so I could reload it the next weekend. (Meanwhile, Dad wrote his own programs to estimate costs to ship large objects via oceangoing ships.) When a friend got a TRS-80, I ended up going to visit him but would ignore him as I got caught up in programming his computer. His mother “suggested” that maybe I should have a computer of my own. My mother and father managed to get me a TRS-80. When I started learning to drive, Strawflower Electronics in Half Moon Bay was a common destination because they sold all the TRS-80 games I couldn’t get in Radio Shack stores. All that experience with early microcomputers got me into computer science, and also gave me a chance to learn about microprocessors and electronics. I’m now working for a company making computer chips - insanely complex microprocessors - but the model railroading gave me an appreciation of electronics and a decent knowledge of what’s happening down at the computer chip level to keep up with the hardware guys. The Kalmbach books on wiring the model railroad and assembling electronics is still helping me forty years later.
A Grown-up Model Railroader
Dad’s always been supportive and appreciative for the model railroad, though I suspect I took it much more seriously than he ever would. He liked what I was building, but his interest was still in the models he’d collected and their history - his Lionel trains from his youth, the HO models he’d built, the european models he picked up on vacation, and the occasional models he’d pick up because they caught his fancy. He occasionally passed on some of his older models to me. Somewhere, I’ve got one of his 1940’s “Crazy Crystals” refrigerator cars.
He liked passing on stories, and indulged me when I’d push for operational details about the Western Pacific. He tended to remember more about the personalities than the day-to-day operations. He didn’t know much about how WP’s Sacramento R Street freight house handled traffic, but he still remembered the name of the guy ran the place. He didn’t necessarily know about how trains were routed, but could pull out an old rate book and explain how to argue about how to disassemble dump trailers to get a better rate.
Mom and Dad, Vista-dome, over Donner Summit
Back in 2006, my wife and I wanted to do something special for my parents, and found out about a private car group trip to Reno and back over Presidents’ Day weekend. The group had assembled three private cars - a streamlined dining car and a dome car, and Beebe and Clegg’s “Virginia City” observation car, all to be placed on the rear of Amtrak's California Zephyr. We picked my parents up, took them to Emeryville, jumped on the train, and crossed the Sierras. We chose a good weekend - we crossed the Sierras as a big snowstorm hit, and got to watch the snow pile up as we passed the traffic jams on I-80. It was an impressive ride, both for getting to sit in a real dome car, and getting to watch a real snowstorm crossing the Sierras.
The Virginia City on the back of the California Zephyr.
The trip also spurred memories from my parents. My parents got married just before my dad left the WP, and he made a point to arrange a trip by the California Zephyr to Salt Lake City and back. They may have ridden in the cars we took that trip to Reno in. We heard more stories of that trip as we sat in the bar at the Nugget casino - the Italian restaurant owner slipping them wine in Salt Lake City, newlyweds in a sleeping compartment, finding others with our rare last name in the Utah phone book. On the way back, our Amtrak train was delayed because of a broken rail somewhere out in Nevada. Our assembled group stood trackside at the Sparks station waiting for the train until the organizers managed to hire a bus to get us all to the warmth of the Reno Amtrak station. While we stood out there, snow flurries started falling - something I’d first seen during a few years living out on the east coast. My mom had never seen snow flurries before; she'd spent her life in temperate California.
My father, by contrast, had been a skier and interested in the outdoors, so snow wasn't so unusual for him. Somewhere, he's got his record of climbing Mount Hood during his days in Portland. A few years ago, I opened one of the Southern Pacific Technical and Historical Society's magazines to find an article on the special trains that would take skiers up to Norden Summit and Sugar Bowl during the season. In the front and center, there was my dad, caught in a publicity photo. He'd also made the trip up to the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley. In one of his few recorded cases of lawlessness, my dad paired up with friends-of-friends who managed to sneak into the US-USSR hockey match, the hottest ticket of the Olympics.
My father's family including his not-yet-train-crazy grandson.
Age slowed my dad down a lot over the last ten years. We’d occasionally go to train swap meets, and we’d talk a bunch about trains or about his time at the WP. When my nephew got to five years old, Dad and I pulled out our saved Lionel trains and cleaned them up for his grandson. We’re not sure he caught the train bug. My nephew wasn’t too interested a few years ago, but he set up a “sushi train” a couple weeks back in the style of a sushi boat restaurant he missed visiting. Dad heard my updates on the Vasona Branch, but hadn’t been down here for a few years because of mobility issues. As I mentioned a few months ago, the Vasona Branch got photographed for the NMRA Magazine in preparation for the NMRA National Convention in Santa Clara. The magazine issue with my layout got sent out in October. I sent Dad a copy when he was in nursing care at the end; he got to see how he’d encouraged and inspired me, and what I’d managed to build. He proudly showed it off to the caregivers.
My father saw a lot during his life. He saw San Francisco before bridges and a city where men wore hats and women gloves. He saw the Bay Area change from industrial and agricultural to high-tech and suburban. He saw the changes in transportation with the decline of the railroads, air freight, and deregulation changes. He saw entire job categories disappear and appear. He saw early computers at Berkeley and the WP (but chose not to pursue that side of the business.) He still loved using his Macintosh to read the world’s newspapers, but the iPad was a little too newfangled for him. He saw Europe and South America, and remembered all his travel fondly. He raised a family, and saw his grandson become an energetic young man.
He also helped his son become train-crazy, and inadvertently encouraged me in what eventually became my career.
I’ll miss you, Dad.
Original story extended with the "Day I Flew a Horse to Venezuela" story.
Wednesday, September 23, 2020
More Model Railroad Sudoku: Cow Cars to the Ainsley Cannery
If we want to understand how a railroad and a cannery worked together, we need some data - preferably details about the number and types of freight cars doing to a particular industry. We’d done that in the past with Tom Campbell’s data about the grocery wholesaler’s siding in Sacramento a few years ago, but there’s always more we’d like to learn.
Getting information on the actual freight cars heading off to canneries is always a challenging task. Summary data often survives, either in terms of how many carloads the Santa Clara Valley sent, or canneries bragging about their canning prowess. Lawsuits might suggest the amount of traffic, such as this description of the fruit produced by several canneries. Although I’ve found occasional other facts (such as delivery notifications for freight cars at the Golden Gate cannery), the information’s spotty.
Luckily, occasional gems turn up. The Campbell Museum shared this Ainsley Packing Co. letterhead as part of reminding us of Campbell’s cannery heritage. They were most excited about the letterhead. I was most excited about the contents.
The letter gives the “pear account” of fruit coming to the Ainsley cannery from the Treat Ranch. It’s unclear where this ranch was. One possibility is a 160 acre ranch in Elk Grove run by the Gage family — which would explain why the fruit was arriving by rail on the Southern Pacific. There’s several other Treat Ranches that show up in searches; I’ll let someone else decide on the right one.
We see a carload of pears arriving every couple days from late July through early September. We see multiple carloads on August 3, but otherwise there’s usually a couple days between cars. There’s a larger gap at the end of the season, with 16 days between the arrival on August 24 and September 8.
What do we know about the freight cars? We can use the Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER) to track down what these cars were. The ORER was a frequently-published list describing each railroad's freight cars: reporting marks, size, weight, and special characteristics. Indexes in front can help us identify the owner from reporting marks. It was intended for use by shippers and others to check on the features of the cars they were assigned for loads.
We see 14 cars listed on the Ainsley receipt. (I’ve put them in a Google Docs spreadsheet if you’d like to examine the data in detail.) All are SP or subsidiary cars, suggesting the Treat Ranch was on the SP. Many of the cars come from the Texas subsidiaries, so they may not be familiar to us West Coast SP modelers. The GHSA is Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railway, LW is Louisiana and Western, MLT is Morgan’s Louisiana and Texas.
They’re a mix of new and old cars; Most cars at least 15 years old, but two or three are new cars, built in the last few years. The twenty year old CS-2 ventilated fruit boxcars were common, showing up four times. Only one load is carried in a regular boxcar.
Half the freight cars are actually stock cars. I've certainly heard of stock cars being used for carrying fruit in high season. Melons were frequently carried in stock cars as late as the 1950's. However, this is a nice reminder how prevalent use of stock cars was for tree fruit. There’s also several mentions of “boxcar/stockcar” hybrids which I don’t know much about, and couldn’t find pictures.
The use of stockcars as a cheap ventilated boxcar is interesting, and could potentially be fun to model on the Vasona Branch. There's explicit evidence that stock cars carried fruit to canneries in the 1920's. Here's a photo showing workers unloading fruit from stock cars at the Richmond Chase cannery in San Jose. The Feb 1926 reweigh date for the nearest car indicates that apricots were still being carried in stock cars in the late 1920's. Note all the lug boxes are marked with the Richmond-Chase logo. If the cannery supplied the lug boxes, then that probably means the boxes needed to be shipped out to the farm by rail too. Doug Debs also pointed out a 1928 wreck of the Shoreline Limited passenger train at Bayshore involved the train slamming into several stock cars of apricots. The accident overturned the engine and forced some poor soul to go and recover the less-damaged apricots.
So, 14 carloads of pears, and 150 tons of fruit just from Treat. What does that tell us about the total amount of fruit arriving at the loading dock at the Ainsley cannery? How many more cars would have been arriving during the year? We can guess that from some of the news reports about the production at the Ainsley cannery. A 1918 news article, four years after these loads, mentioned that the cannery canned 5.5 million cans of fruit during the season. They spent $300,000 on fruit alone that year. Treat’s $7500 in pears would have been 2 to 2.5% of Ainsley’s total purchase, so if Ainsley bought the same amount of fruit in 1914 (and if all the fruit had the same price), we’d expect the equivalent of 750 cars of fruit coming in during the year, or six cars a day for 120 days. Now, not all of Ainsley’s fruit would have come by train; this is the Santa Clara Valley, after all, so pears, peaches, apricots, and plums would have been arriving by wagon. But I could also imagine that Ainsley would want to lengthen their canning season as long as possible, so bringing in fruit from elsewhere would allow them to can even when the orchards in Campbell weren’t producing. (On the other hand, we’re seeing fruit from Treat Ranch from mid-July to the beginning of September - a pretty wide season already.) It’s easy to assume that we’d have a few cars of fruit a day arriving at the Ainsley cannery throughout the season.
For my model railroad, this information gives me more details about the Ainsley Cannery, and how to make freight operations at the cannery better match what really happened in the 1930’s. First, this data suggests I should have cars coming to the cannery bringing fruit. If Ainsley was receiving fruit from elsewhere in the ‘teens, I can guess they were also receiving fruit from outside the valley in the 1930s. The use of stock cars for fruit is interesting and eye-catching, so I should should build a bunch of SP, EP&SW, and LW stock cars to bring in fruit. Finally, with so many cars coming in from Treat, I should definitely keep the Ainsley cannery busy - pushing many carloads at the industry, and also perhaps considering switching more than once a day to get realistic amounts of fruit into the cannery, and keeping my operators extra busy.
All of the research and guessing I’m doing here can be done for your favorite railroad or industry. Keep an eye out for paper and documentation, or check photos to see if you can spot the cars being loaded or unloaded at your favorite industries. Finding information on specific cars is easier than ever; Google Books has a bunch of ORERs on line. Westerfield also used to sell CDs with scans of particular years. I use Tony Thompson’s Southern Pacific Freight Cars books for more information and photos on the car classes.
Thanks to Ed Gibson for noticing the reweigh date on the stock car in the Richmond Chase photo, confirming that stock cars were used in the 1920's. Thanks to Doug Debs for pointing out the 1928 Bayshore wreck. Most of all, thanks to the Campbell Library for scanning and sharing the letterhead!
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