Model Railroad Sudoku II: Straight Outta SLO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Question 3: What’s with those train numbers?

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

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

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

Here’s an excerpt of the 1928 timetable:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we pencil out the train schedules:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

to sign up for a session.

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

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

Hope to see you there!

Movie Night XXXI: Interurban Era visits the Vasona Branch!

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

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

Stuff Sucks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Model Trains Holding My Father’s Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My grad school layout with teenaged boxcar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And So The Pruning Began

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ChatGPT: "The Poisoned Track"

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

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

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

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

Try for yourself here.

Title: The Poisoned Track

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

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

“Yeah?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I found it.

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

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

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

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

"Track 13. Final payment due."

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

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

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

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

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

The poisoned track had claimed its final victim.

The Not-Pretty Side of Los Gatos

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freight Trains in the Sky

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

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

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

Report on Steam Railroads of San Jose

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

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

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

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

What’s Wrong with the San Jose Railroads?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So What Should We Do About It?

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

A: Bypass around San Jose to the west.

B: Elevated tracks along Fourth Street

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

How’d the Consultants Do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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