Stocking Up for the Fruit Season

Part of building a realistic model railroad is building a realistic car fleet that captures the look of the trains and industries that service the places we model.

Back when I was a teenager, my philosophy for selecting model freight cars was easy: if it looked cool, I bought it. I’d pick up a boxcar with a bright paint scheme at the hobby shop after a dentist’s appointment. I picked up a pair of covered hoppers because they looked so different from anything else I had. I built auto rack and modern boxcar kits because I found them at the hobby shop and so I could learn some new techniques or so I could do some modeling some evening.

As I started focusing on modeling prototype locations, I got more picky. I cared more about getting freight cars that would have run in the 1930s, began curating the road names so I’d get a mix of Southern Pacific and eastern railroad cars, and pushed down any interest in inappropriate cars. I sometimes broke the rules - the pink Roma Wine refrigerator car that was eye-catching but the wrong era, the early covered hopper that the Funaro and Camerlengo owner convinced me would be a neat model for my era even if it primarily was used in Florida. I built a pair of Northern Pacific stock cars from the Central Valley kits even though they were likely inappropriate for my layout. As time went on, some of these cars got given away, boxed, or merely kept far away from the layout.

The lack of the stock cars wasn’t a big deal. Although I’d initially assumed that stock movements would be a staple of western railroading, stock movements on the real Vasona Branch were rare. The Northern Pacific cars always seemed like placeholders even for the imaginary cattle movements. I’d bought some kits for SP cars at various times, but they weren’t particularly important priorities when the layout didn’t actually have any stock pens to load them.

But there were always a few rumblings that there might be better uses for the stock cars. I’d seen various photos of stock cars being used to carry fresh (“green”) fruit - photos of workers unloading fruit lugs from a stock car at the Richmond Chase cannery in the 1920’s, Ed Gibson’s find of the crushed apricots in stock cars hit by an errant Daylight passenger train in Bayshore yard in the late 1920s, stories about watermelons being shipped in stock cars well into the 1950’s.

One find, however, convinced me that stock cars might belong on the Vasona Branch. Back during the pandemic, the Campbell Museum shared a bit of Ainsley cannery letterhead summarizing the peaches received by the cannery form the Treat Ranch in the summer of 1914. Looking over the list of incoming cars, I noticed that many of the cars delivering fruit in those days were actually stock cars. That was enough for me: I knew that other canneries were receiving fruit in stock cars into at least the late 1920s, and the accounting of the Ainsley cannery receiving fruit from distant orchards suggested that bringing in fruit from distant places was reasonable for the canneries along the Vasona branch. It was time to actually build some stock cars for the fresh fruit trade.

The Cars

My SP S-40-3 cars were built from plastic kits that Ted Culotta sold via his Speedwich Media business. The parts were originally intended for highly-detailed ready-to—run plastic freight cars sold by the Red Caboose around 2013. Ted, as a passionate freight car modeler, managed to convince Red Caboose to let him sell unassembled parts from the kit separately - I’m guessing for folks who wanted to modify the kits as well as folks who wanted the pleasure of building the kits themselves. When Ted offered these in the late 2010s, I bought three on the assumption they’d be fun to build.

Like a lot of projects, the kits sat on my shelf for a long time - I never quite had a strong reason to build them, nor the inclination to spend some long weekends building the kits.

Luckily, re-reading the Treat Ranch pear accounting when prepping for a presentation on cannery history reminded me that these cars could be useful on the layout.

There’s nothing too special about building these kits - the models were mostly built according to the instructions, painted them with rattle-cans of red primer, and decaled for the SP and T&NO. (The uncommon SP subsidiaries on the Treat Ranch accounting would have been fun to model, but the SP merged all those railroads into the T&NO in the late 1920’s, so the odd reporting marks would have been unlikely to have survived into the 1930s.)

I did bit of weathering on the cars using an airbrush. Specifically, I’d had friends talking about the inexpensive airbrushes with a small pocket-sized compressor. (Here is the airbrush I got.) These airbrushes aren’t suitable for serious painting, but they do have enough airflow to make them handy for airbrushing and other detail work. I'll admit it's also freeing to put the candy-bar-sized compressor in my pocket as I search around the layout looking for things to weather - something that's hard to do with a full-sized air compressor.

The Result

The three stock cars are now on the Vasona Branch, bringing peaches and apricots to the local canneries. I’m looking forward to crews asking why they’re bringing cattle to a cannery. They'll get an earful about how railroads make some very strange choices for assigning cars during busy seasons.