Movie Night XXX: Serious Switchman Skills

Playing the model railroad operations means trying to keep track of a ton of cars as you try to place each in the correct location. Real railroaders had the same problem - they'd need to know the cars in their train. Looking a couple cars down a string wasn't easy - for us modeleres, we might just need to glance a different way or perhaps pull out the reading glasses, but the railroad switchman might need to walk a long way down the track to remember which cars are on that spur.

For that reason, the real railroaders were skilled at keeping track of cars, whether having systems for where they'd place cars, or being very good about note-keeping, or just working on their memory. This video from "You Asked For It" from the 1950's shows switchman Brian Stevenson of the Rock Island's Kansas City yard demonstrating his photographic memory. The TV show runs a string of 40 cars past switchman Stevenson, and he attempts to repeat back the car reporting marks from memory. It's a neat memory demonstration, and a great chance to look at some 1950's boxcars up close!

Installing the Interlocking Machine at West San Jose

I'd shown the interlocking machine for the WP crossing a couple posts back. Now that I've shared it, it's given me a good kick-in-the-butt to actually install it on the layout. After a couple of weekend work sessions, I'm proud to say it's installed now. See the video above to see it in action, or read on and learn some of the details about installing it.

I've argued I need the interlocking because crews will otherwise forget the crossing is there. In case you doubt it, here's a photo from an early op session showing someone dropping cars directly across the crossing.

And finally, some details about the scene:

The Derails

The West San Jose tower was a mechanical interlocking - that is, the levers on the interlocking machine moved piping which would cause switches, derails, and signals to change position and state. Seeing the Barriger photo of the crossing from the 1930's, I really wanted to model the control devices - the derails that would push cars off the tracks, and the movable rods that would move a derail out of the way so a train could pass.

I'd thought about doing something physical to block the tracks, but the alternatives I thought about, such adding a switch point in the track or dropping a derailing device on the rail, seemed both fragile and troublesome. I chose to do something less prototypical, embedding an LED between ties. The LED glows red if the derail is set, encouraging crews not to roll through. The lights don't force crews to deal with the interlocking, but they're at least an encouragement.

I'd also considered laying out the actual rodding to control the signals and derails. That idea also ended pretty quickly; I realized most solutions wouldn't be able to stand up to the aggressive track cleaning needed for a garage layout. I'd considered using something substantial such as piano wire for the rodding, but immediately had thoughts of poking a bit of rod straight through one finger. (Perhaps I could bend right angles at each end of a section of pipe so the ends are firmly in the roadbed?) For now, there will be no piping.

The Signals

The real West San Jose crossing would have been protected by tall semaphore signals - one set of signals close to the crossing, and another about a mile back. Semaphore signals wouldn't survive last long at this point on the model railroad. The area around Auzerais Street requires a lot of reaching in to couple and uncouple cars, and the low upper deck means operators need to reach right in. Rather than watch semaphores get destroyed each session, I decided to use dwarf signals at the crossing. Like all modelers, I've usually got some interesting stuff in the scrap box for a project. The scrap box held some dwarf signal castings I'd probably bought at the Trains-Nothing-But-Trains closing sale back in 1983, but I only had two of those left.

Instead, I fell back on my favorite crutch - the 3d printer. With about an hour of work, I'd sketched up a signal and had it printing on the 3d printer. I needed to refine the design widen the holes so they'd fit my chosen LEDs, but still had usable signals within a day of changing my plan. The design may seem a bit simple, but it's got all the same detail that my 1970's era white metal signal had... and I don't need to run to the hobby store to get more.

The Switches

The interlocking machine controls a pair of track switches for the interchange track between the WP and SP. (Full disclosure: there was no such track here. When the SP and WP interchanged cars, they did so at a small yard along South Fourth Street. Switching interest won out over accurate trackage.) Like all switches on my layout, I use Tortoise switch machines to control them, both so crews don't need to reach into the scene to throw switches and so I've got electrical contacts to avoid dead frogs. The Tortoises work by reversing polarity, so the switches on the fascia are DPDT switches wired as reversing switches. That won't work with the Modratec contacts - it provides SPDT contacts for each lever.

Instead, I replaced the Tortoises with the the MP5 switch motors I'd used on the Market Street modular layout. The switch machines can be controlled via SPDT contacts. They're also easier to install - the position of the throw wire can be adjusted after the switch machine is screwed onto the layout. The MP5s do use tiny screws for mounting, but I've worked around this by mounting them to thin plywood with #2 screws at the workbench, then using larger screws to attach the plywood to the benchwork.

The Lights

The area around the Western Pacific crossing hasn't gotten a lot of attention; apart from a coat of paint soon after the track was laid, there's been little work on the area for the last... oh, ten years. I did build a model of Western Pacific's tower years ago.

Putting in the interlocking also forced me to do a few other jobs - I added dirt to hide the bare homasote, glued down a fence leading to the Del Monte cannery. I also ended up improving the lighting. When I started on the Vasona Branch, I used under-the-counter fluorescent fixtures. They worked ok, but there wasn't always enough space for the twenty inch long fixtures. I also was always a little hesitant about threading 120 volt wire through the layout just in case the wrong wire got chafed or cut. When I'd checked out LED strip lighting years ago, I found the lights weren't really bright enough for layout lighting, and the printed circuit carriers weren't easy to mount.

Last year, I'd spotted some cool LED units in Fry's electronics components aisle. These were 12 volt LED modules, with white LEDs on a plastic carrier. At $1.50 a unit, they were too pricey for an entire layout. Searching on eBay, however, I found the same modules were often used for hollow sign lighting, and that I could buy strips of a hundred of these lights for almost nothing. These are still available on Ebay (like this - search for "LED module 5050" (5050 is the part number for the bright white LEDs) and there's some that exactly match mine, and a lot of other similar fixtures. I like the waterproof ones; they've got sealed packages. I use 12 volt power supplies for laptops to power them - they're cheap ($10), come with a cord and plug, and don't cover up outlets like wall warts.

Next step: get some operators to actually test out the interlocking!

Building an Interlocking Machine For West San Jose Tower

As I’ve mentioned before, I like model railroading as a hobby because of the mix of projects I can do. I’ve got a friend who’s big into wargaming figures. His photos of some of his painted miniatures shows great work, but I always wonder “what does he do when he doesn’t want to paint?” Luckily, I’ve got no such problem; when I'm tired of one kind of project, I move on to another. Lots of projects go unfinished because I’m not quite in the mindset to spend time on them. Some times the project just gets delayed, and sometimes it gets rethought. I’ll switch and do something else for a while, and eventually I’ll come back. Maybe I’ll do the project as I originally conceived it; other times, I’ll throw my old ideas away and go in a completely different direction.

Take the Western Pacific crossing on my layout, for example. The WP crossing was a key part of my track plan, not because it was an active part of switching the canneries, but because it both helped set the location, and because it tied my railroad to the larger world. I had plans years ago for how I wanted to build it, but those plans never worked out. A while back, I rethought what I was going… and ended up with a new plan that sounds like much more fun.

The Crossing as Model

The crossing of the Western Pacific and Southern Pacific tracks in West San Jose isn’t much to see - just a set of tracks crossing between the Del Monte cannery and the Standard Oil spur. There’s an interchange track that gets a couple cars switched every operating session. I built a model of the WP’s 1920’s era switch tower years back, and I keep having ideas of putting the Virden Cannery next to the tracks, just like in real life. However, for the operating crews, there’s just not much there. Littering freight cars across the crossing when switching Del Monte is quite a common occurrence, and would have infuriated the real tower man for the Western Pacific Railroad on the real railroad.

I’d had ideas to make crews better respect the crossing. Somewhere around here, there’s an Arduino with a sound card to control some animation. It would play a soundtrack occasionally - a factory whistle, some cars going by, a far away whistle, and finally the sound of a WP train approaching. Some nearby signals would change to red (to announce the arrival of the train), and LEDs in the roadbed would flash as the phantom train passed. If that wouldn’t keep crews from blocking the tracks, nothing would.

The project that didn't work out.

The plans never quite worked out; I didn’t have a place for the speakers and was never happy with the soundtrack. The idea of making the crossing obvious and important during operating sessions did linger.

History of the WP Crossing

When the Western Pacific was built in the 1910’s, the Southern Pacific already had tracks in all the obvious locations around the Santa Clara Valley. The potential business from San Jose’s fruit industry encouraged the railroad to find a way to get past the SP’s tracks. The WP’s line from Fremont and Niles to San Jose had to parallel the SP for much of its length, then swing far south of San Jose only to approach the city from the south. The route required crossings at Niles Junction, at the crossing of the SP’s Coast Line at Valbrick, and a final crossing of the San Jose - Los Gatos branch at West San Jose.

The tower - West San Jose to SP, and Tower 17 to the WP, was built in 1922. The railroad signalling trade rag commented on the construction: a Saxby and Farmer interlocking machine controlled the semaphores, with 20 levers controlling signals and switches. The crossing was quite substantial, with WP’s branch line crossing the SP’s main line and two drill tracks right in the middle of the cannery area. Like all railroad towers, the second railroad to arrive at a place paid for it all - the track crossing, the tower, and staffing the tower. The WP never got the traffic it expected from the San Jose branch, and had little interest in staffing the tower on an unused branch line. By 1938, the tower was out of use. In later years, WP trains had to stop and check the SP wasn’t coming before dashing across.

James Barriger got a decent photo of the area around the tower in the 1930’s, capturing an SP switcher right behind the Virden Cannery. Although he didn’t capture the tower, he did show the trenches for pipe rods controlling derails on the drill tracks.

The Interlocking

On a railroad, a switch tower is a manned location that controls where several tracks come together, and where the track, switches, and signals are controlled to ensure safety and minimal delays. There’s usually a person present; he sets switches and signals to allow trains to safely move through the section of track based on train schedules, dispatcher orders, and the arrival of trains. Controlling those tracks is often done by an “interlocking machine” - a mechanical computer that ensures only non-conflicting routes can be set up through the stretch of track it controls. Interlocking machines usually have levers that control switches and signals, one lever per device. For the WP crossing, that means that the signals, switches, and derails can be arranged to let an SP train to cross the WP tracks, or allow a WP train to cross the SP tracks, but not both. (It also enforces safe order - the tower man can’t set a signal to green unless the switches and derails on the through route are set correctly, and derails on the crossing track are locked down.) Interlocking machines use a set of sliding bars connected to multiple levers to ensure that if lever A is thrown, lever B cannot be thrown.

As mentioned, the WP tower’s interlocking machine had twenty levers - were there really that many things to control? From various sources, we can guess what the 20 levers in the Saxby and Farmer machine controlled. The Barriger photograph shows piping for derails, suggesting all the tracks had devices to stop a runaway car on a track that wasn’t expecting a train. Railroad valuation map shows that the SP had distant (one mile before) and nearby signals closer to the crossing. Track diagrams show one mainline track and two drill tracks on the SP to handle switching the canneries in the area. One likely guess at the purpose of the levers would be one derail, one local signal, and one distant signal on the SP and WP main tracks in each direction (3 * 4 = 12 levers) + a signal and derail on each SP drill track in each direction (2 * 4 = 8) for a total of 20 levers - just what the trade rag says.

Locking bars, tappets, and tappet blades on the interlocking machine at Santa Clara tower. Chuck's photo.

So it would be neat if I could actually model the interlocking machinery, and give my operators an appreciation for everything involved with the tower - the rules about how train crews got permission to cross the diamond, the need to communicate to the tower man where they wanted to go, and the actions the tower man needed to do to line up the crossing. That means I need to build an interlocking machine - not a standard kit at my hobby shop. I’ve seen articles on how to make an interlocking. Model Railroader had a set of articles by Paul Larson and Gorden Odegard in the January-June 1961 issues of Model Railroader, but it wasn’t quite a step-by-step project, and the suggestion that the authors needed to build a wooden mock-up beforehand to test out the logic suggested it wasn’t a project for the faint-hearted.

Building a Modratec Interlocking Machine

Luckily, there’s folks who can help. Modratec, in Australia, sells kits for making a working interlocking. The price isn’t quite an impulse buy - about US$225 for 12 levers and electrical contacts, but it’s a pretty great little kit. To get an interlocking kit, you download their SigScribe4 software for setting up the constraints, define out how you want the levers to work, then mail off the interlocking details. You’ll get a kit back - all machined and ready to be bolted together, with a bit of metalwork to set the locking machinery to match your intent. I’d been considering this kit for a few years; I’d tried a couple times to get started, but never quite got it. A couple years back, I finally took the time to understand the software well enough to describe West San Jose Tower. The interlocking turned out really nice, and gave me a much better understanding of how real interlocking machines work.

Designing the Interlocking

The biggest challenge was just getting the interlocking designed. It took me several tries over a couple years to figure out the SigScribe software to get a working interlocking. Running through the tutorials multiple times helped. Once I understood the software, designing a new interlocking for my Market Street layout took only an hour. Don’t be surprised if it feels cryptic, or if you find yourself starting from scratch multiple times.

The general steps are:

• Research your prototype to understand how the interlocking may have been laid out. Decide on signals, switches, and derails.
• Draw the track plan in SigScribe, mark the location of signals and switches, and describe the configuration of each signal.
• Associate levers with signal blades or switches.
• Define a route for each signal lever indicating what switches must be set (or locked) to allow a train to proceed through safely.

Planning the interlocking involves a bunch of choices - how far out does the interlocking go? Where did the prototype have signals? What additional safety is required, such as derails or pointing an incorrectly-proceeding train away from active routes? Doing a bit of research helps you lock down what you’re building.

Track diagram for the West San Jose interlocking I built.

For the West San Jose tower, I started by looking at photos and other documents. The Barriger photos showed that the interlocking had derails to keep an incorrectly moving train away from the crossing; representing these adds a bunch of extra levers to the interlocking, and reminds operators about all the extra machinery needed to protect the crossing. Valuation maps pointed out the need for distant signals a mile away - something I chose not to represent because of the lack of space. The California Railroad Commission documentation on the tower mentioned the 20 levers, which confirmed I’d accounted for all the devices around the real tower.

Track diagram for Fourth Street Tower in San Jose.

I also tried building an interlocking machine for the Market Street layout (though I haven’t ordered a kit for it yet.) The San Jose Market Street station had a switch tower at the east end of the station where the lines up to Oakland and down to Los Angeles diverge. For the Market Street layout, I again used valuation maps and photos to figure out the signals and switches that existed. There were no derails in the interlocking trackage. However, Modratec’s documentation did mention that sometimes particular switches would be forced to be set in a particular way to keep runaway trains out of the way of a chosen route, so there were some places where I could explicitly insist a switch had to stay pointed away from routes in use. (Specifically, I designed the interlocking so switch 6 would need to be pointed towards Oakland whenever a train was coming or going from the train shed.) For Market Street, I also had to decide which switches would be controlled by the interlocking. Southern Pacific timetables mentioned whistle signals to get access to nearby industries, suggesting these switches were under the tower’s control. A crossover just east of the station train shed, however, was outside of the track protected by the various signals according to the valuation maps, suggesting those crossovers were manually controlled. I left them out of the interlocking.

The Fourth Street tower was also complex because of the need for separate signal arms for each possible route through. I ended up making the easternmost signal (near "To LA") a three blade semaphore to control which diverging route would be chosen. I'd been curious why they needed a separate signal just west of switch 6; it provided a way to indicate whether the switch was lined for the mainline or the route into the yard without adding extra blades to the signals further east.

Once I had a handle on the track and signal arrangement, I started describing the interlocking in the SigScribe4 software. I drew the track diagram and placed symbols, connected up the levers, then set up the routes - about an hour of work now that I understand things.

Here’s some quick tips for using SigScribe4.

• On a Mac, regular mouse clicks only do selection. You’ll need to do mouse clicks while holding down additional keys to do some of the actions. Select a square in the track diagram, and drag with the alt/option key down to draw a line. When you’ve selected a square in the track diagram (and see the multi-colored square), then shift-click on any of the eight cells to indicate the direction a track line should exit the square. Shift click in the center of the square to finish editing that cell.
• Select a cell and press V repeatedly to show signal options for that cell, or H for derails, level crossings, and other non-signal options. For each signal, open the detail view (right click or command click and choose Detail View) and hit H and V to indicate the kind of semaphore blade in the signal or to show multiple blades when there are multiple routes available.
• When connecting levers or routes, first select a lever, and then right click (or command click) to get the context menu and select “Connect” or “Define Route”. Connect all the switches associated with that lever or route (right click and choose "Connect" on each), then press the big button at the bottom of the screen to commit the change.
• Make sure to define all levers and set their correct color (black for switches and derails, red for signals). If you need to change them, you're likely to lose all previous work.
• Modratec mostly caters to English-style modelers, so it’s worth reading up a bit on either the Modratec website or british signaling website to understand their terminology.

Once I had a design, I tested it to make sure it worked correctly. I tried each route and double-checked the correct levers were locked and unlocked. I then saved out the model, checked the number of locking bars and levers needed, and got an estimate on price. Once I was ready to get the interlocking, I sent off an order and the file describing the model; Harold, the owner, sent e-mails about status, and let me know when the kit was on its way. Total time from order to kit arriving was about 6 weeks.

Assembling the Interlocking

I spent three days assembling the kit. The first day was doing the majority of the assembly. Most of the interlocking machine just needed to be assembled with screws; it all went together smoothly. The next two days were for making the locking mechanism: the tappet blades and locking bars. Finally, I completed assembly and made the track diagram to show which levers to throw.

The two non-trivial bits of work was the locking mechanism. An interlocking machine is set up so that conflicting movements can’t be made; it does this by mechanically blocking tappet blades (bars moved by the levers) with tappets in locking bars. The locking bars that set restrictions between levers are square bar-stock, and come pre-drilled where there would pegs to block the levers from movie. Brass rod needs to be pressed in and cut off to form the tappets, and filed flush with the top of the tappet blades. The tappet blades, controlled by each lever, are brass bar stock. Each tappet blade needs to be filed at the correct location to ensure the mechanism works properly. It’s straightforward but careful work; I was constantly assembling and testing to make sure I was filing in the correct location.

Next Steps

Although I’ve finished the interlocking machine, I still need to install it on the layout, attach it to signals, and tell crews how to use it.

The first step will be adding the model components; I’ll need signals to indicate when it’s clear to proceed, switch machines to control operation of switches under tower control, and derails to mark tracks that should not be crossed. The prototype signals were semaphore signals, located around 500 feet east and west of the crossing. Tall and spindly semaphore signals wouldn’t survive well in this area where people are constantly reaching in when switching; instead I’ll use dwarf lighted signals to indicate when the mainline is safe to cross. The derails are another important part of the interlocking; although I could try to build working derails, it might be easier to just add red LEDs near the track to indicate when the derail is set incorrectly.

The interlocking itself will be inset into the layout so it’s easy to reach, but won’t interfere with movement around the layout. It’s only six inches deep, so it should be easy to hide near one of the Del Monte buildings. I’ve had good luck with Team Digital’s programmable logic boards, though they all appear to have been discontinued. An Arduino board would be easy to program; each lever would throw one switch which would go to the Arduino; the Arduino could then control the signals and Tortoises.

Underside of interlocking machine with electrical switches added.

Once the interlocking is installed, switch crews will start having to work around the interlocking. Scheduled passenger trains will have it easy; the tower man would know the timetable, and could make sure that the signals were clear as the train approached. Freight trains would have a harder time without a schedule; on the real railroad, trains on the mainline would have to stop, whistle “one short and two long” to get the attention of the tower man, and get the switches set correctly. Crews on the drill track would probably need to stop, chat with the tower man, and get the switches thrown appropriately. Everyone would need to set the levers back before leaving. That leaves the WP trains; although I could automate it, I’ll probably just occasionally throw the levers to let a WP train through, preferably when a crew is about to switch in the area.

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Thanks to Chuck who inspired me to build an interlocking machine, and shared stories and photos of the work he’d done restoring the interlocking machine at Santa Clara tower. I’ll miss him.

Information on the WP Tower from Jeff Asay's "Track and Time: The Operational History of the Western Pacific Railroad". I know I've seen more details in the California Railroad Commission decision allowing the WP crossings, but can't find references right now.

I have no connection with Modratec other than building this one kit.

Market Street: The Train Departure Board

Short shameful confession time: I built the Market Street layout because it was easier to build than a video game.

A non-trivial bit of my inspiration for the Market Street layout came from the railway switching games made by SIAM Railway Simulations. These mostly-British prototype games provide accurate simulations either of a station or for dispatching a long set of track. The station simulations put you in the role of the tower man and switcher at anything from the end of a country branch to the busy through station at Crewe. The dispatch sections include British settings (Scottish Highland line) as well as realistic versions of Tehachapi Pass, either in the 1920’s or the 1960’s. I’ve played some samples and bought other games.

SIAM's samples page lets you get a taste of the games by downloading demonstration, reduced versions of their simulations. The samples include dispatching the Highland line and Tehachapi Pass, and handling switching in the stations at Crewe and Penzance. The Tehachapi dispatching game gave me a great appreciation for getting trains over Tehachapi Pass in the steam era.

Penzance, 1987 game from SIAM Railway Simulations

Of course, I wanted to try some more American prototypes - handling the traffic coming and going from the Oakland Pier, perhaps. Or why not the San Jose Market Street station? I got a fair way through making an iPad game so I could switch those places, but I found it difficult to control all the switch engines and car movements I wanted to include. After enough tries, I found myself asking "so what would a layout set up like one of these games look like?

So, I’ve built the layout, and I've got an answer to that question.

However, to make the layout operate like the game, I need to know what trains need to come and go. More importantly, if the layout is being exhibited, I want folks to see the names of the trains coming and going so they can understand the sheer number of trains that could be handled in the 1920’s, even if the station was a creaky old Victorian barn.

Suddenly, that way-too-large display on the Raspberry Pi has a use.

Snippet of departure board. Click here to try it out for real.

My inspiration was a European-style flip-card station sign; it’s not quite prototypical for the era, but anyone who’s been in a large train station has seen one of these, so showing a listing of trains should both inform and hint at the sheer number of trains they’re seeing.

And luckily, making such a sign is easy. One of the neat habits of programmers these days is to share programs they’ve written so others can use those programs. A friendly guy named Paul Cuthbertson liked the idea of drawing flip-style departure boards, and based on an inspiring article, went off and wrote a web page to draw one.

Now, I need more than just the departure board graphics for the Market Street layout. I need a sped-up fast clock to show the current simulated time on the railroad, for the compressed track plan means trains won’t take as long to move around as on the real thing. I’ll need a way to control the board when trains arrive and leave. I’ll need a way to manage problems - backing off accidental train departures, or stopping the clock in terms of problems.

I took Paul’s code and created this departure board for San Jose Market Street. (See this Github project for the source code itself.) Pressing a number key (1-9) causes the nth train to move to its next state; a train that’s on its way will go to “arriving” on the first press, then “arrived” on the second, then will be removed from the board on the third.

Paul’s card-flipping web page turns out to require a lot of computing horsepower to flip through all 26 characters for each change. The poor little Raspberry Pi, being the size of a credit card, couldn't keep up. Instead, I changed the program so that the board only performs 6 flips per letter, instead of flipping though the whole alphabet like the real flip board.

So now, when I set up the layout, I just need to set the box containing the DCC electronics somewhere both the audience and operator can see. The stationmaster can use a keyboard to advance the departure board as trains arrive and leave. The operators know what trains they're building; the audience gets an understanding of how easily they could commute from San Jose to San Francisco (or Salinas) in 1928.

And I get a modular layout that's inspired by a video game.

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The modern practice of sharing sample code and reusable libraries is a great part of modern programming culture. Great thanks to Paul Cuthbertson for the core of the departure board code!

If the departure board idea might work for your layout, download the sources from GitHub and customize it for your own use. Drop me a note if you find it useful!

My Yardmaster Has a +4 Rulebook of Smiting

When I was a kid, I played a fair amount of Dungeons and Dragons.  At its core, D&D is interactive, co-operative storytelling.  You get a bunch of folks together around a table; one person (the “game master”) describes a situation (usually something dramatic from a fantasy novel involving saving the village from a dragon, or breaking into the Thieves’ Guild, or exploring an underground labyrinth full of monsters and treasure). You each describe what your character does, and the gamemaster describes what happens. At its best, it's like writing an adventure novel on the fly.

Dungeons and Dragons - the initial version - was originally created by war gamers. That lineage shows up as lots of statistics and lots of dice. How much damage can my fighter take before he’s disabled? How much extra damage does my extra-good sword give? What saving throw must I roll to avoid being turned to stone by a medusa? The randomness adds to the fun of role-playing, but it's easy for the dice-rolling to take over.  Worse, some folks start thinking the points are what matters rather than the story.  Min-max'ers start making decisions on the game based on the probabilities, acting out of character in order to get the best results.  “Why rescue the princess? It won't give me enough experience to reach level 7.” Munchkins - the stereotypical kid playing only to score more than their buddies - ignore the puzzles and atmosphere in order to kick in the door, kill the monsters, and collect a +16 vorpal sword.

Dungeons and Dragons is a good forty years old now.  (Note to self: keep an eye out for retirement communities with active gaming groups).  Those forty years of game play also means that role playing games have evolved. The latest versions of Dungeons and Dragons still have voluminous rule books, odd dice, and lots of mathematical tables to decide whether your thief can climb to the top of the castle wall. Other games go much more towards the story telling. One of the more extreme examples, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron von Munchausen, has the players pretend to be the famous Baron von Munchausen of tall-tales fame; each tries to tell a story to outdo the others in the 17th century German tavern…. er, sitting around the table.

And some games stress the interactive storytelling but still have some of those random mechanics. One example is Fate Core. In Fate Core, you still create an alter-ego, and catalog down some of that character’s attributes on a “character sheet”. However, unlike Dungeons and Dragons, you generally use words instead of numbers. You choose a subset of skills that your character is good at (“Very good at athletics and investigation, poor at deceiving.”) You name aspects of your character - one liners - naming both how you generally respond, and an obvious weakness. (“Thief with a heart of gold”, “always jumps in to help the underdog”, “afraid of zombies”). Fate Core uses a simpler mechanic for deciding if you succeed, with simple dice with pluses and minuses for the random angle, and a range of success where you get to narrate the result.  Most importantly, the Fate Core rules includes the simple statement:

“Both players and gamemasters have a secondary job: make everyone around you look awesome. Fate is best as a collaborative endeavor, with everyone sharing ideas and looking for opportunities to make the events as entertaining as possible… Fate works best when you use it to tell stories about people who are proactive, competent, and pragmatic. A game about librarians spending all their time among dusty tomes and learning things isn’t Fate. A game about librarians using forgotten knowledge to save the world is... Characters in a game of Fate always lead dramatic lives. The stakes are always high for them, both in terms of what they have to deal with in their world, and what they're dealing with in the six inches of space between their ears.”

After all, isn't that what we want in fantasy stories? Conan the Barbarian fighting off the invading hordes? Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser thwarting the evil Overlord? A conflicted Batman deciding whether to go after the Joker? Academic psychologists defeating the Blatant Beast in the world of Spencer’s Faerie Queene?

Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop show on YouTube shows what an actual game is like; if I’ve made you curious, go check it out.

But this blog is about model railroading.

I’ve said before that model railroad operation is pretty close to roleplaying - a bunch of us come together in a scenario planned by someone else, and try to tell a story about a day on the railroad.  Switchlists and train sheets give some of the war-gaming randomness.  But we also have a much different mission than Fate Core.  We don't want drama and excitement - we want to be recreating the action of the model railroad in a day-to-day, get-it-done model. We’re coming together to get the jobs done and keep the trains moving.

I think of it as more than a game; I’d like folks to get an appreciation of working on the railroad in the 1930s - what the jobs were like, how busy the railroad was, and where the other San Jose residents was working. The role playing is also a reminder of the difficult parts of railroading - the times you're stuck at the top of Tehachapi Pass at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum,  and can't get permission from the dispatcher to leave the siding, or wondering what a switch job would have been like in the rain or snow. It also determines whether we just re-rail those cars that fell in the canyon, or if the dispatcher immediately shuts down the railroad and sends the Big Hook to fix the derailment.

A war-gaming style doesn’t work for us; Joe can’t be a level 5 hostler; if you run over your switchman, that doesn't mean you have a half-effective switchman. But we can try to name ourselves by adjectives, just like in Fate Core. A particular tower man might be “crotchety” and "slow". A yardmaster might be “helpful”. An engineer may be “selfish” and try to tie up his train ahead of others; another engineer may be “know-it-all” and may push the schedule and safety to get to the next siding. A brakeman might be “sleepless” after ten days working without a break. The jobs might have Fate-style aspects, too. A switch job on the edge of the layout might be slow-speed: “don’t sweat it too much”, while a switchman working in the yard might want to feel as if he’s “micromanaged”. Chuck Hitchcock’s Argentine Industrial District Railway sets adjectives like this for certain jobs, with the AT&SF tower man encouraged to favor his own trains and ruin the plans for the crossing railroaders.

But just like the real railroad jobs, some of the role-playing on the layout comes from our own experience. If I operate on Rick Fortin's layout, I know there's experienced crews who know what they're doing, and newbies who make lots of mistakes, and I’m likely to plan for that behavior when I switch the yard. Some of that role-playing falls back on indivdual personality; there's going to be crochety members of the operating session, and mellow coworkers.  If Sam’s the yard master at Keyser on David Parks’ layout, then the yard’s going to be run strictly by the book. If Falkenburg is an engineer, he'll be no-nonsense. If Seth's running the yard, we'll be working double-speed, but he’ll be teaching the newbies out the whole time.

So we're kinda not role-playing - we're just running trains and letting some of our own personality bleed out. That’s not surprising; I suspect the folks who tend to play thieves in D&D probably tend towards the clever and sneaky personality, and the folks playing a paladin probably have a strong sense (or secret inclination) to make sure Things Are Done Correctly And Properly.  We'll role-play a bit outside our normal roles, but most of us probably tend towards acting in a way that has some parallel with our real self.

But model railroading is still role-playing; we need to describe a setting and provide some hints. Our operators need to know whether the rulebook is “more like guidelines” on this layout, or if breaking a rule gets you banished. Our operators need hints about the job and the role, both so they know if it’s a character they want to play, and so they know how to behave towards the others in the session. We can have a bit of randomness to make the system heroic. Perhaps some maintenance work shuts down an important stretch of track, and we all need to pull together to make it through the day. Maybe we should imagine that it’s a winter day, and getting the trains over the hill is a bit of heroism.

Sometimes we just play up the drama. I often describe my own Vasona Branch model railroad as a "high speed, thrill ride switching layout", for I personally like challenging switching puzzles, and I want to invite operators who are interested both in the prototype and in the switching challenges. Like Fate, most of my operators are "proactive, competent, and pragmatic", and if they're not saving the world with their switching, at least they're removing a bit of chaos from the tracks next to the cannery. The real crews, with thirty years of experience switching these same tracks, were probably just as adept at dispelling the chaos.

If I want to inspire my operators with a bit of drama, I can be blunt in my introduction to the layout:

"It's June 15, 1932; apricots are ripe, and everyone's running full-out to can the crop. The canneries have been running double shifts since April on different crops, and you all have been working with hardly a break since then. You've got all the shifts you would want; you don't dare try to take time off, and you've had enough practice so you're confident and working together as a team.

It's six in the morning; the canneries start up in two hours. You need to get the boxcars in position so all those guys on the dock can load the cars up. Go show those guys on the loading docks how railroaders get things done.

But not all my operators are like that; some of my visiting operators, either by choice or by a random roll of the invite list, can be sedate, challenged by puzzles, or are new model railroaders getting thrown into the deep end of the San Jose extra board switching pool. Sometimes, those folks play the role of the new hire on the railroad, destined in his or her first shift to decide whether railroading is the right profession, or if he's going back to the farm where they won't need to distinguish between thirty boxcars in various shades of brown. Some folks might play the character of the old hand who needs some help in the role, which might frustrate the other folks on his train, or might remind folks of how the railroaders protected their own. Hopefully, no one's playing the rest of Ed Gibson's crew on that infamous trip on the Hayward Turn. Sometimes the operator having a hard time on the layout reminds us of crews the real railroad. Sometimes, we hope they'll fall asleep under the layout. Sometimes we'll just want to scream - just like on the real railroad.

To help our operators play the correct role on the railroad, we need to give them hints. We can suggest the tone of the operating session in our introduction and in how we explain our layout, the way the game master does. Just like Fate Core, we can use adjectives to give our operators hints about their roles or their characters. We can also let each operator's personality reflect into the game, either by letting the operators be themselves, or carefully inviting the folks who match the tone for our layout. No matter which way we provide those role-playing hints, our operators will end up making the operating session awesome, and as entertaining as possible... even if they're not a level 5 hostler.

Interested in other story-style role playing games? Check out Tabletop's video of Dread, where characters need to pull a block from an unstable Jinga block stack to avoid bad things happening, or Fiasco's story-telling based on 1970's dance clubs. And if you'd prefer that +16 vorpal sword, check out the card game Munchkin.

Complicating Model Railroad Operations

Here's a cute trick for complicating model railroad operations. Last year, James McNab saw a tank car appear on the Iowa Interstate, the short line railroad he models. The tank car sat around for three days, then disappeared. James figured out it was a misrouted car that wasn't supposed to come to the Iowa Interstate. It sat around for a couple days, getting in the way, until folks could figure out where to send it.

James thought this was a nice way to complicate operations on his model railroad of the same track. He now occasionally places a misrouted tank car on the layout, and warns crews either to "leave it alone" or bring it back to the yard. It's a quick and easy way to complicate operations. For folks modeling the 1970's (or perhaps even the 1930's), a siding full of idle freight cars might be another way to increase the puzzle challenge of operations.

And That's Why You Stare At Old Photos

J.S. Roberts, 1934

The dried fruit packing house at the corner of San Carlos Street and the Los Gatos branch has always gotten a lot of attention on my layout. When I was first planning the layout, I saw the name Abinante and Nola on a 1950 Sanborn map, and decided then to leave space for a packing house with that name on the side. The current model of the plant, kitbashed from a Campbell Scale Models "Tower's Flowers" kit, was a decent model - large, and with plenty of loading doors - but didn't actually match the real building.

When I finally got serious about history, I also found out that the building wasn't occupied by Abinante and Nola during the time I model. I instead found out about Higgins-Hyde, and prune pools, and crafty dried fruit buyers during the 1930's, and J.S. Roberts taking over the business after Higgins got run out of town on a rail. One of the Abinante or Nola sons told me about how he remembered the plant as a big, dark barn, and also that it was his dad's favorite warehouse because its location on a dead-end section of San Carlos Street made it easy for farmers to drop off fruit... and how my model didn't really look anything like what he remembered.

And then, I found an actual picture of the plant, and confirmed that the model was very, very wrong. Since then, making a more accurate model has been pretty high on my to-do list.

Model being assembled

Building the Model: Fast forward a year or two, and I finally start on the improved model. Because the one picture I had of the building was so poor, I instead grabbed my favorite photo of the Guggenhime packing house in San Jose and used that as inspiration. After a few pencil sketches to plan, I pulled out the styrene sheet and started cutting. This was going to be a big model - maybe 14 inches by 8 inches, and six inches high. I'd had problems with similar models warping horribly, so this time I built the model on a plexiglas core to give it some additional rigidity. That worked - I pretty quickly had the four walls, and so I moved on to painting them using my favorite trick of gesso and india ink on weathered styrene to get the appropriate weathered look.

This weekend, after much of the painting was done, I finally squared up the model and glued together the basic block. That, of course, meant it was time to move on to adding details, and the only way to do that was stare at some real packing houses and steal the best bits from them all.

Guggenhime packing house, San Jose.

Here's that photo of the Guggenhime packing house that inspired this model, taken by local commercial photographer John Gordon back in the early 1930's. Like the J.S. Roberts packing house that this model represents, the Guggenhime packing house was a big barn-like structure, three stories high, and already looking weathered here in the 1930's. My first detail was going to be the loading dock doors - I'd planned on using plastic castings, but they wouldn't fit with the plexiglas walls behind the cut outs. Instead, I turned back to the Guggenhime photo and zoomed in on some of those loading dock doors for inspiration.

Here's a close-up of one of those doors, along with my notebook scribblings as I stared at the photo. The loading doors are obviously simple things - some siding nailed on a frame of 2x4's at best. The door hangers look an awfully lot like the tracks used for boxcar doors (I even went rummaging around in my scrap box looking for just those sorts of tracks without luck, so looks like I'll be visiting the model train store soon for reasonable parts.) I really like the angled sheet metal keeping rain off the door, the half-circle metal hangars holding the door up, the 2x12 holding the track away from the building, and the plain wooden blocks acting as door stops. Look at the scratches and gouges as well - the scratches at the height of a hand truck, perhaps, and the wear and dirt close to the ground, and that scratch just where the door would be when the door was fully opened. These are great details, and I ought to be able to use them in the model. And if you zoom in on the original photo at SJSU, you'll even see that funky "2" indicating the door number in a surprisingly artistic hand.

Zooming in on Door 1:When I started looking at that photo tonight, I was having a great time writing down all these little details in hopes I could add them to the model. I even zoomed in on those doorstops, and decided they were crude blocks of 2x4s - nice detail, and easy to model. And then I zoomed in on door one, and saw many of the same details... and then realized there was a strange box stuck on top of the doorstop, maybe eight inches high. Zooming in, you can even distinguish the lettering on the box front: "SWITCH LIST".

Now, when a railroad switch crew comes to your warehouse with a boxcar, they need to figure out where to place that car. If your loading dock can only hold one car, maybe there's not a lot of choice, but Guggenhime & Co. had at least six doors spread across three buildings here in San Jose, and if the prunes for Poughkeepsie are behind door number one, you'll have some very unhappy warehousemen if they need to cart those prunes down the dock to a New York Central car spotted at door number six. Now, the railroad crew has three ways they can figure out where to put that boxcar. They might go by convention - you always want the boxcars on the near end of the track, and the tank cars over by the piping. They might rely on hearing your preferences, getting off the locomotive when they arrive and searching for the foreman to tell them what to do. And if it's the middle of the night and no one's there to tell them what to do, you might leave them a note.

The Switch List box is likely to be the place where the manager of the packing house would leave notes about where to put the different cars. He would have had his phone call with the agent or car department to find out that the empties he needs (or the cars he's waiting for) are arriving tonight, he would have known what cargos would go in each, and he could quickly scribble down what he needs. The Northern Pacific boxcar full of box shook goes to door six. The two cars for the East Coast go to doors 1 and 2. The SP car getting bags of prunes for a steamship out of San Francisco to Europe goes at door four. He pencils that in, folds the note, and puts it in the box. Late that night, the train crew rolls in with the cars for Guggenhime, stops, pulls out the instructions, curses a bit because they've got the cars in a completely different order, and starts their switching. The next morning, the manager comes in, checks his cars, and starts the crews loading and unloading them. (If it's a weekend, we might see something more like Vince Nola's memories of driving by the warehouse with his dad on Sunday night to make sure the SP had placed the cars they'd promised would be there by Monday morning.)

If an army marches on its stomach, the Switch List box reminds us that a railroad marched on a lot of paper, whether for internal consumption, sharing official correspondence with shippers, or leaving helpful notes to a crew about where a boxcar should be placed. Tony Thompson has talked about the equivalent for a station agent - the bill box used to trade the waybills (official billing papers) and switching instructions between station agents and the crews that might be visiting the town when the station was closed. Guggenhime's switch list box was very unlikely to have official paperwork because the railroads held onto that tightly for billing purposes, but the switchlist box seems just right for unofficial instructions that needed to survive a winter rainstorm. My model for J.S. Roberts will only be a third the size of Guggenhime and won't need the bill box to tell where cars should be placed, but I suspect my model will still have the bill box sitting up on top of one of those 2x4s.

[Guggenghime packing house photo from the John C. Gordon photo collection at San Jose State University. J.S. Roberts photo taken from the edge of another John C. Gordon panorama of the San Carlos Street viaduct, also in San Jose State's collection.

If you've got better ideas about how the switchlist box was used, leave a comment below or drop me a note. I'm guessing at a lot of this, and I'd love either some confirmation or suggestions about how to use a switchlist box like feature to make switching more realistic on my layout.]

Seeing Local Model Railroads at "See" Level

Leo Pesce has been visiting some of our local layouts out here in the Bay Area and videotaping how things look from a train's eye view. Go check out his videos on YouTube to see some of our cool local layouts.

Rick Fortin's Valley Division Fourth District ATSF layout models a hypothetical Santa Fe branch from Chico north over the Siskyou mountains. Rick's layout is huge, requiring twenty people to operate well. One of my early operations experiences was handling the yard switcher at the west end of the yard, where I spent eight hours one Saturday just sorting boxcars. After spending a fun day in the yard, I went wandering around the layout at the end of the session and noticed some of the boxcars I switched spotted at industries up at the far end of the layout.

David Parks's Cumberland Western models the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Western Maryland as they fought through the Appalachian mountains near Cumberland, West Virginia. I've been lucky enough to operate several times at David's; again, it's a large layout that shows the fun of practicing teamwork to get trains moving over the railroad.

Making Beautiful Historic Maps

A couple years back, I mentioned a San Jose Japantown historic map which showed not only the location of the businesses and community sites for San Jose's center for Japanese-Americans, but also highlighted the canneries clustered around Eighth and Taylor Streets on the edge of Japantown.

I'd missed the fact that Ben Pease, the artist behind that map, has done similar ones for many other California towns with that attracted Japanese immigrants. His Japantown Atlas includes similar maps for San Francisco, Sacramento, Walnut Grove, Lodi, as well as many more towns in Central and Southern California. Many of the immigrant communities were close to the railroads and to the canneries, so if you're researching either the industries, the trains, or the towns, you'll probably be familiar with the locations. The San Luis Obispo Japantown, for example, was a block located just next to the Pacific Coast Railway's yard, helping me better understand the locations around that yard, as mentioned in Tom Knapp's presentation on his Nn3 modular layout at last year's Bay Area Layout Design and Operations Weekend.

And that's a great opening to remind you all that if you're interested in model railroads, history, or model railroad operations, come on over to Alameda on January 25 and 26, 2014 for my favorite model railroad event of the year. The Layout Design and Operations meet is always a great program, with talks, clinics, and layout design advice on Saturday, followed by chances to operate on local model railroads on Sunday.

See y'all there!

The Best Time To Rip Up Track Is Two Weeks Before An Operating Session

Well, well! It's certainly been a while since I talked about model railroad subjects!

Let's just say it was a busy spring. I hosted an operating session for the Bay Area Layout Design and Operations meet (always the week before the Superbowl, best event on the calendar, come on over next year!). I hosted another operating session in March for our local model railroad invitational, BayRails, and hosted some very skilled operators from Santa Rosa, Arizona, Southern California, and British Columbia. I also had an open house for the Vasona Branch in early April as part of the local Iron Horse Express convention. Whew!

But that list doesn't quite tell how crazy a winter it was, and some of those stories are worth telling.

Adding some "Hurry Up and Wait" to a Model Railroad When I've heard professional railroaders talk about their jobs, I often hear about the "hurry up and wait" moments - how they'll have moments during the day when they need to rush, and other points in their jobs when all they can do is wait for long stretches of time.

I'd had a couple folks remind me that railroaders don't just show up to large industries and start switching; often they'll arrive, search around for the foreman, ask about car placements, and then start switching. Even though my switch lists already contain car doors, that idea of having to walk in and talk to the foreman seemed like a nice bit of the daily grind worth bringing into the operating session.

My low-tech solution was to take a Post-It, fold it in half to make a standing sign, and write "Contact foreman before switching plant". My crews would pull their trains out of staging, think about their moves, then start backing down the track to Plant 51 before seeing the signs. They'd come over, I'd make a couple changes to their switchlist and door spotting instructions, then turn them loose.

I liked how this worked out. The crews got a brief interruption before they started switching that got them away from thinking about the layout, and I dragged out operations a bit more (which is usually a good thing on a smaller layout). Even if their initial plans may have been thwarted, the crews seemed ok with the interruption.

The idea of "find the foreman" isn't original; Seth Neumann has blue flags made from pins and tape blocking some tracks at the Snoboy transshipment yard on his WP Milpitas Yard model railroad; I'm sure other modelers have used similar tricks. It worked well for my layout, so I'm suspecting it's time to make more permanent signs. Excitement At The Operating Sessions As usual, hosting operating sessions on a model railroad can be a bit stressful. I find my Vasona Branch requires a fair amount of prep work beforehand - cleaning track, vacuuming scenery, testing switches, tuning locomotives. I'd told the story back in January about how the prep obviously wasn't enough; on Saturday night before the operating session, cars were constatly derailing when backing into the track leading to Plant 51. Much of Saturday night and Sunday morning was spent trying to tune the cars and track so one of the busiest locations on the railroad didn't turn into a sea of derailed refrigerator cars. That repair worked and led to a good operating session on Sunday afternoon, but that track had gotten me mad.

That track at Plant 51 had been installed probably on day 3 of the model railroad. The offending section was a climbing track with a curved turnout leading to an industry, and with the turnout placed over a joint in the subroadbed. What seemed like inconsequential bumps on my first day of construction had always been trouble spots. It took the frantic effort Saturday night to convince me it was time to fix that track for good. The next week, I ripped up that entire stretch of track. I took a power sander to the roadbed to even out some bumps in the homasote, stiffened some of the joints in the plywood underneath, spackled the roadbed to get rid of any detectable unevenness, and got the track back into operation in time for BayRails. I also ripped out some of the adjoining scenery to better model the missing Los Gatos Creek bridge. Photos forthcoming as soon as I can mock up the Higgins-Hyde Packing Company plant.

The Plant 51 switch ran much better during BayRails, but I'd caught a few cars derailing during the operating session. Being conscientious, I went out the following Sunday morning determined to run the badly-behaving cars around the layout and identify trouble spots. I immediately hit two big ones - some uneven roadbed near Alma that had always been a low-grade problem, and much more frequent derailments at the Los Gatos siding that had been a constant annoyance for the last few years. After the good luck with the Plant 51 switch, I decided to rip out and replace both stretches of track... only to realize that I had two weeks to get both locations back in order before the Iron Horse Express open house. Short answer: the track got replaced, but it was a little touch-and go there.

I did learn some lessons from all these episodes. The Los Gatos Creek scene in San Jose, while unfinished, still came together remarkably fast once I'd decided to rip out and replace the track, and the new trackage makes operations a dream. I'd forgotten how fast I could build and repair when I had some hard deadlines, and the deadlines certainly contributed to getting some lingering problems fixed for good.

Going out that Sunday morning after the operating session was also a wise move, for I fixed several misbehaving cars while I could still remember where the problems had been occurring. More importantly, running a test train with only the worst cars helped me realize how badly-performing some of those cars were, and helped me zero in on bad trackage that I might not have noticed during a regular operating session. I'll certainly try to repeat this exercise after future sessions.

Guess it's time to schedule another operating session soon so I'll have a reason to rip up some track at inappropriate times.

San Jose Switching Limits: Confirmed!

It's funny that I'm an SP modeler, considering my father spent fifteen years at the Western Pacific Railroad. His knowledge of the business side of the railroad thanks to his time working on rates and doing sales in Oakland means that I know more about railroad tariffs than most kids.

And every now and then, he finds these tidbits and passes them on to me. Just before he joined the WP in 1952, they'd had a tour for the San Francisco salesmen of the San Jose sales area, and the booklet given to each salesman included this neat little map showing the WP and SP team tracks as well as the switching limits.

What are switching limits and how do they differ from yard limits? Yard limits are operational; they tell train crews which areas they can switch with impunity, and which requires the dispatcher's permission. Switching limits affect the rates charged customers (because moving cars within a terminal area has a different price than hauling it outside that area), and affects crew salary. As Jason Hill explained a while back, trains going outside switching limits generally required road crews and were paid by mileage (with a minimum) while yard crews switching within switching limits would get a daily rate.

At least for 1952, the switching limits for the SP in San Jose went to the north end of College Park yard, out (probably) to the San Jose Brick Co. spur on the Los Gatos branch, and down to the GE plant on the south side of town. This suggests that Campbell and Los Gatos probably got switched by road crews, while all the canneries around Auzerais St. on my layout could have been switched by yard crews.\

Remind me during operating sessions to give fewer cookies to the crews doing the San Jose Cannery job, and more to the crews switching Campbell and Los Gatos, ok? We might as well maintain the pay disparity for realism.

And for you WP fans, how about all those team tracks scattered around town?

Better Brakemen

You've got to admit that model railroad operations does tend to focus your mind. Many have said how running on a double-deck layout isn't that distracting; usually you're so focused on your own train that you don't know the action happening on the lower level.

That's also true for keeping track of what's happening near you. One of my first operating sessions almost ended in disaster when the crew switching Campbell started pulling a long train of cars towards San Jose, and a crew in San Jose started pulling a long train of cars towards Campbell. Because there's a curve between the two stations, the crew didn't notice that they were trying to occupy the same track until it was too late.

Soon after, I printed out some of the Operations Road Show paper flagmen, and I keep a few scattered around the layout so crews can guard track and avoid another crew intruding into space they need. Usually this works, though we've got a few flagmen with wheel marks showing that even careful crews sometimes run over flagmen.

John Plocher liked the paper flagmen on my layout, but felt they were insufficiently noticeable. John came up with the elegant solution of the DCC Brakeman, a little PC board cutout of a brakeman with a base that could touch both rails to power an LED. His little brakemen are both human-shaped and light up nicely - a great idea and very nice implementation.

John has put the plans up on his website, but he also had a set of brakemen built and assembled. They're currently for sale at the Train Shop in Santa Clara for around $7; the only work is to solder the figure onto the base, and attach the weight to the base. Go pick a few up for safety!

Model Railroad Sudoku

As I've mentioned before, I love model railroading as a hobby because there's so many different types of projects I can do.  If I'm feeling detail-oriented, I can tune the mechanism of a balky locomotive.  If I'm feeling creative, I can cover myself in plaster.  If I'm feeling analytic, I can play Sudoku.

Sudoku?

Well, practically Sudoku.

One of the many questions I'd love to know about the real life San Jose-Los Gatos branch was how those trains operated.  What was a typical day for a brakeman? Was the work switching the canneries and packing plant a hard and undesirable job?   Were the same people on the job for months, or was the work being done by whatever inexperienced employees were handy?

Information like this is sometimes available in time books, the notebooks that railroaders kept to record their hours and wages.  These usually had significant detail on the jobs being done.  For example, in this time book for a fireman working out of Portland in 1939, you can see how Mr. Hendershott did most of his time in yard switching wherever he could get work - Portland, Albany, or Corvallis - with occasional higher-paying road trips on long distance trains.  He also spent significant amounts of time away from Portland getting hours. With some non-trivial analysis, it's possible to extract other details out of the books.

I've never found one of these books for my area and my era.  Chuck Catania, though, found one from 1949 that he thought was from San Jose.  Here are the images of the pages from that book.  Unlike the Portland book, there's not much here - a date, a three digit number, a couple letters, something that might be a time, something that might be a locomotive number, and a name.  These aren't the standard columns, so it's hard to tell what was being recorded.

Luckily, some careful research and inference can help.  Chuck had originally noticed that the phone number for the owner, Mr. Gray, was for a San Jose phone exchange - Axminster 6-5114.  A quick web search shows that the AX6 exchange was used by San Jose, while AX0-5 would have been for Santa Clara.  That's a potential match.  The crew call number on the first page has a CYpress exchange, also an old phone number, so Chuck's assumption that this is a San Jose book is seeming more realistic.  A quick dash to ancestry.com's city directories shows that a John A. Gray lived in Cupertino in 1949, and he was a yardman for the Southern Pacific.

Ah, a yardman - now the book is making more sense.  He wouldn't have been on long distance trains, so he wouldn't have needed all the various entries in the pre-printed book, explaining why he made up his own unmarked columns.

Next step: the second-to-last column might be locomotive numbers, times, or something else.  Times won't work; there's a couple where the last two digits are greater than 60.  Some of the numbers look like locomotive numbers (including some diesels and some steam), but the 19xx number doesn't match a known locomotive, and it seems odd that he used the same locomotive so frequently.

More importantly, the owner of the book summed that entire column on a few pages, wrote "total" on the bottom line, and put a dollar sign before one of the totals. Those numbers must represent the pay for each day, with Mr. Gray making $175.39 in the first half of September 1949, and $287.08 in the second half. Because yardmen were paid for 8 hours of work, the pay was mostly constant: either $12.26, $12.72, $13.57, $18.55, or $19.50. Those amounts might seem odd unless you look at the back page where Mr. Gray noted potential pay per month: "30 days at Foreman: $407.10, Helper: 381.60, Herder: 367.80". The day rates have the same ratio: yardman helper gets 3% more than a herder, and 6% less than a foreman. The higher rates match the time that "Gray" was listed in the right hand column, suggesting it's listing the foreman for the job. The $18.55 and $19.50 rates were with overtime, with the highest rates again in the cases where Gray was foreman.

Let's turn to that second column again. Each is a number and a pair of letters: "706 BRd". The letters are either "BRd", "PA", "CP", or "NS". Some thought and searching turns up possibilities: they're the names of either yards or yard assignment positions. "CP" is obviously College Park, the older San Jose yard, and the location for all the extra freight jobs that Mr. Gray held. "NS" probably is Newhall St. and refers to the Newhall Yard next to the Santa Clara station. Newhall Yard was the newer yard on the main line, and handled through freights, I suspect, because of its location. For "BRd" and "PA", I'd originally guessed "Palo Alto (California St)" and either "Butler Road" (in South San Francisco), "Berryessa Road" (for the east side of San Jose) or "Redwood Junction" (after one entry that looked like "BRJ"). A better guess would be "Brokaw Road" for the north end of Newhall St, which counted as a separate job into the 1970's, and "Park Ave" for the crews servicing the Cahill St. passenger station.

Decoding the numbers required shoving all those entries into a spreadsheet for better analysis. Sorting by the unknown number showed that the number always matched the letter code - 700-709 for "BR", 720-739 for "CP", 740-759 for "NS", and 760-763 for "PA". One guess is these are job numbers; most of the time, entries for the same job number also have the same third column, suggesting it's a start time. Job 704 was a Brokaw Road job starting at 7:59 am, 711 was a College Park job that started at 3:59 pm (because it was the second job of the day at least once.) The 760's make sense for Park Ave. because they were numbered consecutively job 764, the depot herder. (Herder jobs were yardmen on foot throwing switches, and paid less than jobs on the locomotive.)

All the high-pay days match the days where Mr. Gray worked two shifts in the same day, suggesting the extra pay for the second job was because of overtime.

So what did I learn from all of this?

• I'll bet most of those "X Eng" jobs were cases where Mr. Gray worked extra freights switching in the San Jose area. Considering the sheer number (about a third of the jobs he did), I'd guess these were all the local freight jobs, suggesting that some of those runs might have been switching the Los Gatos branch. It would be interesting to learn whether in the 1930's which jobs were handled by yard crews, and which had to be handled by crews on extra freights. The locations of the extra freights suggests that the local switching jobs were handled out of College Park rather than Newhall Yard.
• Gray might have been a junior crew member because he was switching jobs all over the place, but he had enough experience to be foreman in around 30 of the jobs, often on extras.
• Gray was also working awfully frantically, with few if any days off between September and December 5. Once winter hit, he wasn't working again til March 1950, and only got two weeks of work done before the log book ends. I wonder - did he give up on the railroad, or just get a new log book? The long run without breaks, and the occasional double shifts, make railroading sound like an awfully hard career.
• Now that I know about the different jobs, I know more about railroading in San Jose. Various friends have mentioned former yard crews in San Jose; now, if I ever talk to any, I'll know to ask which jobs they worked, where they started their days, and which jobs would have served the canneries and packing houses of San Jose.

My big questions:

• What's the difference between Newhall St and Brokaw Road jobs - north and south ends of the yard, or was there a real difference in the work?
• Who handled switching the various industries - would the yard crews do such work, or only the extra trains?
• Which jobs were the desirable ones? Mr. Gray didn't get many chances to work the depot; were these considered easier work?
• Which jobs were morning, and which were evening? I can infer this partially from the days when Mr. Gray had two jobs, but don't fully know how often yard jobs ran overnight.

And that's why I don't need to buy Sudoku books.

Operating at Techachapi

I've mentioned in the past an unnatural interest in timetable and train order operation, the operating rules that railroads formerly used to keep trains apart. Timetable and train order (TT&TO) operation uses a combination of pre-printed timetables and telegraphed orders describing the pecking order of the different trains to let crews out in the field, far away from any way of communicating with a dispatcher, decide whether or not they're allowed to move or should stay in their nice, safe siding.

My layout is a bit too small for realistic TT&TO operations, but I've been able to experience it when dispatching on Jim Providenza's Santa Cruz Northern. But most model railroads are too small and fast-moving to really experience TT&TO. There's really only two choices if you want to try TT&TO: build a time machine, go back in time to the 1940's, and get a job on a railroad, or go to San Diego and operate on the La Mesa Model Railroad Club's layout at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum during one of their operating weekends. I'd had a brief chance to serve as a train order operator at La Mesa last year, but was still eager to get the full experience.

Last weekend, I went whole-hog. Thanks to an invite from the folks at the La Mesa club, I got a chance to do one of their all-weekend intense operating sessions, running trains from 8am to 8pm on both Saturday and Sunday, and got a sense of both the stress and boredom that was so representative of the real railroads.

La Mesa has its TT&TO sessions about once every three months, and each session is a continuation of the last session. This session ran from 8 pm on December 3, 1952 to December 4, 1952; the train orders from the previous day were still at each operator's desk and the trains were positioned exactly where they were before, ready for us to pick up wherever things left off three months back.

Even though I've seen the layout as a tourist, the layout's mind-blowing as an operator. If you walk around it as a tourist, you see a medium sized museum with a large display, mostly focused on the passing sidings at Caliente and tracks spiraling up the side of the mountain. But when you start operating there, you find it's much, much larger - a hundred and twenty foot long yard at Bakersfield, similar trackage in a hidden aisle representing the double-track in the valley between Bakersfield and Bena, and another long stretch before you enter the public museum spaces near Caliente.

Climbing up out of Caliente, you climb and criss-cross the hills as the trains get over your head, then find yourself eventually on their upper mezzanine floor where you have another long stretch before you reach the famous Tehachapi Loop scene. Another long stretch, and you finally hit the upper Mojave yard, another seventy feet long with huge staging yards just past there. Your train climbs a good fifteen feet between Bakersfield and Mojave, and those trains are huge in model railroad terms - forty and fifty car trains are normal, and a couple hundred car trains - fifty feet long! - went down the hill during the operating session.

And that's just the main line. The staging yards beyond Bakersfield fill some of the areas under the layout. Extra little yards - the passenger tracks here, or yard for the modern equipment used during museum hours - get hidden under various parts of the scenery. Often times, reaching some of these hidden yards or the secret car repair facility required crawling under the layout; so did getting to the yardmaster and train order operator's location in Bakersfield yard, and a good yard crew at Bakerfield had at least one crew member agile enough to duck back and forth under the layout. It's probably no coincidence that the layout was formed by a group of La Mesa teenagers who at the dawn of the club probably loved diving under benchwork, and the club is still remarkably tolerant of young members compared to other model railroad groups.

Friday Night

Tom and I both flew in on Friday as one part of the out-of-town contingent participating in the operating session, and after a tour of the layout, we got to help out with preparing the different script-like paperwork needed for the operating session - lists of trains scheduled, switching work expected in the yard, and expected arrival order - then spent a bit of time proving we could navigate around the backstage areas to leave all the paperwork at yardmaster, staging yard, and operator locations. We stayed late being good citizens, made it back to the hotel around 11 or 12, and collapsed ASAP in true railroader fashion.

Saturday

The alarm rang way too early around 6:30. With a fine breakfast at the New Orleans-themed restaurant at the 1960's era motel, we made it to the museum in time for our 8:00 a.m. call. My first assignment: the Woodford train order office I'd worked last year. The club members already had last session's trains pulled out of staging and located on the layout; with a quick look over the past train record and train orders, I put on the operator's headset, and waited for the firehose of trains to be pointed at me as the clock started.

It's worth mentioning that La Mesa uses regular clocks for the sessions, though sometimes 12 hours off of the real time. Our session on Saturday started at 8:00 pm on December 3, 1952, and ended that evening at 8:00 am, December 4. Sunday's schedule picked up at 8:00 am December 4, 1952, and ran through that day of 1952. Evenings were dominated by the overnight passenger trains between Los Angeles and San Francisco, with occasional through freights.

As the train order operator at La Mesa, my job wasn't that hard:

• First, watch for trains coming uphill or downhill. The train order operator needs to stop trains that deserve additional instructions, so to check for additional orders, warn the dispatcher with the words "Woodford heading west (or east)". The dispatcher could check his train sheets to figure out what train that was, think about whether he had more train orders for that train, and tell you whether he had any additional train orders to give that train.
• Second, set the train order signal at the station to indicate whether the train needed to stop. The La Mesa gang knows a lot about prototype operation, and one of the operators hinted that I was setting the train order signal to green too fast. "Don't change it till the engineer could see the flag; if he didn't see the flag move, the Southern Pacific rules said he had to stop just in case you'd forgotten to reset the flag after the last train."
• Third, clear the signal after the train received any orders, mark the time the train passed, and warn the dispatcher about the train going past. The dispatcher was always hungry for train position information, so it was acceptable to interrupt almost any conversation on the telephone to tell the dispatcher about the passing train.
• Finally, write up the orders themselves. The dispatcher would tell me how many copies were needed, so I'd pull out the pad of train order forms, add an appropriate number of carbon papers between the layouts, and start transcribing the train orders:

To C&E THIRD 802 at WOODFORD:

EXTRA ATSF 140 WEST MEET THIRD 802 AT WALONG THIRD 802 TAKE SIDING

DFM, Chief Dispatcher

That's the life of a train order operator - watch trains pass, transcribe the orders, listen on the telephone to hear orders going to other stations and build up a mental model of what trains were passing, check out the scenery, organize the desk - hey, here's the train sheet from last year, and there's my name and the shift I handled!

Train order operator at Woodford had its quiet moments, but the real railroads did too, and there were enough terrifying moments as I tried to write down the train orders exactly to keep me entertained and out of trouble. I also could check out the various photos and maps showing the scenery they're planning on building at Woodford. I also got to hear and read the different orders to the trains, and get a sense for the legalistic language used for train orders.

After the six hour shift at Woodford, I got relieved, and got a chance to work as crew on the Hill Crew taking trains from Bakersfield to Mojave. I was feeling a little nervous at my first serious chance at running under train orders, but also a bit cocky because I thought I understood train orders. When they were short crews and sent me out without a mentor on my first trip, I thought: "No problem, I can do this."

It's crazy in Bakersfield yard, with six or seven crew running about, switching cars and preparing trains. I finally get the train order operator's attention around 4:45am, and he hands me a stack of train orders. Let's look at my orders:

CLEARANCE:

KERN JCT. Station, DECEMBER 4, 1952

To Conductor and Engineer THIRD 802 displaying GREEN flags

I have 2 orders for your train as follows: Order No. 9 No. 10

Train order No. 9

To Conductor and Engineer THIRD 802

At KERN JCT

EXTRA ATSF 170 WEST HAS RIGHT OVER THIRD 802 WOODFORD TO BENA

Train Order No. 10

To Conductor and Engineer THIRD 802

At KERN JCT

ENGINE ATSF 225 RUN EXTRA MOJAVE TO KERN JCT AND HAS RIGHT OVER THIRD 802 MOJAVE TO BENA

My timetable shows that SP train 55, a passenger train, is supposed to roll into Bena (at the bottom of the mountain, and the start of double-track all the way to Bakersfield) at 5:06, and is supposed to arrive at Bakersfield at 5:15am. If I can get out of town quickly, I'll be on double track and I can make it past the passenger train. After a bit of work getting the engines set up, I see the engine ATSF 225 at the head of the train rolling into the yard; whew - that means one train I need to watch for is out of the way. I thread my way onto the mainline, pop through the backdrop at the end of Bakersfield yard, and end up in a dark aisle holding the track leading towards the Tehachapi mountains.

I roll through Magunden, Edison, and Sandcut at moderate speed, switching between watching the front of my train and signals, and watching the end to make sure the helper locomotive is doing ok. After two hundred feet of track and a good ten minutes of running, I find myself at the end of the double track at Bena. There's a train register book there, but my official timetable says that's only for trains that started or ended between here and Bakersfield. There was something else I was going to check in Bena… and I look over and find the last passenger train lost its last two cars on the track at Edison on the other side of the aisle. I ought to just ignore it - in real life, that's ten miles back - but I instead walk back to Bakersfield yard and warn the previous crew they lost part of their train.

Back in Bena: check the timetable, no trains should be coming at me. I'd already checked my train orders and marked the ones that didn't matter any more. I can't think of any other reason to delay, so I throw the switch to get out onto the mainline and start heading up into the mountains. I get a scenic view of the wider canyon at Ilmon and narrow canyon further up. The signals are all green, so I know there's no opposing trains. I roll into Caliente, pull up to the train order station, and greet the operator.

And around the corner comes Steve, who'd trained me on the Woodford train operator position last time. "Robert, by what authority did you travel from Bena to Caliente?"

Oh, wow, I'm getting a rule book check - I'd heard they quiz new operators to make sure they're prepared for operations. "I'm running on the schedule of train 802; the previous two sections have already left according to the train register in Bakersfield. I have train orders saying I can run from Bakersfield to Mojave. All my train orders are fulfilled because the opposing trains have all been dealt with. There are no other conflicting trains on the schedule; I checked at Bena when I left double track." I'm feeling confident and safe. I'm waiting for a softball "what attributes are necessary to call something a train?"

Pause.

"Let me see those orders… So have you seen Extra 170 West yet?"

Um… oh, right, I'd thought in Bakersfield I was going to have to wait in Bena for that train… and forgot to double-check my orders in Bena. That train wasn't expecting me to be this far along, and if I'd been unlucky, I could have had a cornfield meet with it any place between Caliente and Bena. If this had been a real railroad, I would have been looking for a new career at that point; because it's a model, I instead got good-natured but stern reminders from several club members about the importance of checking train orders and only moving when safe.

And down the hill came Extra 170, and to add insult to injury, we're both too long for the siding at Caliente, both with fifty cars. Luckily, I can break off my helper and fill the second siding at Caliente, but that delays both of us and compounds my embarrassment. It delays things more when Extra 170 remembers to ask whether there's any sections following me, and he learns there's a fourth section that, after a perusal of his train orders, is having to wait for him at Bena too. The dispatcher holds me for a bit longer to let me stew in my ignorance, and finally tells the train order operator to let me get out of there and stop blocking up his railroad. I double check my paperwork, check the timetable again, decide that this time I must be safe, and start heading up hill.

And it's a beautiful run, watching this huge train climb up through the many curves and over my head. I worry that the helper engine might push the rest of the train off the track, but it all behaves as it snakes around the hills, and as I steal quick glances at the hills and beautiful scenery. Green signals all the way through the public areas of the layout, then spiral up to the mezzanine and into Woodford where I get another order:

Train Order No. 14

To Conductor and Engineer THIRD 802

At WOODFORD

EXTRA ATSF 140 WEST MEET THIRD 802 AT WALONG THIRD 802 TAKE SIDING

DFM, Chief Dispatcher

That's a meet at the next siding uphill; I roll up to the Tehachapi Loop where my train loops over itself, pull into the siding, and accidentally run a bit too far and can't stop till I've blocked the main. I back up, out of danger, and eventually ATSF 140 rolls downhill so its engineer will get to see the mountain scenery.

And finally, after about an hour and a half of running the third section of train 802, I pull into Mojave yard with a much better appreciation for the caution required when operating under train orders and timetable operation.

A slight wreck in the canyon below Caliente delayed trains for the rest of the session and triggered a flurry of activity as wreck trains were brought in from both ends of the railroad, but it delayed ops until we broke for pizza at 8pm. We again helped out with setup for the next day, headed back to the hotel, and collapsed again around midnight.

Sunday

Alarm goes off at 6:30 am; waking up this early is getting old. Another quick breakfast under mardi gras beads, and we're back at the museum at 8:00 am. I'm again train order operator, this time at Mojave yard, the upper end of the layout. Handling train orders at one of the terminal stations (where trains start and end) has a bit more work; there's more train orders needed to start trains on their journey, and sometimes I'm making several copies of an order to give to "All Westward Trains" for the rest of the day. There's lots of listening on the telephone, lots of writing, and a bit of cleanup of the desk (again with all the train orders from the last several sessions present.) It's also a bit less lonely with a yardmaster and train crews usually in the neighborhood for conversations and status checks.

I also get some time to read a real railroad rulebook, Josserand's "Rights of Trains", that carefully describes every rule in the railroad rule book, and explains all the edge cases and subtleties of the rule. Josserand was a Western Pacific railroad dispatcher; my dad met him during a stint working in Sacramento, and still remembers the dispatcher's office in the Sacramento depot with over-stressed, over-caffeinated, and over-nicotined dispatchers controlling trains between Oakland and Salt Lake. Josserand also had words for dispatchers and train order operators:

Train dispatchers should not engage in conversation while on duty, except on matters pertaining to their duty… Train dispatchers should not read a newspaper or magazine while on duty…. It is hazardous for train order operators to do clerical work not connected with train order or message work on the same desk with train orders."

Yup, the last one's definitely true; forgetting to deliver a train order because it's hidden under debris on the desk is a sure way to cause a collision. Josserand also teaches me that if I don't have enough copies of an order, I can write up new copies as long as I contact the dispatcher and confirm through repeating that my copy matches the original he has in his book. Fun for me, though an interruption for the dispatcher trying to figure out how he'll survive the next rush of trains.

And I made two big mistakes at Mojave, but both were survivable - I forgot to give an "all westbound trains" order to one train (and heard over the radio as the mistake was noticed in Caliente when he almost didn't stop for the opposing train), and requested a "clearance" (permission to proceed) for a train that wasn't yet out of staging, reserving the first half of the railroad for the twenty minutes till he got into Mojave.

After six hours on Mojave, and I'm getting compliments on my operator work; I'll thank Dear Wife and her stories of air traffic control and the importance of precise language phrased in the same way each time.

With my successes at Mojave, I switch to spend the second half of the day down as the Kern Junction train order operator, giving train orders to all the train crews coming out of Bakersfield. Where Mojave and Woodford were quiet and mellow, Bakersfield is just chaos - seven crew working the yard, engine depot, and bringing trains out of staging. The yardmaster stands in the middle of it barking orders, demanding information about incoming trains, and trying to herd his set of switching crew cats. There's shouting across the room to figure out what to do next. The orders are getting bigger because the uphill trains all have helper locomotives and extra stops to make, and I'm encountering cases where I'll need to "copy many" orders to prepare for all four sections of a train heading uphill. I'm also having to handle the chaos left over from the last operator - where are the train orders to be handed out, what trains need to be prepared to go?

Without the dramatic scenery, Bakersfield might not have been as photogenic, but the frantic work and huge trains being assembled in front of me pointed out the scale I was working at. When a set of helper engines, coupled together, rolled downhill and through Bakersfield, I realized that the three cab-forwards and two 2-10-2 locomotives together were longer than most trains on my model railroad. Woah.

We bailed at 7:30, just before closing; we both were catching the last flights of the night out of San Diego, and weren't eager to miss those flights. With the last trains still rolling, we snuck out to our car (parked very conveniently next to the museum at 0-dark-thirty that morning), headed back to the airport, and headed back towards modern life.

And I'm a bit afraid to go back in the garage and look at my model railroad for fear I won't know how to run trains on anything that tiny.

[The La Mesa Model Railroad Club has operating sessions about every three months. Details on the sessions are available at Ops on Tehachapi, along with the rule book, timetable, and rule book test. Photos are all mine, take with too little care with a cameraphone; apologies for the blurry photos.]