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Anyone interested in railroading in San Jose ought to check out the latest edition of Model Railroad Hobbyist for a great set of model photos of Diridon Station in the 1950's. Vic Roseman, famous for his realistic east-coast dioramas and photos in Model Railroader magazine in the 1970's, appears to have switched coasts, and he's done some beautiful models and captured the scenes nicely.
Welcome to the Left Coast, Vic! We'll try to make sure you'll never have to model snow again!
Personally, I'm holding off for my chance to build a large and operable version of San Jose's old Market Street Station circa 1930, and try to run the tons of daily commute trains that left that victorian-era three track station on five minute intervals.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Busman's Holiday
I spent a good part of the weekend on a busman's holiday - cleaning up the computer program I use for deciding which boxcars get switched during an operating session. It's cleaned up enough so that I'm willing to let others try it out.
Go check out a very early version of SwitchList if you've got a Mac, and could use a computerized switchlist generator for your layout.
Now, if you don't know why you'd need that, let's talk about model railroad operations.
If model railroad operation is a game, then figuring out what has to be done during the game is a key detail. For the operations game, the question is "where do the trains run" and "what freight cars do the trains need to switch?" There have been all sorts of ideas proposed over the life of the hobby. Some use car cards that can be picked randomly to figure out where a car should move. John Allen, a famous modeler from the 1960's, drilled holes in his freight car roofs and stuck colored tacks in to indicate the destination of each car. (Rumor has it a real railroad tried this once, but stopped after accidentally drilling holes in the roofs of new cars held in a car carrier.) Others have placed scraps of paper with placement instructions on the top of freight cars. Others go with the simplest approach and roll dice at each town to figure out the number of cars to pick up and drop off in each town.
When I first started operating the Vasona Branch, I tried the car cards approach. I photocopied a couple hundred of the cardboard slips to represent the cars and the cargo they carried, and spent a couple nights on the repetitive task of writing down potential actions. "Take a boxcar from Plant 51 back to staging." "Take another boxcar from Plant 51 back to staging." "Take a stockcar up to the passing siding at Alma." "Take another boxcar from Plant 51 to staging, but this time pretend you're sending it to Cleveland." It was slow, painful work.
At the operating session, I dealt out a card for each freight car, and paper-clipped the cargo card to the card representing the freight car, gave a stack to my operators, and let them start. The cards worked decently - the print was a bit small, but they weren't too hard to handle, and they were easy to find if someone dropped his cards on the garage floor. I needed a place to put all those cards, so I glued together some small plastic pockets out of styrene sheet to hold the cards for the freight cars at each industry.
It worked ok, but after a few sessions, I wasn't as happy. The cargo cards just specified a kind of car - "this car is for a tank car, that for a refrigerator car.' But the process of picking an appropriate car for appropriate lading in the real world is much more complex. There are elaborate rules about what to do to return a boxcar after it's carried a load to another railroad. Generally, the rule is that the car can be reused for a load heading back towards the owning railroad, but if no loads are going in the right direction, the freight car needs to be sent back to its owner as fast as possible. (Read a bit about demurrage here or here too if you'd like a future in transportation law.) One bit of fallout of that is that cars on my layout from a non-Southern Pacific railroad -- such as those East Coast boxcars -- should only appear on industry sidings that might either send or receive lading from the east coast.
And so, one day I look at the concrete warehouse spur in front of Plant 51, and I see a Florida East Coast ventilated boxcar sitting there, and I know that there's absolutely no reason why that car should be there. No one would have *any* reason to ship cement from Florida to California in the 1930's. Nothing in that warehouse would be heading the other way from California to Florida. It's just wrong for that car to be there, and I'm annoyed. Obviously it doesn't take much to annoy me.
Now, there's ways of tuning car cards to avoid that sort of problem. Maybe mark certain cards according to which railroad's cars can hold them. Similarly, when I got annoyed that the dirtiest boxcars were ending up hauling canned fruit for Del Monte, I could have started marking which cargo cards required "clean" boxcars, and which cargos could go in the dirtiest, most weathered boxcars. But that requires writing a lot of car cards, and I'd had my fill of that.
There are some commercial Windows-only programs for generating switchlists or waybills, but they were all for Windows only. I found some free switchlist software, but found them cryptic and hard to use. Yes, I'm proud I can tweak some strange configuration file for a twenty-year-old command line program to add a couple new freight cars to the system, but I don't really want to do that regularly.
So the solution was to write my own program for the Mac, and it's been sitting on my computer for a few years now. It's usually worked ok, but I've never spent enough time to actually polish it or get it in a state where others might be able to use it. One of my biggest problems was that that car assignment algorithm was messy, and I didn't have any easy ways to test that any change I made wasn't going to break the software completely. Fortunately, I tried using the automatic unit testing code for the Mac (specifically the OCUnit Objective-C unit testing framework), and spent the weekend adding hundreds of tests to make sure that cars moved reasonably correctly. Between that and some cleanup of how stuff is stored on the computer disk, SwitchList was finally at a state to let others check it out.
So try it out, see if it's useful for you, and let me know how it works!
Go check out a very early version of SwitchList if you've got a Mac, and could use a computerized switchlist generator for your layout.
Now, if you don't know why you'd need that, let's talk about model railroad operations.
If model railroad operation is a game, then figuring out what has to be done during the game is a key detail. For the operations game, the question is "where do the trains run" and "what freight cars do the trains need to switch?" There have been all sorts of ideas proposed over the life of the hobby. Some use car cards that can be picked randomly to figure out where a car should move. John Allen, a famous modeler from the 1960's, drilled holes in his freight car roofs and stuck colored tacks in to indicate the destination of each car. (Rumor has it a real railroad tried this once, but stopped after accidentally drilling holes in the roofs of new cars held in a car carrier.) Others have placed scraps of paper with placement instructions on the top of freight cars. Others go with the simplest approach and roll dice at each town to figure out the number of cars to pick up and drop off in each town.
When I first started operating the Vasona Branch, I tried the car cards approach. I photocopied a couple hundred of the cardboard slips to represent the cars and the cargo they carried, and spent a couple nights on the repetitive task of writing down potential actions. "Take a boxcar from Plant 51 back to staging." "Take another boxcar from Plant 51 back to staging." "Take a stockcar up to the passing siding at Alma." "Take another boxcar from Plant 51 to staging, but this time pretend you're sending it to Cleveland." It was slow, painful work.
At the operating session, I dealt out a card for each freight car, and paper-clipped the cargo card to the card representing the freight car, gave a stack to my operators, and let them start. The cards worked decently - the print was a bit small, but they weren't too hard to handle, and they were easy to find if someone dropped his cards on the garage floor. I needed a place to put all those cards, so I glued together some small plastic pockets out of styrene sheet to hold the cards for the freight cars at each industry.
It worked ok, but after a few sessions, I wasn't as happy. The cargo cards just specified a kind of car - "this car is for a tank car, that for a refrigerator car.' But the process of picking an appropriate car for appropriate lading in the real world is much more complex. There are elaborate rules about what to do to return a boxcar after it's carried a load to another railroad. Generally, the rule is that the car can be reused for a load heading back towards the owning railroad, but if no loads are going in the right direction, the freight car needs to be sent back to its owner as fast as possible. (Read a bit about demurrage here or here too if you'd like a future in transportation law.) One bit of fallout of that is that cars on my layout from a non-Southern Pacific railroad -- such as those East Coast boxcars -- should only appear on industry sidings that might either send or receive lading from the east coast.
And so, one day I look at the concrete warehouse spur in front of Plant 51, and I see a Florida East Coast ventilated boxcar sitting there, and I know that there's absolutely no reason why that car should be there. No one would have *any* reason to ship cement from Florida to California in the 1930's. Nothing in that warehouse would be heading the other way from California to Florida. It's just wrong for that car to be there, and I'm annoyed. Obviously it doesn't take much to annoy me.
Now, there's ways of tuning car cards to avoid that sort of problem. Maybe mark certain cards according to which railroad's cars can hold them. Similarly, when I got annoyed that the dirtiest boxcars were ending up hauling canned fruit for Del Monte, I could have started marking which cargo cards required "clean" boxcars, and which cargos could go in the dirtiest, most weathered boxcars. But that requires writing a lot of car cards, and I'd had my fill of that.
There are some commercial Windows-only programs for generating switchlists or waybills, but they were all for Windows only. I found some free switchlist software, but found them cryptic and hard to use. Yes, I'm proud I can tweak some strange configuration file for a twenty-year-old command line program to add a couple new freight cars to the system, but I don't really want to do that regularly.
So the solution was to write my own program for the Mac, and it's been sitting on my computer for a few years now. It's usually worked ok, but I've never spent enough time to actually polish it or get it in a state where others might be able to use it. One of my biggest problems was that that car assignment algorithm was messy, and I didn't have any easy ways to test that any change I made wasn't going to break the software completely. Fortunately, I tried using the automatic unit testing code for the Mac (specifically the OCUnit Objective-C unit testing framework), and spent the weekend adding hundreds of tests to make sure that cars moved reasonably correctly. Between that and some cleanup of how stuff is stored on the computer disk, SwitchList was finally at a state to let others check it out.
So try it out, see if it's useful for you, and let me know how it works!
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Santa Clara Valley Mill and Lumber and Cheim Lumber
One of my industries on the Vasona Branch is the Santa Clara Valley Mill and Lumber yard on San Carlos St. near Sunol St. I'd done a bit of research on it - enough to know that the company was run by William Doughtery, who did significant logging in the Felton area. Although the old Sanborn Maps showed this name on the property, it became Cheim Lumber some time in the 1930's, a business that ran at that location until 1997. Leo Cheim's obituary also mentions the business.
I don't know much about what the business looked like in the 1930's, but Rick Sprain shows some photos of what their retail store on the Alameda looked like in the 1950's. Sadly, they were photos taken as the store burned down, supposedly because of children playing with matches in the yard behind the store. Searching the Internet also turns up the lawsuit by Pacific Hardware complaining that Cheim Lumber should have kept those kids out of the yard. Rick's photos are nice views of San Jose in the 1950's, with the landmark (and recently gone) Andy's Pet Shop in the background.
History San Jose also has a picture from the fire showing employees saving the business records as the fire rages behind them. There's also a water tank visible in the smoke; my guess is it's for Del Monte Plant 51.
Here's what the site looks like today.
I don't know much about what the business looked like in the 1930's, but Rick Sprain shows some photos of what their retail store on the Alameda looked like in the 1950's. Sadly, they were photos taken as the store burned down, supposedly because of children playing with matches in the yard behind the store. Searching the Internet also turns up the lawsuit by Pacific Hardware complaining that Cheim Lumber should have kept those kids out of the yard. Rick's photos are nice views of San Jose in the 1950's, with the landmark (and recently gone) Andy's Pet Shop in the background.
History San Jose also has a picture from the fire showing employees saving the business records as the fire rages behind them. There's also a water tank visible in the smoke; my guess is it's for Del Monte Plant 51.
Here's what the site looks like today.
Freight trains on Fourth Street?
Along with the Vasona Branch layout in the garage, I've also got a shelf layout focusing on the old San Jose Market Street station inside the house.
Originally, the Southern Pacific line from San Francisco curved east near present day Coleman Ave., crossed north of downtown San Jose, then turned onto Fourth Street and proceeded through downtown San Jose on its way to Los Angeles. The Espee had a fifty year franchise to run trains on Fourth Street starting in the 1870's, and by the 1920's, San Jose was sick of mainline trains snarling traffic and dirtying laundry hung outside. After a good deal of fighting with the locals, the Southern Pacific finally re-routed their mainline around the west side of town, and built the current station on Cahill Street near the Alameda. Any traffic jams after that point could only be blamed on the automobiles.
This photo from the Willow Glen Resident newspaper shows why the town wanted the Southern Pacific off Fourth Street. Apologies for the bad reproduction, but the newspaper hasn't gotten around to put the photo online.
One obvious detail I can see I need to add to my shelf layout: lots of cars stopped at the railroad crossing, cursing the railroad. I could even play a tape loop of drivers cursing to make the scene realistic, but then my layout would be rated NC-17.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Work like that doesn't happen instantaneously...
Articles about model building always seem to happen quickly and flawlessly, but my models never come together that well. Luckily, Bill Hambly actually kept a diary as he built a railroad station, and mentioned the mistakes (wall built backwards. Oh, I've never done that!) as well as the parts that went well. He also names the nine work sessions required to build the kit, with one (assembling the sides) dragging out over a week.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
"Take a Setting Card"
Every now and then when talking with a new acquaintance, I'll mention my model railroad hobby. If they don't immediately give me the "you play with trains?" look, I'll also mention model railroad operation, and describe it as "kind of like Dungeons and Dragons, except where you're trying to role-play life as a railroad employee rather than a freelance destroyer of monstruous pests in the local ruins."
And, to be honest, that's what operations feels like to me: can I do the switching jobs in the same way a real crew would, and get an idea for what life on the railroad was like? That's great for the work tasks, but there's not a lot of ways to appreciate the setting when model railroading. We focus on the track and trains because... well, that's our job. We've got nice scenery to explain where we are in the world and hint at the setting, but what's it really like to be riding in the caboose up Los Gatos Canyon, or what subtleties of the town are we not getting from the scenery?
I'd thought a couple years ago about having a bunch of "location setting" cards at each town to add some color. As you passed through each town, you could pull out one card and it would give you some color to whatever role you were playing. For example:
Or:
Similar cards for Campbell or San Jose could give details about life in the canneries - reminders of what season it is, reminders of how the traffic compares to last year, which plants cut production completely because of the depression, or how the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) strike affected the train crews.
So, what's your opinion - too geeky, or a nice way to help set a mood for operations?
And, to be honest, that's what operations feels like to me: can I do the switching jobs in the same way a real crew would, and get an idea for what life on the railroad was like? That's great for the work tasks, but there's not a lot of ways to appreciate the setting when model railroading. We focus on the track and trains because... well, that's our job. We've got nice scenery to explain where we are in the world and hint at the setting, but what's it really like to be riding in the caboose up Los Gatos Canyon, or what subtleties of the town are we not getting from the scenery?
I'd thought a couple years ago about having a bunch of "location setting" cards at each town to add some color. As you passed through each town, you could pull out one card and it would give you some color to whatever role you were playing. For example:
Wrights
Climbing up Los Gatos Canyon feels like a different world. The canyon walls close in, the towns disappear, and the closest sign of civilization are the orchards and farmhouses further up the ridge. At times, the tracks are carved into the cliff, and you can look down out of a window and see the creek below.
You can smell the sage, and the bay laurel trees, and the dust getting kicked up from the train.
The brakeman shot a rabbit during a station stop at Alma, and the smell from the caboose makes it seem like they’re working on lunch.
Or:
Wrights
As your train pulls past the empty station at Wrights, you almost feel like the town’s fading away before your eyes. Sure, the general store’s still open on the other side of the tracks, but the Water Company’s trying hard to buy that bit of land and chase out the few families in the area. Alice Mattey, the operator, waves from the station, but there’s no one else on the platform. A couple wagonloads of apricots sit on the opposite side of the river waiting for a refrigerator car to be spotted.
The forest is slowly overwhelming the town. The trees droop and shade the track, and you occasionally see deer running through the brush.
Similar cards for Campbell or San Jose could give details about life in the canneries - reminders of what season it is, reminders of how the traffic compares to last year, which plants cut production completely because of the depression, or how the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU) strike affected the train crews.
So, what's your opinion - too geeky, or a nice way to help set a mood for operations?
It's on the Internet, so it's got to be correct!
We all hopefully know that not everything is true on the Internet. For the Vasona Branch, I've always been a little suspicious of the guess on one of the SP railfan websites that a board and batten building on Railway Ave. in Campbell was actually an old freight house for the South Pacific Coast. I didn't bother actively debunking the details til I saw folks mentioning the building on the Espee mailing list.Here's a photo, if you're interested, or all the photos of railroad details along the Vasona Branch.
So what's got me debunking this building as ex-SPC?
- It doesn't look very SPC or like a freight depot - no siding repairs to mark the position of freight doors, lots of windows, doors at inappropriate places, no SPC style roof supports or overhangs, etc.
- The 1928 Campbell Sanborn map shows no such building south of the later (now gone) Southern Pacific depot.
- I can't find any historic photos showing that building around. I've seen photos of the original (tiny) SPC depot in South Pacific Coast: A Centennial (p. 143), and that building is (1) much tinier, and (2) had horizontal siding, not the board and batten of the suspect building.
- I've seen photos of the later depot, and it's not the same building.
- The suspect building doesn't match the Los Gatos (SPC?) freight depot, a much larger building that I assume was SPC built - see the roof supports in this picture.
- I saw an article in the local paper describing that building as a former cannery cafeteria, (objection: hearsay!) and the Hyde cannery cafeteria in the foreground of this photo would be the right shape. The Sanborn maps also show the cafeteria building was vacant by 1928; any chance the old cafeteria building was just moved across the tracks when the bypass roads around downtown were built?
I don't know if I'm right, but I'm looking forward to hearing if anyone on the mailing list has got a strong idea that this really was an SPC building.
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