Training Wheels for Train Orders

I'm prepping for an operating session this weekend, and after my experience writing train orders at the La Mesa club's Tehachapi layout, I thought I'd try running trains a bit more formally than just calling out "yeah, come on down the hill."

I'd already suggested keeping simple train orders on hand to give out to crews, but needed some forms to make them realistic.  Some work with the word processor and a lot of block printing gave me some basic train orders to give out on Sunday.  The orders are simple; the photo shows the clearance card and train order for the Campbell cannery job; nothing else will be on the railroad when it's out, so the train order and clearance card merely says "you've got the railroad from 6:15 a.m. to 10:15 a.m. except for the passenger trains."  I also wrote up orders for three trains that will running in the second half of the session; we'll see whether my plan on where those trains will meet will stand up to reality.

I've done much of the work ahead of time, just to cut my stress.  Most of the orders to give out will already have been written up, and can be handed to the crews with no work on my part.

You can do this too! Here are PDF files for blank train orders and clearance cards; right-click on the links to download them to your computer.  Print them out on your favorite printer, cut them apart, and fill them in.  The train order sheet prints two orders per 8.5 x 11 inch sheet; the clearance card sheet prints three cards per sheet.

If you're unfamiliar with train orders, go over to the Dome of Foam, my favorite railroad site that's filled with Bay Area and Southern Pacific information, and read through their very informative lessons one and two of train orders.  Poke around on the site; there's also lots of stories of life during the time of train orders.

Operating Sessions in a Nutshell

Yep, that's what an operating session looks like. Some moments of quiet and distraction, other moments of frantic repair (in the background), and yet the trains keep running.

[From tonight's operating session at David Parks' Cumberland West layout, where many trains ran.]

San Jose's Japantown, and CalPak's Pickle Factory

Even with all the historical articles lately, I'm still building models. The California Prune and Apricot Growers (Sunsweet) Plant #1 for Campbell is on my desk. The thick styrene walls still warped from the contact cement and Campbell corrugated siding. I also built the first plastic models I've touched in a while - Walther's interlocking tower, which was nicely designed so that trim and clapboards could be painted separately. The tower will stand in for San Jose's Fourth Street tower on my Market Street layout, guarding the east end of the passenger station and the switches leading either to Milpitas or Los Angeles.

But some quick searches turned up this great map of San Jose's Japantown in 1940, and shows track arrangements around the two Del Monte plants on the east side of San Jose - California Packing Corporation Plant #4 and Plant #339, the pickle factories. They cover three blocks east of Japantown.

It's also an attractive and detailed map, with color coding for the different types of buildings (businesses, industries, etc), comments on history, and details about the occupants in the 1940's. Go check it out.

San Jose's Japantown is still an active neighborhood, so wander over to check out the Nichibei Busson department store and have lunch, or stop by for one of the regular festivals in the neighborhood.

Photo of Another Abinante and Nola site

Another photo in the Gordon Collection captured a glimpse of another Abinante and Nola plant site. This time, a photo of Albers Brothers Milling on Ryland St. shows the back side of the packing sheds on the north side of the tracks near the San Jose Market Street station.

Here's the full photo if you want to see what other details you can find.

In the full photo, Albers Bros. Milling is at the corner of San Pedro and Ryland (either 100 Ryland St. or 395 N. San Pedro St, depending on the occupying company. Beyond that is 200 Ryland St. with the "FRUIT CO." sign - it probably holds Warren Dried Fruit right now, but about 1944, it'll become Abinante and Nola, and they'll redo the foundation as seen in the building permit. The larger building is Rosenberg Brothers, and past it is J. B. Inderridden as I mentioned in March. That posting in March showed the opposite side of these buildings, and the aerial view.

That corner looks a little different now; it's under the Coleman Ave. overpass.

This was a hard photo to track down; the Sanborn maps show that Albers was on the south side of the tracks, but the shadows and the weedy distance didn't match with the position of the San Jose Freight Depot just visible to the left of the building. Luckily, I realized those ventilators on the roof were uncommon, and matched the photos from the other side of the tracks.

By the way, this photo, like many of the photos I've found in the different libraries, is catalogued over on Lookback Maps so I can remember which photos I've found near a specific location. Why not mark where some of your favorite historical photos were taken?

More Photos from the Gordon Collection

And if you need some other HO scale structure projects, how about:

• Violet Ray gas station and don't forget the Ideal Auto Camp.  Betcha didn't know they sold Nehi in Santa Clara County!
  
• Faultless Bakery, with some surprisingly nice terra cotta or molded concrete detail.
  
• Security Warehouse and Cold Storage.  Details the area around the buildings.  Security was located between First and Second, just east of the Market Street Railroad Station.
  
• Bean Spray Pump Company's very attractive Mission-style factory.
  
• Material Supply Company spur.  I'll bet they were on the Western Pacific considering all the WP boxcars.
  

Post if you find any other interesting photos in the Gordon collection.  Note that all of San Jose State's digital collections provide a RSS feed so you can watch as new photos are added to each collection.

Paydirt: Photo of Abinante and Nola Packing House!

All the research I've been doing on Abinante and Nola started with a single question: what did the packing house at 750 West San Carlos St. look like? Although aerial photos on Historic Aerials show a rough silhouette and Sanborn fire insurance maps show the floor plan, I've never found photos of the actual building.

Luckily, one of the rules of research is to keep looking till you do find something. When I did a recent search for "J. S. Roberts", the previous owner of the packing house, some new panorama photos from the 1930's turned up at San Jose State's John C. Gordon Collection. (The Gordon collection is a great set of photos for anyone interested in San Jose in the 1930's.) An image of the San Carlos St. viaduct shows one building for Del Monte Plant #3, a row of maintenance-of-way cars along the tracks, and the J.S. Roberts dried fruit plant. The photo is also from 1934 - pretty much my era.

Full photo here.

So let's compare the photo with the scene I actually built:

• The packing house is large and barn-like with clapboard siding and a corrugated tin roof. It's definitely different from the model I built, and much plainer.
  
• Hidden in the trees, you can just barely see the tiny boiler house made of corrugate steel, with what appears to be a tall smokestack twenty feet in the air. The boiler house looks like it's behind a worn, whitewashed fence,.
  
• The railroad crossing on the former street is blocked off at the bridge; that fence is still there, as far as I know, but the bridge was removed long before. That line of parked cars behind the barrier would be a great detail in the scene. I'm not modeling Los Gatos Creek, but modeling at least part of the bridge and creek would be a great bit of detail for the scene. I don't have room for both sides of the creek, but I wish I could add the sign on the telephone pole just before the bridge: "BRIDGE UNSAFE: NO MORE THAN 6 TON EXCEPT RR R.T.WAY SPEED LIMIT 8 MILES".
  
  Also note the road on this side of the creek is bordered by the creek, and has the nice boardwalk and railing to protect the locals from falling. On the other side of the road, the Del Monte property has its own fence to protect folks from falling in the creek.
  
• The bridge supports have an unusual shape, with the actual supports narrower than the bridge. Those might be a good project for the 3d printer. The last portion of the viaduct is solid - again details to get right in the model.
  
• I'd forgotten the stairs from the viaduct - they're still there, and I assume were designed for workers the Del Monte workers - again a detail to reproduce.
  
  On the far side of the viaduct, there's a line of what appear to be maintenance of way cars with windows and steps. The static maintenance-of-way cars might be a nice addition to my scene, as the curve on that side of the viaduct is pretty bare.
  
• There's telephone poles and wires everywhere, some power, and some (on the viaduct) for the trolleys and Peninsular Railway interurban line.
  
• One surprise for me is that there's little sign of construction of the new mainline in this phot. The Park Ave. underpass is obviously in place off in the distance, but I don't see any track other than the Los Gatos branch in the scene. However, if I look at another photo of the viaduct, taken from a lower angle, I can see a great deal of construction activity hidden behind the viaduct - debris, a maintenance of way shed, and several boxcars.
  

By the way, the current mainline SP tracks will pass just in front of the solid viaduct support, between that barricade and the bridge. Google Earth shows the relationship of the tracks and the viaduct piers quite nicely. This photo from Google Street View (a few years old, considering that walls of the Del Monte cannery are still standing) shows how the scene has changed in the last 80 years.

This photo again shows why I like modeling real scenes. Much of the set dressing - the abandoned bridge, blocked street and line of parked cars; the plain packing house building, the stairway from the viaduct, the odd supports, and the row of maintenance-of-way cars - they are all details I would not have placed on my own.

Stay tuned for a future episode where I'll describe plans to redo the Abinante and Nola scene!

History of a Dried Fruit Packer: Abinante and Nola

Early on in the planning for my Vasona Branch model railroad layout, I poked through old Sanborn fire insurance maps for ideas about industries. One of my finds was a dried fruit packing house next to the tracks at 750 West San Carlos St. in San Jose. It sat across the street from Del Monte Plant #3, the huge cannery in San Jose that I was already planning to model. Depending on the year, the building was either labeled as Pacific Fruit Products (1915) or Abinante and Nola (1950).

The Sanborn maps hinted at a building that would make a great model: tall (30'), multiple floors for processing fruit, additions (sulphur box on the second floor), and a boiler and oil tank along San Carlos St. Model railroads need lots of industries to ship enough cars to make an operating system fun, and this place looked like the kind of shipper I needed on my railroad - busy, rambling, and photogenic.

The Vasona Branch is modeling 1932, but at the time I didn't know whose name should be on that building. I flipped a coin, annointed Abinante and Nola the current owner, built my model, and many crews have shipped dried fruit from the place ever since.

But I was still curious about Abinante and Nola. What did the building really looked like? How did the dried fruit packing business work? There's a reason for my curiosity; my grandmother grew up on the family fruit ranch in Hayward, and similar families in the San Jose area would have been selling apricots and prunes to Abinante and Nola and the other local packers. So I kept searching around for information about that packing house.

Luckily, I started trading e-mails with Don Abinante, son of one of the founders, and learned a bunch about dried fruit packing. Here's a quick history of Abinante and Nola, and some quick notes on what the business was really like (as opposed to how it appears on the
model railroad.)

Abinante and Nola's History: Abinante and Nola actually was founded a bit after the era for my railroad. Abinante and Nola Packing Co. was started in 1935 by Sam Abinante and Frank Nola. Sam had been a fruit buyer for other companies in the Valley, and Frank knew how to run the processing plant, so they teamed up, started the business in a barn owned by Frank's parents, and ran their own show.

By 1940, they must have been doing well. They moved to a new property on Stevens Creek Road, a couple blocks away from the current Nissan dealership. (If you're eager for exact location, let's guess at Woodhams Road between Lawrence and San Tomas Expressways.) A 1940 issue of Engineering News-Record notes the request for bids for the new warehouse in September, 1940.

The Stevens Creek Road plant burned down in 1945 (arson, according to Don, and an event that almost made Sam give up on the business, according to a granddaughter. For a couple years the company primarily acted as brokers for fruit processed by others: Valley View Packing (run by the Rubino family down on Hillsdale Ave. near the Guadalupe River) and CalPak (California Packing Corporation, aka Del Monte). There's also signs they were developing additional warehouse and packing space. A 1944 San Jose city building permit shows them doing repairs to the old Warren Dried Fruit plant at 200 Ryland Street, just across the tracks from the old San Jose Freight Depot near Bassett Street and San Pedro St. They were still in the building through at least 1949 according to another building permit (for the addition of a canopy), as well as entries in San Jose phone directories of the time.

In the late '40's, they finally moved to that building that I model at 750 West San Carlos St, but kept the building on Ryland St. Within a few years, though, they bought a former Mayfair Packing Plant #2 at 631 Sunol St. (Mayfair was one of the larger independent packers in the San Jose area, and was moving to their new, modern plant over on South Seventh St.) Abinante's new plant was on the Western Pacific, and a late 1950's WP track diagram in Track and Time marks the building as Abinante and Nola. That building still stands, by the way, occupied by a roofing supply house at a new addresss of 991 Lonus St.

By 1966, though, the encroaching suburbs were eating up the remaining prune orchards in the Bay Area, and the fruit to pack was coming from further afield. Abinante and Nola moved to a modern prune processing plant in Fairfield to be closer to the farmers supplying the fruit, and thus leaves our story.

The Business: Abinante and Nola's primary business was packing prunes, but they also handled smaller amounts of dried apricots, peaches, and pears. They produced a good quantity of fruit-typically around five or six million pounds a year.

To understand what Abinante and Nola's packing houses was like, Sunsweet's 1950 video gives a good overview of the dried fruit packing business. The fruit packer had already bought the crop before harvest, estimating price based on the buyer's rough guess of what would be produced and the fruit rancher's past yield. Farmers would dry the fruit before delivery, either in their own drying yard or at a commercial dryer. When the fruit first went to the dryer, it would be washed then run through the dehydrator to reduce the water content and preserve the fruit. The dried fruit would then be delivered in sacks (early days) or in 2000 pound wooden containers (later years) to the fruit packer.

The fruit would arrive at the Abinante and Nola in August and September. Upon arrival, the packer would sort the fruit, then store it until sales came in. Packers generally sold the fruit bit by bit over the year, so the packing house needed enough storage space to hold the year's crop. When the fruit was ready to sell, it would be inspected, washed in hot water, and steamed for easier processing and sanitizing. It would be inspected again, re-hydrated to 20% humidity for consistency, and boxed as appropriate for sale. At Sunsweet, the fruit would have been boxed for individual sale, but Abinante and Nola were processing for others to distribute. In the early days, they exported the fruit to Europe and even Cuba, but as time went on, they started selling in addition to brokers and retailers on East Coast, Chicago, and Texas. From the 1930's to the 1950's, most fruit would have been packed in 25 pound containers (first made of wood, then cardboard).

It's interesting that all of Abinante and Nola's facilities (except for that first one on Stevens Creek Road) had rail access. Much of their fruit was exported via ship in San Francisco, and so was usually sent by truck in the 1950's. When the company shipped product to the east coast in the same era, it would tend to go via rail, and they'd ship only two or three cars a month. Either rail was an acceptable way to send cargo to the piers in San Francisco in the 1940's, or the large warehouses that Abinante and Nola needed just happened to be next to the tracks.

Abinante and Nola wasn't the only dried fruit packer in the valley. Mayfair Packing and Valley View were two other privately held fruit packers, and were considered "friendly competitors" by Abinante and Nola -- not cutthroat, but each company had to be aware of the other's prices when trying to make sales. Guggenhime & Co (which had plants over by the San Jose Market Street Station) handled both dried and fresh fruit, but was a smaller competitor. The big producer - then and now - was California Prune and Apricot Growers (Sunsweet); they had a major effect on prices, but tended to sell into retail and didn't compete directly with Abinante and Nola.

Sunsweet still dominates the industry; check out the Prune Barganing Association's history to see how 60% of prunes are still sold through Sunsweet.

I'd assumed that canners would have been competing for the same fruit, but each crop and farmer tended to specialize in either fruit for drying or canning. Del Monte, Stapleton and Spence, Filice and Perelli, and Rosenberg Brothers were primarily canners, and did not compete with Abinante and Nola. Although Del Monte had a bit of a dried fruit business, they didn't cross paths with Abinante and Nola because of the size of the market and the fact that Del Monte was processing for their own label.

The Building: 750 West San Carlos: According to the Sanborn maps, 750 West San Carlos St. was four stories tall. The top floor was for grading and storage. The third floor stored the unprocessed fruit waiting to be sold. The second floor had the processing machinery and the sulfur box for re-treating apricots just before packing and sale. The first floor was for packing, storage of finished product, and the office. Separate from the main building and out by San Carlos St was the small boiler house for the hot water and steam and an underground 6000 gallon tank. That's a big tank - think eight feet in diameter and sixteen
feet long.

The San Carlos St. building, like all of Abinante and Nola's buildings other than the one on Sunol, is gone; Historic Aerials shows the building disappeared some time between 1948 and 1956.

The Model: So that's what I know about Abinante and Nola. The building with their name on it on the Vasona Branch was theirs only for a few years, and if I were more earnest, I'd change the name to J.S. Roberts, the actual occupant in 1932. But I like it, and now that I've learned about Abinante and Nola, I'm not too interested in correcting the anachronism.

All this research also hints that I might need to run the layout differently. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the business would have been run the same way by the building's occupant in 1932.

• I should consider loading fewer freight cars at Abinante and Nola. With most fruit going to Europe, I ought to have fewer east coast boxcars loading there, and either direct more fruit out in SP boxcars (for traffic being sent to the piers) or cut the total number of cars and put
  more trucks in the scene.
  
• Ship fewer cars. I set my layout during a fruit rush (either early for apricots or later for other crops), but because Abinante and Nola was shipping continuously during the year, it wouldn't have been the same beehive of outgoing activity that I would have seen in the canneries.
  
• Don't bring tank cars to Abinante and Nola. Because of the size of the oil tank, it's unlikely they would have gotten oil via rail. I'll bet the oil dealer would have stopped by every few weeks to top off the tank.