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Some of the shots also show how busy the south side of Bassett was, with bars, hotels, and all the other businesses you'd expect near the railroad station. Most of the photos I've seen make it look like the area in front of the station was much more empty.
Luckily, things were so much simpler in the old days, with friendly orchardists, canneries, packers, and wholesalers living in happy harmony… right?
Not quite. The Valley was full of stories of reinvention, obsolescence, and battles to keep up with the Jones's Cannery. The Santa Clara Valley was the site of one particularly big battle back in 1920, as the large meat packers attempted to move into the wholesale grocery business. Their effort turned into ten years of battle over the Packer's Consent Decree, deciding whether the meat packers should be allowed to sell canned fruit, and whether one of the upstart canners - the California Cooperative Canneries - was merely a front and supplier for the Armour monopolists, or was a farmer-owned attempt to do an end run around canners and wholesalers that had unfair control over the price of fruit.
Cooperatives Blossom
When the fruit business first hit California, growers and packers followed the customs of the day; as "Sunsweet Story" put it, "the first duty of each individual... was to look out for his own interests almost wholly to the exclusion of the interests of others." Everyone pulled their own tricks to increase profits. Farmers would send green fruit to the cannery hidden in the bins. Packers would spread false rumors about low prices, or mix poor-quality fruit in with better fruit. Wholesalers in Europe would reject an arriving shipment, knowing the shipper would have to sell the "bad" fruit at a lower price.
Everyone also thought the other guy was making a killing. Growers assumed that the packers were making money at their expense. Canners were suspicious of the wholesalers and brokers selling their crop, and assumed their growers would flee to a canner offering more money each year.
For the growers, the solution was to go in collectively and run their own processor. These efforts started in the 1890s with dried fruit collectives doing their own packing and selling. The first round of co-ops (including the California Dried Fruit Association and Santa Clara Valley Fruit Exchange were unsuccessful. However, during World War I, a new generation attempted to use the co-op model. Orchardists selling dried prunes and apricots created the well-known California Prune and Apricot Growers (which we still know as Sunsweet). Raisin growers in Fresno started the Sunmaid co-operative. On the canning side, the movement led to co-operatively owned canners such as California Cooperative Canneries.
California Cooperative Canneries
Like Sunsweet, the California Cooperative Canneries was an attempt to work around the packers and better control the prices paid to growers. The cannery was the work of one Vernon Campbell, an inventor, canner, and most of all "promoter". Vernon's brother, the well-known Southern California lawyer Kemper B. Campbell, described his brother as "the genius of the family” for his work in the canning industry.
"[Vernon was] the first one to can olives in tin… invented the process of making all the olives look black and shiny, whether they were black and shiny when they started out or not… a pioneer in teaching the rest of the country to eat ripe olives", and learned how to transport ripe olives in brine".
In addition, Vernon started Moneta Canning in Ontario, California with his family, managed the Central California Canneries plant at Visalia in 1913. Vernon was also a true believer in grower cooperatives, starting several in the early teens.
Vernon Campbell, 1922.
Based on his experience in the olive and canning industry, Vernon wanted to shake up the canned fruit industry and get rid of the inefficiencies where the canner and the wholesaler took the majority of the profits. So in 1918, at the same time that Sunsweet attempted to wrest the dried fruit market away from the dried fruit packers, Vernon decided to go after the canners. He started the Santa Clara Valley Grower’s Association to attract farmers interested in a cooperatively owned cannery, and started building at Eighth and Taylor. He also lined up some significant names to help with the cannery. Albert Haentze, a Chicago business and real-estate man who had retired to the life of a rancher and San Jose winemaker at Evergreen's Villa Vista ranch, signed on as a manager. S. E. Johnson of Cupertino, another founder, brought his reputation and pull as director at Grower’s Bank in downtown San Jose. Within 65 days of construction, the plant canned 10,000 tons of tomatoes, and an unknown amount of apricots.
Edith Daley visited the California Cooperatives Cannery, and described her visit in the July 16, 1919 San Jose Evening News. Ralph Crary, VP and sales manager, explained why this co-operative would succeed.
"The co-operative cannery is an entirely different proposition from a purely commercial plant," explained Mr. Crary. "The commercial cannery will say to a grower, 'We don't want your fruit.' We say to every one of them, 'Bring it in!' Not only that, but we are ready to take care of all increases in acreage. In reality the psychology of the two methods of operation is as far apart as the poles. The principle in either case is entirely different. In the purely co-operative canneries the grower not only gets a good price for his fruit but by the elimination of the middleman he shares in the canning profit as well."The co-operative enterprise," continued Crary, "usually fails for lack of three things: managerial ability, finance, and distribution. We have all three if we may be allowed to modestly admit it. Our officers are men of standing, unquestioned ability and valuable experience. Finances are arranged for and the problem of distribution is solved. It is our aim under good leadership to so enlarge our capacity and distribution that we can put California canned products within the reach of everyone."
One problem, of course, is who would buy all those canned goods, and whether the wholesalers, brokers, and distributors would work well with the new cannery. Campbell himself wasn't a big fan of the existing system; he declared:
“The sore spot in our social infrastructure is distribution. We continue to use the ox cart when a steam railway is needed… The prodders now have a modern piece of machinery under Government control [World War I production and price controls], but “special interests” are moving heaven and earth to prevent our use of it… Good Lord, if this company could save the billions that are wasted and extorted from the people through the present so-called system of distribution, which is an uncoordinated, hit and miss, unintelligent, go as you please, hold up game, we would not need to worry about the cost of freight, wages of railroad workers, the cost of armaments, or the need of good roads. There would be more money than anybody would know what to do with, at least until Henry [Ford] increased his fliver factory and output sufficiently to absorb the surplus cash."
Meanwhile, two thousand miles east, Campbell’s savior from the patchwork of wholesalers appeared.
The Meat Packers
The other half of this disruption story came from an established player: the meat packers. Companies like Swift, Armour, and others had already disrupted the fresh meat market by taking a local, personal, and inefficient job (slaughtering and selling meat in small towns), and turning it into an industrial, regional, and efficient process. The companies bought huge numbers of animals, and dominated the livestock auctions. They ran the specialty newspapers that published the auction results. They built huge, centralized slaughterhouses to turn the animals to meat. They took the huge volume of leftovers from the butchering, and became a major seller of offal, hides, sinews, sausage meat, and hide glue. They ran their own refrigerator cars to control how the meat was carried. They negotiated special rates and trains with the railroad to get the meat to towns quickly. They sold direct to butchers to control prices and the market. Because many towns weren’t big enough to need a full railroad car (10,000 pounds) of meat, they ran “peddler cars” along fixed routes that could provide smaller amounts to a series of towns on a fixed schedule.
The packer’s success was a mixed blessing. Their new methods provided fresh, inexpensive meat quickly to every town and hamlet in the U.S. However, they were also seen as monopolists and bullies, controlling prices and chasing out local butchers and slaughterhouses.
The packers, meanwhile, saw an new business that could use their special touch. As wholesalers, they already delivered meat to every small-town butcher in America. They already used extra space in those refrigerator cars for related groceries - lard, meat by-products, butter. Their distribution network could handle even more. Why not distribute rice? Why not soap? Heck, why not even canned goods? Armour and the others would be able to fill out their freight cars; they could cut deals on wholesale groceries for towns too small to take a full load of meat, and they’d be able to make a tidy profit by eliminating the existing grocery wholesalers.
And why stop only at wholesaling? Why not control production of all these new foodstuffs as well? At first, the packers bought canned goods from the packers - usually in huge quantities, much like Walmart might buy today. But then they realized owning the cannery might be even better. Swift and Company had already been in this game for quite a while, owning Libby’s since the 1880’s. (Libby's had started off making canned meat; Libby's fruit cocktail came later.) The 1918 season encouraged the packers to reconsider buying canned fruit on the open market as overwhelming demand blocked Armour from buying product. Supplies were so short, Armour couldn’t buy canned fruit at any price from the California Packing Corporation. When fruit was available, fear of market control between producers and packers discouraged sales. When Armour tried to buy 20% of Sunmaid’s 1918 crop (800 carloads!), the raisin cooperative turned them down for fear of losing control over their fruit and brand.
And this is where the two stories came together. Vernon Campbell wanted to break the canner's grip over growers with his own canneries. Armour wanted to break the wholesaler’s grip over small town grocers via an alliance with a friendly canner. It’s a match made in heaven.
In 1918, Armour offered to finance the expansion of the cannery at San Jose as long as California Cooperative Canneries could supply them with the canned fruit they needed for their wholesale grocery business. Their $200,000 represented around 40% of the investment in the plant. Campbell had already been pestering the local banks and investors for money that year, but was consistently turned own. For their money, Armour took a 51% ownership stake; the contract guaranteed Armour all the fruit they requested by January 1 of each year at the same price that Del Monte was selling canned fruit futures. If the cost of production turned out to be more than that price, then Armour would pay actual cost.
Apparently, Campbell wasn’t shy about his Armour connection, nor about his plans to let cooperative canneries sweep the state. Mark Grimes, president of the California Tomato Growers’ Association, claimed during 1922 Senate hearings:
Through extensive conferences held with Vernon Campbell during 1918, I know his ambition is to have Armour, through California Cooperative Fruits, gain complete distribution of California canned fruits. This plan and effect were discussed by him with Davidson, their Chicago representative, and Pfiffer, who was at that time in Armour’s Chicago office, in my presence and the presence of other witnesses in San Francisco in 1918.”
Solicitation for growers, Modesto Evening News, Feb. 11, 1920.
To the growers, having another buyer meant profits; Campbell claimed that his entry into canning raised the prices of fruit across the state. R. G. Spencer, "organization manager", declared that the cooperative raised prices for fruit in the Central Valley by $40 a ton in 1919. Dallas H. Gray of Armona was the Visalia buyer for the cannery; he went to bid on the “Visalia Pool” of cling peaches, and bought 6,000 tons one season at $92.50 a ton for cling peaches and $55 for free-stone and lemon peaches. The Del Monte buyers laughed - “Gray, you are crazy for taking on a job like this. You know you cannot get enough cars to ship 6,000 tons of fruit out of Visalia.” But Gray did it - needing sixty men at eight receiving stations across the region to collect the fruit, then somehow finding a way to get the fruit quickly to the cannery at San Jose. The cannery cleaned $6,000 on that deal alone.
Campbell wasn’t doing badly either; his contract as the general manager meant he got 0.5% of the gross receipts of the cannery. For a cannery selling a million dollars of canned fruit a year, he was doing awfully good.
Fears of the Meat Packers
The deal with California Cooperative Canneries was a great deal for Armour. They now had a ready supply of fruit for their challenge of the wholesalers. They also had their pre-existing distribution channel: 1,120 “branch houses” for wholesaling, 1,297 “route cars” visiting fixed routes and stopping in thousands of smaller towns, cold storage warehouses, and trucks.
And, as you might expect, the grocery wholesalers got very, very scared.
In 1922, looking back on the entry of the packers, the wholesaler John G. Clark of Bad Axe, Michigan summarized those fears.
“Michigan is very close to Chicago and prior to this consent decree a number of so-called peddler car routes existed on the railroads in Michigan radiating from Chicago. It was a common practice that, if a quantity of fresh meat insufficient to make a minimum car was unobtainable in a town, then very attractive prices were made in canned goods, soap, rice, or other non-packing house products, in order to move the car forward at the carload rate of freight with this rapid service. With the tremendous tonnage controlled by the packer, he is enabled to continue to enjoy preferential treatment over the wholesale grocer, as was clearly shown at the above mentioned Interstate Commerce Commission hearing.
The FTC, investigating the packers in 1918, noted the effect of the packer's entry into the business.
"Already even the oldest and most strongly established wholesale houses are seeing line after line of their merchandise absorbed by the packers' branch-house stem. First, they saw the packers encroach on the handling of butter, eggs and cheese, then canned goods, then various kinds of "package goods", and now rice, sugar, coffee, and other staples are being increasingly handled by the packers. Last year the Big Five's combined sales totaled $2,127,245,000. At the present rate of expansion, within a few years the big packers would control the wholesale distribution of the Nation's food supply." (1918 FTC report on the meat packers).
Wholesalers were up in arms as they saw their entire business threatened by the entering monopolists. They were particularly incensed because the packers had, in their opinion, all sorts of preferential treatment. The packers ownership of their own refrigerator cars to carry the goods meant they weren't subject to the car shortages that every other business faced. They received lower shipping rates, and had lower minimum car weights for shipping charges. They had better schedules with their peddler cars.
Many of those advantages transferred over to California Co-operative Canneries. If the railroads couldn't provide enough freight cars to the canneries, the cannery could request cars from Armour's private fleet. Vernon Campbell highlighted that the refrigerator car shortages were a problem even for non-perishables such as canned goods; the risk of freezing mid-continent convinced canners such as him to use refrigerator cars for any product shipped even in fall or spring.
Some of the arguments weren't completely fair. Armour might have a smaller minimum charge and easy access to their own refrigerator cars, but they also paid to build and maintain the cars. The fixed peddler routes gave them guaranteed capacity and fixed schedules, but independent packers could sometimes ship faster without the fixed schedules. The packers also had strong reasons to build their own car fleet. Swift, the first meat packer in the refrigerator car business, built their own refrigerator cars because the railroads weren't willing to risk their investment in stock cars and animal pens.
The packer's moves into the canning business also were at an awkward, politically charged time. World War I's food demands for soldiers and rising prices meant that the packers' actions were looked upon suspiciously. In 1917, President Wilson took a stand and asked the Federal Trade Commission to research whether there was an unlawful monopoly in meat packing by the "big five" - Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson, and Cudahy. The FTC found there was, and highlighted that much of the problem was their marketing and wholesaling:
If these five great concerns owned no packing plants and killed no cattle and still retained control of the instruments of transportation, of marketing, and of storage, their position would not be less strong than it is. The competitors of these five concerns are at their mercy because of the control of the market places, storage facilities, and the refrigerator cars for distribution." (Federal Trade Commission Report on the Meat Packing Industry).
At the time, the "Big Five" packers controlled somewhere between 60 or 80% of the meat industry, depending on how you counted. Packer's profits in 1917 were four times what they are before the war. They slaughtered 70% of the livestock. They owned 90% of the refrigerator cars in meat service. They ran their own ice docks. They could demand rebates and discounts from railroads, rather than regular shipping rates. Their companies were in the hands of very small number of rich individuals rather than a wider set of shareholders who might encourage moderation.
The "Big Five" packers also had control over half the eggs and cheese, and a quarter of the canned fruits and vegetables for some products. They secured control over vegetable oil, and were trying to extend their power to fish and other foods. Between 1916 and 1917, they tripled their canned goods sales, outdoing the two largest independent wholesalers by a similar amount. In 1917, Armour handled 23% of all grain at Chicago. The same year, Armour started handling rice, and immediately became the "greatest rice merchant of the world" in their own words. Rice prices, coincidentally, rose 65% the next year. This wasn't a time when their actions would be viewed charitably.
The pressures of the public and of President Wilson led to a serious investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. Needless to say, they didn't look upon the packer's actions generously.
First off, the packers hadn't made it easy to trust their actions because of thirty years of suspicious behavior. The first study of the packers in 1890 found explicit collusion and restraint of competition; these revelations led to the Sherman Antitrust Act. The packers found ways to work around the laws. They split up the meat market between the companies, with each company having an explicit quota of sales, with companies buying too much livestock or selling too much fruit kicking back the profits to those not meeting quotas. A 1912 investigation found that until 1896, the packers still met every Tuesday afternoon as a group to discuss sales and adjust each packer's sales. Although the packers stopped meeting in person in 1896, Henry Veeder continued to manage "pools" to set quotas and margins for each region, and assess penalties and bonuses for packers who strayed from their quota. The pools were finally ended after a Department of Justice investigation in 1903. To work around the defeat of their pools, Armour, Swift, and Morris instead secretly arranged to buy up the competitors and build a new "National Packing Company" monopoly (imitating the American Can Company monopoly, and the California Fruit Canners Association merger of canners around the same time). The government looked poorly on the merger, so National Packing was split up in 1912, and the smaller packers split between Armour, Swift, and Morris.
Even in 1917, the packers still seemed to think that the U.S. wasn't going to act against them. During the 1917 investigation, government investigators caught the packers in outright lies, with an Armour vice-president claiming no interest in the Chicago stockyards, yet the treasurer of the company later admitted that they'd transferred the company's complete ownership as the investigation was started. The company's attorney initially refused to testify on the grounds he might incriminate himself, but later testified to facts that didn't match documents he'd signed.
The FTC also found the packers were expanding their monopoly into foreign countries, and actively expressed worry that the packers' action was going to reflect badly on the U.S. In a short time, the U.S. packers controlled half of export meat for Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.
The Packers Get More Than a Hand-Slap
The Federal Trade Commission 1919 investigation was damning. Six volumes long, it condemned the meat packers in every way possible. The FTC's opinion was for more control - turn the refrigerator cars and stockyards under government control, divest the cold storage plants and warehouses, and run stockyards as common carriers who had to provide access to all.
The final Packer Consent Decree wasn't as extreme as the FTC wished, but it was a huge attack against the packers. The initial agreement in 1919 banned the big five meat producers from owning stockyards and stock-market newspapers, stockyard terminal railroads, retail meat markets, public cold storage warehouse. They were banned from handling fresh milk, and manufacture and sale of other food lines. The packers were explicitly banned from selling fresh or canned fish, vegetables, fruit (except meat-related stuff such as baked beans or mincemeat), soda, candy, coffee, nuts, flour, bread, and grape juice. They had to get out of the market supplying soda fountains. Worst of all, they had to sell their refrigerator car lines. And this wasn't going to be a slow divestment: companies had to plan to dispose of the banned businesses within 90 days. The federal government locked the status quo in place even more with the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act, which restricted the packer's behavior in the meat industry.
From the 1922 re-hearing on reversing the consent decree:
Mr [Vernon] Campbell: “When I talked to Mr. White, vice-president of Armour & Co, I asked him why they had signed such a foolish agreement, and he said they were holding a gun to his head and he had to sign.
Mr. Breed: Mr White, of Armour & Co. said that?
Mr. Campbell: Yes Sir
Mr. Breed: “Who was holding a gun at his head?”
Mr Campbell: “Attorney General Palmer. The point was this: that all this publicity, and this continual hounding by the Federal Trade Commission, and those wild charges made against the packers, it was injuring their business in foreign and domestic trade; it was depreciating their securities, and it was causing the foreign governments to begin to investigate the affairs of the packers, in some instances closing the doors to their business, so that in order to relieve themselves from this persecution they were willing to do almost anything to get out from under the charges, Mr. White said were unjustly made, by the Federal Trade Commission.”
Or, to quote that old Transylvanian proverb, “When the peasants with pitchforks and torches are at your castle door, it doesn’t matter that you've already stopped building the monster."
The final ruling on the Packer Consent Decree dragged out over years. The packers, with Vernon Campbell as the public face, took to the Senate in an attempt to reverse the Packer's Consent Decree. By 1924, the California Co-operative Canneries was allowed to legally fight the case (Packers Lose in Food Fight. May 20, 1929 Milwaukee Journal.). An appeals court temporarily reversed the decree in the mid-twenties, but the decree was finalized in 1929 when the the Supreme Court refusing to get involved.
After the Packer’s Decree
The packers moved quickly, selling many of the businesses within a year of the initial decree. Armour sold their refrigerator car business to a new Fruit Growers Express company. The packer's exit also encouraged the growth of other refrigerator line companies, including the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific's Pacific Fruit Express. Libby, McNeil, and Libby had already been spun off from Swift & Co. in 1918.
Overall, the fallout was mixed for the meat-packers. Immediately after the divestment, the post-war downturn in the economy cut their sales, and caused investors to flee Armour's stock. J. Ogden Armour, the majority owner, had been relying on debt to buy all sorts of unrelated businesses. When Armour's stock tanked, he watched his fortune disappear until he was finally chased out of the company in 1923. Morris & Co., also suffering, was merged into the remains of Armour. Louis Swift, by comparison, saw the decree as a chance to streamline his business and left in a stronger state (Maureen Ogle, In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America).
Vernon Campbell, meanwhile, was in a tough spot. Within a year of starting the California Cooperative Canneries, he'd already lost the company that was bankrolling him, which also was buying 50% of his product. Finding buyers was now his primary job; he applied for a passport in 1922, with the purpose of "selling canned fruit in Europe".
But the California Cooperative Canneries did survive. In 1926, the company even managed to expand, building a tomato cannery in Sacramento, buying Delta Packing's cannery in Isleton, and starting a related shipping terminal in Oakland. A 1928 newspaper article claimed Co-operative Canneries had ten outposts across California.
Like all canners, the depression hit the canner hard. The Sacramento cannery shut down unexpectedly in September 1930, leaving 150 workers without pay for the season. The other canneries also succumbed to a lack of market for their goods. By 1931, the company was gone. A new co-operative, the Tri Valley Packing Association, bought the San Jose, Modesto, and Visalia plants. Sacramento's cannery was reopened by the landowners as Bercut-Richards Packing Co.
California Cooperative Canneries plant, Modesto, 1923.
With the end of the cannery, Campbell left the Bay Area, finally settling in the Sierra foothills by 1940. At age 65, he still listed his occupation as "promoter and organizer of cannery plants". He'd been a promoter the whole time. Even his opponents saw him the same way; Ernest Richmond (of Richmond Chase) denigrated some of Campbell's work in Southern California, but declared "he, himself, is a promoter 100 per cent efficient." Even retired, Campbell was still quite insistent on promoting co-ops and taking on the established canners.
Vernon Campbell photo taken from his 1922 passport photo. California Cooperative Canneries ad for growers from the Modesto Evening News, February 11, 1920. Modesto canning employee photo from author's collection.
Built-up SP W-50-3 Hart convertible gondola kit.
I'm now selling the SP Hart gondolas as kits. Price will be $32 for the body, instructions, and decals. You can get either models with the hopper doors open for ballast dumping, or with the hopper doors closed for gondola use or side dumping. You'll need to provide trucks, couplers, wire, end steps, brake wheel, and a bit of styrene strip. See the Dry Creek Models website for more information, or drop me a note at info@drycreekmodels.com.
I'll be sharing some stories of manufacturing these kits over at the Dry Creek Models blog, so keep an eye over there if you're interested in the cars I'm making or for more details about 3d printing. I'll continue to talk about random adventures in 3d printing here, as well as sharing the usual updates on the model railroad and San Jose history.
Here's the latest result: Southern Pacific's "Battleship" gondolas. The "battleships" were side-dump ballast cars built around 1902, and they're cool cars from so many different angles.
The Battleships are interesting construction-wise because they're some of the Southern Pacific's early steel freight cars, completely built using steel plate and angles, riveted together. They're sort of like the Eiffel Tower of freight cars in that way - big, metal, and covered in rivets, and they probably impressed the locals at the time for the same reason the Eiffel Tower was impressive. When I saw the plans at the California State Railroad Museum a few weeks back, I found they're just as interesting underneath, with a three foot tall I-beam running down the center of the car, and all sorts of cross-bracing supporting the interior A-frame for the slope sheets.
The cars are also interesting appearance-wise because they look unlike any other freight car. The available photos make the cars look big and boxy, even though they're only 30 feet long - short by modern standards, and even small for my 1930's era. The unusual hinged doors covered each side completely, and the arrangements of hinges catches the eye. Their air-operated mechanism for the side doors are beautifully steampunk with ten foot long operating levers covering the sides.
And finally, the cars were present at the Southern Pacific's greatest battles. The cars were intended to dump fill on each side of a railroad track. Three hundred were bought for the Lucin Cutoff work - Southern Pacific's attempts to tame Utah by running a railroad straight across the Great Salt Lake. They were used in the fill work to block the Colorado River's escaping of its old channel as it tried to fill the Salton Sea. The cars hauled debris away from San Francisco after the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906. They were used in countless other improvement projects, with some cars lasting into the 1950's in maintenance-of-way service.
These cars were printed on my Form One printer, printed upside down (top to bottom) for easier support during printing. The needed support structure attached along the top rim of the car, and also had individual supports down into the interior. These versions of the model have only been painted with primer and touched up with a bit of putty; I still need to install grab irons, brake gear, and still need to paint and decal the models.
The air-operated mechanism for opening the doors was the touchiest part of the cars to design, and I'm surprised it printed as well as it did. You can see that some of the levers are supported from behind so that the car can be printed in a single piece. I found the lower frame the hardest where shallow angles support the slope sheets that stick out just beyond the edges of the car. The interiors were the fun part because they forced me to fully understand how the car was supported - posts come up from the lower frame to support the top of the car, and a different set of supports braces the door below the hinge point.
Oh, and a pro tip for folks building 3d-printed model railroad models: always take a picture with a coin or X-acto knife. Otherwise, you'll look at your photos and think "wow, that's a lousy model", and then you realize the detail you're complaining about is a literal pinhole.
"You don't need to know how many cars could fit on the team track at the San Jose Western Pacific freight depot to build your layout. The answer is "three", by the way."
--Byron Henderson
Not every model railroader is interested in history, but there's enough so that some potential model railroad builders get stuck trying to learn every possible detail about their prototype before they ever start building. Byron's quote highlights that we don't need all those details to have fun modeling.
But his quote also highlights how obsessive some of us can get learning about particular places. I'm guilty of that; to build my model of the Vasona Branch, I've done way more research than I really need. One particular source of my obsession has been the packing house at 740 West San Carlos Street, once occupied by J.S. Roberts in the 1930's, but occupied by Abinante and Nola in the late 1940's. I've written about Abinante and Nola many times in the past, and about working on the scene as it would have looked in the 1930's.
But, hey, how could I model that packing house without knowing everything about it? What about their oil tank used for supplying steam to the dried fruit packing plant. Was it 6,000 gallons and filled by the local oil dealer, or bigger, and supplied by rail?
I can answer that sort of question now. Heck, I can even tell you what that tank looked like. You see, I went off for lunch at Paradiso's Deli on Auzerais St., just behind the former Del Monte cannery. After some tasty ravioli and meatball, I wandered off along the Los Gatos Creek trail for sightseeing, and saw a backhoe digging off on the other side of the railroad tracks.
1902-era redwood heating oil tank being dug up.
What were they digging up? Turns out they did an environmental survey on the property at 740 West San Carlos, and discovered that the old oil tank for the packing house had never been removed. Yesterday, they'd exposed it, and found it still had 9,000 gallons of heating oil in it, and pumped out the thickened oil. Today, they were pulling up the tank to check underneath for spills. Odds are the tank was placed in the ground in 1903 when the packing house was built for Ernst Luehning and his San Jose dried fruit outpost. It was in really good shape for a hundred year old *redwood* tank that had been holding something similar to diesel fuel for all these years. The joints were still tight on the tank, and was little sign of fuel leaking through.
More importantly, the Sanborn map lied; it wasn't a 6,000 gallon tank, but closer to 12,000 gallons - probably just the size to deserve a carload of heating oil a few times a year.
Now, I'm not a stranger to the idea of shoving oil in the ground - when we lived (briefly) on the east coast, we lived in two houses with heating oil; in both cases, we had to remember to call the oil company to dump a thousand gallons of oil in our front yard so we didn't freeze to death. In our last house, we didn't quite trust the landlord to compensate us for oil we left in the tank on moving, so we tried to stretch the tank for the whole season... and ran out just before a huge snowstorm hit. Ugh. After that mistake, I really can't imagine anyone moving out of the packing house without taking those 9,000 gallons with them. But I guess landlords were much nicer in San Jose back then.
If you're ever over to see the model railroad, look over just to the right of the packing house, and with luck I'll have added some piping and vents for a certain 12,000 gallon oil tank that I know occupies exactly that spot on the model railroad.
And if you're one of those folks doing the environmental impact surveys, try aiming a couple hundred feet west. The Zicovich Winery was out there in the 1890's, and with some luck you might find some barrels of wine that survived the Great San Carlos Street Fire of 1899. Much more tasty than half-century old oil.
Photo of tank being dug out of lot at 740 West San Carlos taken by me, August 19, 2015. Thanks to the crew doing the removal for talking with me about the fun of discovering an removing the old tank. Thanks to the crew doing the digging for chatting with the strange obsessive model railroader about their site.
As much as I care about modeling prototype scenes accurately, I also realize I'm using the historical research just to help me figure out what to build as part of a hobby and relaxation. The model isn't meant to be a perfect representation of history; sometimes, I'll build stuff because it's fun (ex: the Goleta gas station sitting on Meridian Road) or because a particular model might not be perfectly accurate, but it still gives the sense of the Santa Clara Valley I'm trying to share.
Back in 2009, I talked about my notebook of location sketches that I used to remember photos of particular locations. I was using my map of Wrights at the time to redo the scenery around there; my big question was how the road went between the Wrights depot and the (still-existing) road bridge. I'd guessed at the time that the road dipped under the railroad bridge. I wasn't sure if it was perfect, but (1) it was plausible, (2) I wanted to improve the scene, and (3) I wasn't going to get better information any time soon. I rebuilt the scene anyway, and it's a nice scene.
1911 Wrights map
I did another day trip up to Sacramento last week. It's a bit of a long slog, but I enjoy getting the chance to search through old archives, look at original documents, and get a better understanding for how things had been. It can be boring work, but the occasional revelations and surprises make for a satisfying day.
I had a bunch of other goals for that visit, but found some time to look for materials on some of the stations along the Los Gatos brach. One of the stops was at the California State Archives. Most of their archives can be dry - corporate records, transcripts from California Railroad Commission cases, etc. They've also got microfilms of some railroads drawings from the early 20th century, probably collected as part of some state law at the time. I poked around in several of the maps along the Vasona branch - Foyle (location of the brickworks on Fruitvale Ave.), Vasona, and Wrights. One of the finds was particularly cool - the April, 1911 map of Wrights in their collection shows "Depot Road" passing under the bridge, in pretty much the same way I guessed. Woohoo!
Cover of Wrights bridge rebuilding brochure
Plan of rebuild of 6th crossing of Los Gatos Creek near Wrights
This was just one of many discoveries that day. The California State Railroad Museum had a handful of other docs to highlight the details - the 1914 equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation talking about a rebuild of the bridge crossing Los Gatos Creek (with shape of piers and cost) also showed where the bridge crossed the road. (Congrats to the Southern Pacific; their intern from 1916 did a great job on the brochure!) A 1938-era map showed the road passing under the bridge, even as every other building in the vicinity had been removed. A 1938 map showed the Wright station removed.
It's great knowing that I got that detail right. Some might ask "why did you build it if you weren't certain about the arrangement?" To be honest, my guess about its location wasn't too far off the mark. Although I could have held off on modeling Wright until I got that detail right, I'm really glad I didn't wait six years but instead built something that was mostly correct. It's more fun to have an operating layout with fun scenery than to have something that's 100% accurate.
The maps also showed a bunch of interesting details that are worth adding. Several maps showed a freight house on the "Sunset Park" spur just before the tunnel; the 1910-era maps also showed packing houses that (sadly) aren't visible in later years. All the maps show wooden "bulkheads" along the creek keeping the hillsides from eroding into the creek.
The last map also highlights some cute little details that never made it into photos. About a hundred yards down the track, the map shows a "shed made of bridge stringers", and an old narrow gauge car body on blocks next to the tracks, joined to a small frame building. (An annotation mentions the buildings were sold to "W. E. Hughes".) Those buildings would be neat details to add to the layout. The photos of the Wrights bridge also points out my trestle-style bridge isn't quite correct; to be accurate, I really need a 50' steel girder bridge "from Santa Clara River (Montalvo bridge)", along with some large concrete piers to hold it up, and some timber trestle on either end.
And on top of all that, the maps highlight little bits of history that aren't relevant for modeling, but do highlight the place I'm modeling, and life in the Santa Cruz Mountains at the beginning of the last century. The 1911 map shows that one of the packing houses was used as "Dance Hall and Packing House", highlighting how buildings shared multiple purposes in rural towns.
The 1911 map also contains an unnatural fascination in running water for the town:
Note: All properties shown excepting that marked Nick Bowden are owned by Matty. Cottages 1, 2, 3, 4 & 11 are occupied only in summer. Each has 1 3/4" faucet. Cottages 6, 7, 8, & 9 are occupied only in summer. They get water from the one faucet shown. The saloon, hotel, & livery stables are rented and run by B. Borrella. The saloon has 5 3/4" faucet shown & 1 toilet. The hotel 7 3/4" faucets & 1 toilet, the livery stable 2 3/4" faucets and 1 1 1/2" faucet. The blacksmith shop has 1 3/4" faucet. Cottages 5 & 10 are occupied permanently, each has 1 3/4" faucet. The grocery store is rented & run by Chas Squires, & has "1-1" & 1- 3/4" faucet. The chinese store has 1 3/4" faucet. The dance hall has 1 3/4" faucet. The Earl Fruit Co. packing house has 1 3/4" faucet. Nick Bowden's place has 1-3/4" faucet.
That accounting of faucets might say something about whether water would be available for other development; one of the later maps at CSRM showed that the railroad water tank was filled from small dams along some of the ravines north of town, which couldn't have supplied much water, and must have been dry during summer. If I had a thirsty locomotive in the middle of summer, I'd be unwilling to trust there was any water in that tank.
None of that matters for building the model (except for the notes about both Earl Fruit and the freight house existing), but it does hint at Wrights being a quiet rural village that would have been near-empty during the winter.
Excerpts from 1911 Wrights Station map from the California State Archives - ask for the "Aperture" cards, and check the card catalog in the research room to see what's available. The excerpts from the Southern Pacific "S.P.C. Bridge Renewal" brochure from the California State Railroad Museum's archive. They've got a similar brochure for the next bridge downhill towards Los Gatos that I haven't seen. Great thanks to the research staff at both libraries for their help!
That question goes a lot to the challenge of 3d printing. Although the technology seems magical (“press a button and a freight car comes out”), there’s a huge amount of work to design a model. Having an existing thing - whether a real car or an existing model - doesn’t help. You’d need to get a scan, clean up any imperfections, add detail in the places that didn’t scan well, adjust the design to either exaggerate detail that would get lost when printing at your scale, and hide detail that won't print well.
For example, rivets smaller than about 1.5" diameter don't print well, so I usually do both rivets and bolt heads as 1.5" diameter, 1" tall cylinders. Models with a board floor need gaps drawn in to show off the boards, or require each board to be at a different height to be visible; either choice affects spacing, and how the floor attaches to other parts of the model. Detail that needs to be painted on, such as a metal strap, might need to be raised up so it can be hit with a paint brush. Metal structural parts, such as angle iron, needs to be thickened - 1/4" plate used for stiffening a railroad car would be 3/1000 inch thick - perfectly solid on the prototype, but impossibly flimsy on a model. Changed dimensions might snowball into affecting other parts of the design. Making decisions about how the design should be tweaked requires judgements about what can print reliably, and what detail is essential or unimportant for a model. For lack of a better term, it requires a bit of "art". (Folks making plastic kits have to worry about all these details all the time; check out a plastic boxcar to see the mold maker's choices.)
Fixing an existing scanned design to fix details and make the judgement calls about scale is a ton of work. In many cases, it might be easier to start with a rough idea of what you want to build, and then design from scratch in 3d, just as if you were making technical drawings on paper.
Making a 3d model of a freight car isn’t easy, either. For the three cars I’ve built (the CS-35a flat car, the F-50-4 flat car, and the Hart gondola), I built the models mostly based on photos. I grabbed my copy of Tony Thompson’s “Southern Pacific Freight Cars” book off the shelf, started with any drawings he included, then started guesstimating from the photos. For the CS-35a and F-50-4, Tony included very tiny copies of the original drawings; with these and a good magnifying glass, I could get a decent idea about measurements. With the photos in the book, I could identify some of the details, such as the shape of the stake pockets or guess at dimensions I couldn’t read.
End elevation from Hart gondola plan.
Making the 3d Model from Photos: With the Hart gondola, I had more of a struggle; the Freight Cars book didn’t have any drawings. Tony did include minimal information on car length from an old car description, but other than that, I was on my own. Multiple times, I printed a model, then looked at the photo to compare scale and look for details I missed. The result was pretty good - certainly good enough for my model railroad - but I knew there were mistakes.
So fast forward a couple months, and I’ve decided to try doing another 3d model - this time the Southern Pacific’s “battleship” side dump ballast cars, built in 1902. These cars were critical for the early SP, helping to create the fill across the Great Salt Lake, hauling away the debris from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and plugging the Colorado breach to stop the flooding of the Salton Sea. These were huge boxy, coarse steel freight cars that, in every photo, were dumping immeasurable amounts of rock to stop a river or cover a hillside.
For the Battleships, the book only had eight photos, mostly side views. With those, I could get the rough outward appearance. However, the insides weren't visible in any of the photos. I needed to understand how the inside of the hopper was shaped - these had a triangular shapes interior to slide rock to the outside, and those insides would be very visible on the completed model. The photos also hinted that the car was mostly hollow, with support structures underneath holding up that hopper bay. 3d printing promised to get that internal structure just right, so I really wanted to get that non-visible structure correct.
It was time to go to extraordinary lengths.
So last week, I headed up to Sacramento and the California State Railroad Museum to search for more information. The CSRM managed to save many of the plans and blueprints from the Southern Pacific, so for details on obscure, century-old railroad cars, it’s the best hope for information.
Finding the Original Hart Plans: I went up looking for three bits of information. First, when I’d shown off the Hart cars to Tony Thompson last month, he hinted that the cars had been rebuilt in the late ‘teens. “After the rebuild, the cars were two boards higher.” I wanted to find plans for the rebuild so I could make an accurate modern version of the cars. Second, I wanted to find blueprints for the Battleship cars; although I’d been able to print a rough model, I couldn’t see how the frame of the car was built, and wanted to get that right. Finally, I wanted to poke around for more information on San Jose and the canneries.
I wasn’t so lucky with the Battleships and the rebuilt cars; plans for both are stored off-site, and need a week’s notice. (Pro tip: WS and McC call numbers on plans imply they're stored off-site in West Sacramento and McClelland Air Force Base.) However, the staff did find a beautiful set of plans for the original Hart gondolas (last revision, 1918), all on a 30x60 piece of vellum. The drawing is a beauty - some draftsman spent a huge amount of time getting the it perfect, even sketching in the wood grain on some of the posts.
And now I’d put myself in an awkward situation. I already had spent a lot of time on that original model. I’d guess I’ve spent 40-50 hours on it, both in getting the rough design done, and fine-tuning it for printing. And now I had accurate plans, and knew all my mistakes. If I’d scratch built my ten gons, I might have stopped and said “good enough.” If I hadn’t thought that someone else might be interested in the gons, I might have stopped too. But now I knew I had an imprecise model. Worse, I had the ability to change that model.
Detail, Hart gondola door. Note how U bolts and angle iron were used to fabricate the hinges, and note the detail on the door latch that I never could see accurately in the photos.
I sat there for about 20 minutes just looking over the details. Ah, the straps hinging the side doors were actually angle iron, not steel strap. The trusses underneath the car were much deeper (3’) than I thought, and fabricated from larger iron angles. The metal aprons that could be flipped across car gaps only existed on the brake end of the car. I had the length and door spacing slightly wrong. I hadn’t quite understood the mechanism for opening the bottom dump doors.
If you look at the snippet from the drawing, you can see just how much detail is there. There are the revisions about where the handrails go on the car ends. You can see the “v” notch cut into the sides to hold the hinged-up doors. You can identify how metal rods wrapped around each post, then held the posts firm against the frame and truss. You can even see the metal plate joining the side frame and truss, and see the I beam going through the hopper area only joined to the inside of the frames - details I could sort of see in the photo, but now really understand.
Now, it's also worth noting that my original cars weren't that bad. The models I designed were eye-catching and reasonably accurate. The general proportions of the car were good. They're still worlds better than either of the two 1960's plastic or metal kits would have been. Many of the incorrect details I spotted were insanely minor - cases of replacing a metal plate and bolt with a pair of bolts-and-washers, or placing the removable ends just outside of the line of side posts. But I know there are inaccuracies.
So now I’m redoing the Hart gondola - stretching parts correctly, adding details that I hadn’t known about, and hopefully adding some parts of the mechanism. And once that’s done, it’s time to print, paint, and decal some accurate Hart gondolas
I’m still planning on dealing with the “rebuilt” Hart gondolas and the Battleships. I’m going up next week to see those plans. I suspect I’ll be spending a lot of time in front of the computer over the next couple weeks as I pore over some draftsman's really fine work. Stay tuned for more photos of 3d printed freight cars!
Snippets of drawings from Southern Pacific / Union Pacific C-1652 plan, used on SP’s class W-50-3. Last revision April 19, 1918. Original in California State Railroad Museum.
