Next Project

I've actually got two projects to do next (besides fix the signals):

* As I mentioned in the last blog entry, I'm thinking of placing an abandoned farm between Alma and Wrights. Good for the period, but it'll get rid of the last bit of empty, unoccupied space... and I might want to remind viewers they're looking at a desolate canyon.

* All the nice photos face uphill towards Wrights because the sky disappears in the other direction. (That's really a shame, as I really like this photo of the station and the hillside.) I've got backdrop material to finish the backdrop here, and then I need to start putting scenery on the bare styrafoam at the other end of the Alma siding.

That second idea will need me to make some uncomfortable choices. The tracks curve onto a shelf built behind Los Gatos and over the staging tracks; I've been hesitant to put in scenery here, partially because I wasn't sure what to do, and partially because I'm going to find it really hard to maintain the tracks underneath once the scenery goes in. So if this really is a five-year or ten-year layout, what are the odds I'll need easy access to those tracks, or can I be enough of a contortionist to twist under the benchworks to clean the tracks?

It's also exciting for me at the same time; Alma's been a very unloved point on the railroad, but this month's scenery has been coming out wonderfully and makes the spot eye-catching. Before the scenery, it was just a siding on a shelf. Once the scenery went in, it became very easy to imagine what's really happening--a train pulling aside on train orders, a fast passenger blowing through town without stopping. Just running trains through here for the photos has been great fun. It'll be interesting to see how the other half of the siding turns out when scenery goes in.

More Photos of Alma

This weekend's big project was getting the signals running in Alma; by the end of the weekend, the semaphores are moving, but I'm still having problems getting yellow indications to show. Although I blogged about my last problems with the signals last time, I didn't write down enough to help me track down what's going on here. No matter - I've got the signal board nested underneath the upper deck, and they're moving, and that's success enough today.

The Alma scene's looking great to my eye. I love the tall grass, and the cut into the hillside, and the Station. Compared with my original plan a month ago, I'm doing pretty good. I still need to finish detailing the station, and add the MOW boxcar I saw in one old photo. I've also got an idea for the next stretch of scenery between here and Wrights: an abandoned farm, with an orchard disappearing into the weeds and an abandoned building. The early 30's were a hard time for farmers in the Santa Clara Valley, with fruit prices dropping. Modeling some of that fallout might be good.


Here's a couple pictures of the actual Alma station, the first from the Preston Sawyer collection at UCSC (and published in the original South Pacific Coast book) dating from 1950, just before the valley was flooded for Lexington Reservoir. The second was taken by Norman Holmes around 1944, and is from Prune County Railroading. Comparing the real photos to the photos of my model, I still need to add some gingerbread trim at the roof peak, add drainpipes, and that very obvious hose bib centered on the end wall. I also still need to add fascia boards along the edge of the roof and smokejacks. I still have a few nice evening projects before I'll be finished.

Being able to dive into small projects.

Yesterday's entry mentioned that I still needed to install the semaphore signals at the far end of the Alma siding. The existing signals are LEDs covered with hot glue - not the most prototypical, but cheap and easy to build. My only problem was that there wasn't really room for both semaphores; although I'd cut a notch into the hill for the downhill signal, there really wasn't enough space for the signal and assorted signal machinery details. That spot also happened to be right under one of the joists, and didn't have room for the real machinery under the layout to move the semaphore.

So instead, I took a utility knife to that nice hillside I made last weekend, and cut out addtional space. Here's the photo of the area right after I finished. I'll admit I worried this was going to be one of those model projects that took a reasonable accomplishment and messed it up. But I wanted those signals, and I wanted the signals in each direction to be across the tracks from each other as they were on the prototype.

Here's the after shot. Now, the key detail is that this photo was taken about 6 hours after the previous one; in fact, the little mound of ballast for the signal didn't really bond this time, so I dripped more matte medium on it right after I took the photo.

Rebuilding the scene went quickly because I had all the supplies still out - the sifted dirt for the base layer, the pinkish sand for the gritty sides of the cut, the box full of oak-like trees I made last winter. More importantly, I've been keeping a jar full of diluted matte medium around with an eyedropper always included, so it was really easy for me to take the rough Sculptamold scenery, cover it with brown paint, then sift on the various dirts and install the trees. The matte medium was particularly handy because I saw later in the afternoon that some of the track wasn't fully buried in the ballast or dirt, and so could quickly dump a bit of dirt on the tracks, spray it with the water sprayer, then soak it with matte medium for bonding. That's half the work of getting scenes built - having some of the supplies on-hand so that making little bits of touch-up like this can be done in ten minute in between other jobs (or in between household chores) rather than requiring an afternoon to get all the tools out.

The other cool project for the scene were the telephone poles. These are the Rix telegraph pole kits; I pulled out the kit package last night, glued on the crossarms, then sprayed them with dullcoat and gray paint this morning. The metal arm supports got a touch of color with a Floquil rust paint marker I've been using for the tracks, and the insulators got whichever color of green was handy in the paint box. I cut down a few of the poles for that short-pole look often seen in period photos.

Anyway, hopefully I can get to the signals in the next week or two; I'll need to install the servos for controlling the semaphore arms and set up the electronics for controlling them; the only hard part is where to stash the electronics so the wire runs aren't too long. The servos are temperamental, and long wires can cause them to not work at all.

More Alma Progress

The Google Earth backdrop got reprinted in yellower colors (to be a bit closer match to the existing backdrop further on), so I glued that on with some Spray-mount (well, Super 77 contact cement). Once the backdrop was in, I added some backdrop oak trees I'd made last year from Supertrees. The scene's looking pretty great to my eye. The yellow static flock and Silflor grass tufts really make the scene look like a typical summer in California. The tufts are lots of fun; although they're pricey (around $25 for about 12" square) they're actually cheap fun because they're easy to add to a scene, suck up a lot of time as you figure where taller grass can appear, and do a great job of carrying grass out to the edge of the benchwork. I've found the tufts to be much more useful than the Silflor grass sheets.

This shot shows off the sandy banks well. I worried they wouldn't look right with the darker soil I use, but the different texture (and darker color bleeding through) makes it work. It's too bad I didn't have room for explicit drainage ditches on the far side of the tracks. I used some of the Silflor bunch grass along the edge of the cut to make the grass look thinner. Next step: replace the hot glue signals with some moving semaphores.

For the time I model, Alma was at best a flag stop; it had lost its agent years before, and one of the history articles I read said that the station became the area's community center by 1940. Trains weren't stopping in Alma. The crossing under the photographer's feet would be the original (1915?) Santa Cruz Highway; by 1932, the state had built a new highway up the center of the valley, off to our right across the creek about a half mile away. The local water district was furious because they'd been planning on building what would become Lexington Reservoir, but the state wasn't willing to move the highway. When the dam and lake were finally approved in the late 1940's, the courts heard about Caltrans's intransigence, and forced them to pay for a good portion of moving their "new" highway out of the way of the dam.

Another Cool Photo!

I've been spending evenings adding online library and history photos to Lookback Maps; it's been a good way for me to organize photos I've seen at the Bancroft Library or Los Gatos History Museum's websites without downloading and saving them all. I've also been finding all sorts of cool photos available online, ranging from some of Dorothea Lange's photos of the last days of the Berryessa Valley before Monticello Dam flooded the region to photos of William Wurster's modern office building for the Schuckl Cannery in Sunnyvale.

I've also found a few wonderful photos for planning the Vasona Branch. Here's a neat photo from History Los Gatos's collections of photos from the Jesuit Novitiate above town; it shows some of the Novitiate students on a hike up Los Gatos Canyon to Wrights Station in December, 1938. I like this picture because it's a really clear shot of the station location, though it's obvious that the station was torn down sometime before 1938. The water tank is still available for any trains that come by, but it'll be useless as soon as the line is abandoned in a year and a half.

The surprising detail for me in this photo is the huge size of that cut behind the water tank - the hillside's been cut away up to fifty feet above the tracks. Wrights had a short passing siding here, but I don't know why the railroad cut such a huge bench out along here. The sign is located where the post-1906 station had been; before that, the station had been behind us, across the river and just before the tunnel. I wonder if the railroad needed to carve out more of the hillside to give the tracks room to curve across the creek and to the mouth of the tunnel? Or was the canyon just so narrow and steep that digging space for the tracks required so much earthmoving?

Time to start combing through those online history web sites to find more photos like this one!

Alma Progress

This weekend was the time for landscaping, inside and out. Outside, I exploited our little break in the rain, and mowed the front lawn, pulled all the dandelions in the flower beds, trimmed back the lemon tree, and collected a bucket of lemons for friends. Inside, I continued working on Alma.

Last weekend, I tore out a bit of the Alma scenery, built up an embankment for the Alma station on the correct side of the tracks, and cleaned up the rough scenery in the whole area. This weekend, I covered everything with some fine, sifted dirt from the backyard, put down ground foam, and applied a bunch of flock-style tall grass with my home-made electrostatic flocking device. (Search for "flyswatter static grass" for details, though it looks like the article I used has disappeared.) I even managed to ballast the tracks, and things still appear to run ok. Here's progress photos from this weekend's work:

Here's what the scene looked like before two weeks ago. The station is a freelanced model I made about ten years ago when trying to survive through an East Coast winter. It's been a placeholder at Alma for a few years now, and while there was space for it against the backdrop, it never quite looked right.

Here's the scene with the static grass and ballast in. The dirt near the foreground tracks is sifted dirt from our garden. Living in the same area I'm modeling means that I can get accurately-colored dirt any time I want to. I dig some from the parts of the garden that haven't been tended for a long time. The color is close to a raw siena, and matches the base paint I use. The cut on the opposite side has the same dirt underneath, but the top is a sandy pinkish rock from Arizona Rock and Mineral. I was trying to capture some of the changes in soil color as we get closer to the San Andreas fault, but this stuff's worked better for portraying a sandy, unweathered soil for the cuts. I'll give it a few days and see if I still like it.

Here's Alma station and the first mock-up of the backdrop. I'm using images clipped from Google Earth again here, though this panorama's either a different time of the year, or just prints darker and greener. I'm still trying to figure out how to make the backdrop images match between Wrights and Glenwood. The hills are a bit too high here; I'll probably cut an inch or two off the bottom before installing the real backdrop, and it'll also be screened by oak trees and various decorative trees.

That retaining wall holding up the station is an obvious sight in the published photos of Alma (which I'd include except I'm getting a bad case of copyright infringement phobia - we'll see if I'm brave enough to scan photos another time.)

The hillside above Alma held the Alma Hotel, as this 1880's photo from Frank Rodolph shows. I'm thinking of putting up some tall, non-native trees and perhaps a whitewashed fence with a faded advertisement for the hotel on the far hillside.

Here's the completed scene as it looks tonight. This was taken before I removed the locomotive and painted all the rails with the Floquil rail color paint markers. They're much easier than trying to airbrush the track!

Leafing Through Old Newspapers

I've heard stories about how the canneries were frantic when the fruit was in season, but I don't think I realized just how boom-and-bust the canning business was. Searching on Google is currently turning up articles in the San Jose Evening News, and a search for the Ainsley Cannery turned up this article from July 3, 1901, describing how the canning season really was either going full blast or completely idle:

Canners Expect to Begin Upon Apricots Next Week

"Early next week the canneries, which have been running but little in comparison with former years, will open for the season. The cherry crop has been so light that it required but a short time to dispose of the entire amount secured, and since that time the establishments have been idle. It was not certain today when the canning establishments would begin on apricots further than that they will begin within a very few days...

"The Ainsley cannery at Campbell has sent out word that if present expectations are fulfilled a start will be made with a good force Tuesday. From advices of growers it is expected that a quantity of apricots will be delivered Monday. The Golden Gate cannery has set no date certain yet, but yesterday believed that the start would be Wednesday or Thursday. The Sunol street cannery [which will become Del Monte Plant #3] will probably stasrt about Tuesday or Wednesday on apricots....

"The shipment of fruit from Santa Clara county as compared with the amount shipped up to this date last season, is just one hundred and twelve cars short. Last season the shipment up to this time was 155 cars, but up to July 4, but 43 cars have been shipped."

[Check out the whole article, including cursing at the strong morning winds recently.]

Another article from the 1920's talked about the huge production from the Los Gatos Hunt Brothers Cannery that is on my layout. In 1928, they canned 582,000 pounds of apricots, 12,000 pounds of plums, 1.3 million pounds of pears, and 6 million pounds of peaches. (I wonder if the pears and peaches were local, or if they were grown across the Santa Clara Valley.) Those boom years didn't continue; another article pointed out that the Hunt Cannery was closed during 1931 and 1932, and didn't produce anything.

1932 is pretty much the year I model. As much as I want to model the Santa Clara Valley accurately, I don't think I want to reproduce the business problems of the Depression. I'd prefer to be running trains than rolling past empty canneries.

Anyway, try archivesearch in Google and see what newspapers you turn up. I've also subscribed to Newspaper Archive when doing some family history research. They're also interesting if they have local papers for the area of interest. In my case, I liked searching the Hayward newspapers for family history, but was frustrated they didn't have any San Jose newspapers for railroad research. I'm happy Google has access to the San Jose Evening News, even if the paper seems a bit hysterical on the front page at times. Guess some things never change.