Interesting finds in the newspaper

I spent the weekend on machining projects instead of on the railroad or (more importantly) yardwork, so there's nothing new to report. I did see a couple interesting articles in the paper, though.

First, the local weekly paper, the Willow Glen Resident, had this photo in their "Looking Back" feature. If I needed some ideas for my abandoned farm near Alma, this ought to give me some ideas. Looks like the owners brought out all their livestock to show how well they were doing.

Second, the Mercury News has a nice article on the city
buying up land for the proposed A's ballpark next to Diridon Station. Usually, I've got to go poring through old archives to find histories of old industrial buildings, but here they put a nice map on the front page. I'm glad I actually looked at the physical paper this morning.

The map's interesting because the area south of Diridon station holds areas I model. The "PG&E substation" used to be a PG&E generating plant. I've got a model of that plant as a building just south of the Plant 51 area; I modeled the building off a photo just after Diridon station was built. HP Pavilion was the site of a coal gas plant (I think) and had a gas holder for many years; I've got that too.

The extension of Autumn Street just south of the old main line (cutting across the top of the map) plows right over the former site of the Greco Canning Company, next to the Guadalupe River. History San Jose has a nice picture of that plant; it's where the large parking lot now sits at "B" on the map. There's also this history of Anthony Greco; I don't know if it's the same Greco's, but it gives some color for the history of the local canning business. [Oops, it's not the same. Anthony Greco formed a Greco Canning in 1909 which lasted four years until reorganization, then started Alba Canning, selling out in 1920 to buy land in the hills. The Greco Canning on Autumn St. was founded by Victor Greco in 1915. (Wonder if it was the remainder of what got reorganized?) The canning business is starting to sound a lot like high-tech...]

I also love the Greco Canning building because it looks like so many of the Campbell model buildings from my teenage years. They always looked odd to my eye, but now I know they were prototypical!

The Truth about Dairies

One of the fun parts of this hobby is learning all sorts of trivial details about California history, industries, and agriculture. Take, for example, dairies. A friend gave a talk on the milk trains and dairy industries along the New York Central railroad in the Northeast, and about the creameries that processed the milk. Kind of interesting (even if his stories only reminded me of snow and New Yorkers)... Ever since then, the other local modelers keep asking me, "so, do you have milk trains on the Vasona Branch, just like Ed talked about on the NYC?"

I didn't know. I don't know how the California dairy industry worked, except that there used to be dairies on the San Francisco Peninsula back in the days before suburbia. The cows handled the fog and wind better than the teenagers in Colma: The Musical.

Or at least, I didn't know until recently. My mom lent me a copy of A Barrelful of Memories: Stories of my Azorean Family by Pauline Correia Stonehill, a few weeks ago. The author talks about growing up on a dairy outside Los Banos run by her parents, first generation Portuguese immigrants. It's a great book, and not just because it hints at my grandmother's life on her parents' fruit ranch up above Hayward at the same time. The stories about the dairies talk about buying a herd of cattle from another immigrant, renting a farm, and then putting in the hard work needed for a dairy - twice daily milking, growing and harvesting hay, dealing with the hired help, and fighting against all the obstacles that that the world threw at them.

In the 1920's and 1930's, the Los Banos area had tons of dairies run by Portuguese and Italian immigrants. The descendents still run dairies around there; when I drove Highway 59 between Los Banos and Merced a couple weeks ago, the farms had the same family names: "Silva Dairy", "Brazil Ranch".

In the stories, Stonehill remembers her father taking the wagon or truck to the creamery into town with the day's milk - no milk trains for them or anyone, even though they were next to the train tracks, three miles out of town. There were so many dairies in the area around Los Banos to give the processing plant plenty of raw material to work with, and the wagons probably were the easiest way to get the milk into town. It also meant that Pauline got to do all the same high school activities as the city kids because her father could give her a ride home on his way back from the creamery.

The same was probably true in San Jose; the stories about the dairies on Dairy Hill south of town and the American Dairy Company (Borden) creamery near 17th and Santa Clara St. match those of Los Banos. (Borden took over the Sneath Dairies, too. I didn't know that either.)

And if those stories weren't enough, the lack of any milk trains on the Southern Pacific timetable definitely say that milk wasn't shipped around by train. There's no trains marked as stopping at all locations as the traditional milk train did, and the stories of the dairies talk about the need for morning and night milking putting out milk each night for the early morning train seems awfully inefficient for what should be a five mile drive into town. Milk trains might be a bit romantic, but it sounds like they were east coast-specific (or perhaps from an earlier era). Maybe they made sense in the narrow valleys of the northeast where the dairies couldn't be clustered together, but when you had a twenty mile (or hundred mile wide) valley, you could put an awful lot of dairies close together and right next to the creameries.

And one last bit of trivia that I also learned in this particular thread: did you know that most barns in Los Banos face west or northwest? I didn't before, but now I do. Bet that barns in San Jose faced the same direction.

Not that any of those trivial details make much difference in my life, but fun in the same way that puzzles or collecting might be: learning a few related facts to build a bigger idea, visiting out-of-the-way museums (like Los Banos's) to collect other little tidbits, and making connections from books I once read

. And best of all, unlike collecting physical things, I don't have a boxful of thoughts filling up the closet.

[Picture shamelessly cribbed from ourlosbanos.com.]

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!