3d Printing Detail Parts

Wonder what I've been doing lately? How about making my own HO figures and detail parts?

Pruning Crews, and Finding Photos on Facebook

Pruning crew, Santa Clara County?

If you listen for the stories of growing up in the Santa Clara Valley, you hear a lot from local kids about summers spent "picking prunes" - picking the ripe fruit off the ground. It's usually spoken of both as an awful job (because of the sticky fruit and constant stooping) and as a first taste of independence and cash. But those weren't the only jobs in the orchard. In his oral history, my great-uncle told how his father made extra money during the winters by pruning other folks' orchards.

A couple weeks back, one of the local history groups on Facebook posted this photo of "prune pickers". But these aren't prune pickers. They're too old, they don't have buckets for the crops, they're warmly dressed... and they're carrying pruning shears. This gang of men are a pruning crew off to shape the trees for a better crop in spring. I don't know if they're Anglo, Portuguese, Italian, or Croatian, but some of them were probably saving for their own orchards, and some might be helping out at someone else's orchard.

Facebook history groups like this seem to be the current rage this year; San Jose Memories has had a great mix of photos, and there's a good half a dozen railroad sites posting random photos. They're great way to attract a wide audience that might not visit a focused history site. Still, I wish there were easier ways to attach the source of photos both for credit and tracking down additional details.

[No idea about where this photo came from, but it's way too good to share. Let me know if you've seen this on a museum's website.]

Morgan Hill, As Seen From Shipping Receipts: Prunes, Wine, and Stove Pipes

Receipt for prunes shipped by E&J Bender from Morgan Hill to San Jose, 1896

I've had a couple articles here about how the dried apricots and prunes made it to the packing house; we learned about the San Tomas Drying Company and the trains coming down from Wrights, and we've heard about the packers having agents ready with train cars at Niles in the season. But were there other ways?

Through another EBay find, I've got some more details. Someone was selling a bundle of old shipping receipts from Morgan Hill in the 1890's; I've, of course, scanned them all and put them on Flickr. And in those receipts, we get a few answers about how orchardists got their prunes to the packers and eventually to the East Coast and Europe.

For example, E. and John Bender, local orchardists, had a pretty good season in 1896, with four loads of prunes being shipped from Morgan Hill in October. First,they shipped 456 sacks - 48,000 pounds of prunes on October 2, 1896, shipped on Central Pacific boxcar 19678 as inferred from a quick scribble. Then, 40,000 pounds of prunes on the 3rd in 600 boxes. On the fifth, 540 boxes of boxed and dried prunes for another 34,000 pounds on SP 1750. And finally, on October 7, they shipped 560 sacks of prunes - 53,500 pounds of prunes - out on SP 38626.

I didn't have an Official Railway Equipment Register to track down all these cars, but SP 38626 was a 33 foot ventilated boxcar with a 50,000 pound load limit. That car managed to survive until 1913 according to the 1913 ORER, but the rest of the cars didn't survive the additional fifteen years for us to identify.

So over four days, the Benders shipped around 200,000 pounds of prunes. That may seem like a lot, but if you poke around on the internet, you'll find that modern prune orchards can produce around 4 tons per acre. California currently averages around 2 tons of dried prunes per acre of prune orchard. With such numbers, the Benders would only have needed 50 acres worth of prunes to produce four freight cars worth of fruit.

For my grandfather's ten acres in Hayward, that means that every harvest season would produce around 40,000 pounds of apricots, and that's not including fruit dried at his yard but produced by neighbors. That would have been a lot of fruit to haul to the station in a horse-drawn wagon... and he was doing so in the 1920's.

All Bender's Morgan Hill prunes were going straight to Porter Brothers on Julian at Bassett Street, just west of the San Jose Depot. Porter Brothers was a Chicago-based wholesaler. The Binders must have been pretty happy clients of Porter Brothers, but hopefully they weren't selling fruit in 1903 when the company surprised Valley fruit men with a surprise bankruptcy.

There's occasional other details in those old receipts. The Binders also sold wine to Paul Masson in San Jose in 1896, though the receipts list them as puns. I'll leave it as a puzzle to you, the reader, to figure out what a pun is. There's also a bunch of household goods being shipped around, some to a George V. Herbert who doesn't appear to be the same as San Jose's own George N. Herbert. I'm also surprised at the number of tents and camping gear that appear in the shipping receipts; I suspect mid-September was a good time for vacationers returning from resorts like Sveadal, the Swedish society's campground in the hills.

Another cute detail are a few receipts from the Bisceglia Brothers for boxes of tomatoes - usually less than a thousand pounds - going to San Francisco and the California Canneries plant at Fourth and Townsend. The four Bisceglia brothers - Joseph, Alphonse, Bruno, and Pasquale - came to the U.S. in 1885 and, at least from the receipts, must have been farming by 1898. Like many immigrants, though, they worked their way up, starting their own cannery in Morgan Hill in 1903, and then moving the business to San Jose by 1913. The receipts not only catch them on their rise, but also highlight that the San Francisco (and probably San Jose canneries) were attracting fruit from many miles away. Importing fruit by railcar isn't that crazy an idea on my model railroad.

For my modeling, the receipts highlight just how much freight even a small depot like Morgan Hill would handle. If I ever wondered why railroad stations had such big freight depots, the idea of Bender's sacks of prunes and barrels of wine certainly explain the purpose. On my model railroad, I disregard the freight depot at Campbell, partially to avoid blocking a passing siding and partially because I didn't think there would be enough freight traffic to deserve blocking the siding with a boxcar. If I want to be able to load Bender's prunes, spotting the occasional boxcar against the depot might be worthwhile.

Check out the full set of receipts and see what you can learn about Morgan Hill at the turn of the century, and add your comments to the scans there. And if you figure out what a 'pun' is, throw your guess in the comments here.

Movie Night XVIII: Sprawl Isn't Just a California Thing

And in case you thought sprawl was just something that happened in California, listen to a Londoner talk about sprawl and a missing train line in tonight's movie night.

Barriger Collection: WP Photos

Somewhere in Stockton

Just as a reminder: if you liked that photo of the WP crossing in San Jose, remember that the Barriger Library's photos on Flickr includes photos of other railroads. The Western Pacific collection has some great photos of the WP in Stockton and other places. If you're interested in the Western Pacific, Stockton, or Sacramento, check them out. If you're not, check out all the other railroads!

Modeling the Weed-Infested Parts of the San Jose-Los Gatos Branch... With Photos!

W.P. Crossing, Los Gatos branch, 1940's?

Jack Burgess once explained how he started modeling the Yosemite Valley Railroad. “I went into the model train store, and they had two books on two California shorelines. I bought the Yosemite Valley one because it had more pictures.” That’s not an unusual way to start out modeling a specific railroad; usually when we start, we know only a bit about the specific railroad, don’t know where to turn for good photos, and don’t always have a good understanding of what the surroundings looked like or what trains ran there.

Luckily, we learn more over time. Jack ended up learning more about the YV than anyone else I can think of, and wrote a book about it. And me - well, I started out choosing the industries along the track based on which names sounded better, but every year I’ve learned a bit more about San Jose, the Los Gatos branch, and the canning industry.

And every year or so, I discover some picture that shows me a side of the railroad I’d never seen before. This photo, for example. I found this in a set of railroad photos on Flickr that were put online by the Barriger collection at the University of Missouri, shows the tracks in San Jose at the Western Pacific crossing. It’s a place that appears on my model railroad, so this photo gives me lots of details about what the area looked like, what the buildings looked like, and also what little details I ought to add to my model.

It's also a photo I thought I'd never find - an uninterrupted shot of some underused tracks cutting through the canneries and dried fruit packing houses on the edge of San Jose, showing more weeds than track. It's not a pretty shot, and it's not an action shot, but it shows a scene of San Jose that every distractible schoolboy saw on the way home from school - a photo few people would have ever taken. And it wasn't taken by a schoolboy, but a railroad executive.

Link to BIG VERSION of picture at Flickr.

The Industries:

Sack shed, Sunsweet Plant #6, Lincoln Ave.

It may not look like much, but this photo is filled with major industries. The corrugated iron fence and barbed wire top protects the Standard Oil depot. In the distance to the left, you see the roof of the large, wooden Sunsweet Plant #6 packing house on Lincoln Avenue - originally the George N. Herbert Packing Company. That little one story building in front of it? It’s listed on a 1950’s Sanborn map as “sack storage”, probably for Sunsweet. That packing house is the same era and the same rough construction as the J.S. Roberts packing house I’ve been building recently. The chimneys behind Sunsweet hint at the Contadina cannery, packing tomato paste.

1930 Sanborn Map, Lincoln Ave at Auzerais

On the right in the foreground is the sawtoothed former Virden Packing cannery; by this time, it may already be used for wine storage. It’s also got that loading dock on the side, also probably an SP siding. The masonry building on the other side of Lincoln Ave. would have been a cold storage building (I’d guess for pears for the canneries), and then in the far distance is the United States Products cannery, packing in glass for extra shelf appeal.

The Details:

Derail, WP Crossing

For detailing a scene, this is a beautiful photo. For example, the WP crossing was controlled by a switch tower through at least the 1930’s. That tower would have been just to the right of the scene You can see signs of its existence here - derails on both the left and right sidings / drill tracks to keep cars from rolling over the crossing and blocking the tracks. You can also see wood framing the ditch under the tracks which held the rods that controlled the derail.

If you look a bit further out, you’ll see cross bucks and a banjo crossing signal in the distance where Lincoln Ave. crosses the tracks. If I had any questions about appropriate signals for the busy Lincoln Ave. crossing, I now know. You’ll also see the searchlight signal a bit further out, indicating that the SP finally did put signals along the Los Gatos branch. There’s finally all the little details - hip-high weeds on the left side of the tracks, and fewer weeds on the right side. The tracks are set right in the dirt - all those lessons about raising main tracks to make them look better maintained is a lot of bunk, at least for San Jose. The railroad’s telephone poles and signal poles frame the shot, reminding me of another detail to add. Then there’s the random debris - posts sticking up out of the weeds, the canvas in a pile on the side of the tracks, the scrap wire just past the WP tracks.

Switchman's Shanty, Lincoln Ave., San Jose

And if you look past that signal in the middle foreground, you’ll see a little shack on the right side of the tracks - that switchman’s shanty that showed up on the Dome of Foam engineering plans.

And if I needed ideas about my buildings, there’s lots of great details that would apply, whether here or in another part of California: the corrugated iron fence around Standard Oil. The weathered low building for the empty prune sacks, with its big freight door and lots of windows high up. The packing shed with random gables and skylights poking out here and there.

Even the locomotive’s position gives me hints about how the tracks were used. None of the maps I had showed whether there was a track in that location, so I assumed there might be an interchange with the Western Pacific. Locomotive 1235 is sitting on a track in the right place; it might be an interchange track, or it might only be a spur for the Interurban railroad yards up on San Carlos Street. The photo also tells me I ought to be switching the industries along this track with a similar tiny 0-6-0.

Photos like these are waiting for you to find them. I couldn’t have imagined finding a photo like this when I started modeling the Vasona Branch, but I keep discovering photos like this. Each photo helps interpret the purpose of the different railroad tracks, identify the changes to the industries along the track over time, and hint at the set-dressing details that will make my models more realistic.

Your favorite railroad probably has photos like this - maybe you’ll see them in a book, or find some random photographer who snapped a photo of your favorite bit of track. (For example, if you model 1971-era Oakland, check out Nick deWolf’s photos of San Francisco and Oakland in the summer of 1971, which has some photos of local scrapyards and industries.)

The Barriger collection on Flickr is also huge, with a lot of very non-traditional photos of empty tracks, industries, and stations. Those photos also cover many railroads including the Western Pacific and Southern Pacific.

But I know there’s a bunch of photos out there that you’d love to find; just keep looking.

[Original photo from the Barriger collection at the University of Missouri; they're being quite generous to share the photos on Flickr, so go look at them and add comments explaining where these photos are. The Barriger collection is a set of photos taken by a railway exec in the 1930's and 1940's; check them out for some great discoveries.]

Model Making Inspiration

I just learned a new word: "greeble" (pronounced "gree-blee"). The word was coined by the model makers at Industrial Light and Magic, and refers to all the gratuitous detail that you need to add to a model to make it look realistic.

Adam Savage from Mythbusters has been doing videos about movie special effects; this time he talked about making a living as a model maker for movies specializing in "hard models" - spaceships and buildings, as opposed to "soft models" of creatures.

Also worth watching is Adam's twelve hour project to make a box for a Blade Runner pistol as a reminder of how to quickly create realistic and worn props.

Watch both, and I'll bet you'll want to be back building models too!