Wrights Bridge 2: 3d Printing All The Details

The crossing of Los Gatos Creek at Wrights was always an odd scene. I really loved how the scenes on either side had turned out; the area around the Wrights station had the right look of California hills and trees hanging over the tracks. The area around the summit tunnel also gave the right look of diving into a dark redwood forest.

But the bridge scene - well, it just looked like mediocre work. The bridge didn’t look prototypical; it neither looked like the actual SP bridges along the route, and to be honest didn’t look particularly realistic for any railroad. The stream scene had never been completely landscaped and still showed bare spots and unrealistic slopes. It was also missing water in the stream bed, details on the bridge and in the surrounding area.

Now, some of this could be fixed; I’d done decent scenery elsewhere, and had my methods figured out. I’d use a gray-brown paint for the dirt color, sprinkle over sifted and sanitized dirt from our garden (“downstream from Los Gatos canyon, so really prototypical!”). I used yellow ground foam and static grass for the grassy areas, and a mix of Woodland scenics foliage and Supertrees for the larger trees. For water, I’d use the remainder of a jar of the Woodland Scenics decoupage stuff. Details also weren’t hard - just a matter of looking at photos and figuring out some debris to put here and there.

I’d have a harder time matching the prototype details. Prototype photos of the actual bridge, as well as other bridges through Los Gatos Canyon, always had a very specific Southern Pacific look. The piers were cast concrete, with rounded edges and gently angled sides. Bridges often had walkways hanging off each side with outriggers and cross-bracing from dumping pedestrians into the creek if they leaned too hard against the railings. Bridges often had very obvious concrete abutments.

None of these details were things I could buy - the standard SP look just didn’t match the store bought pieces. I could buy piers, but they’re not going to exactly match the SP shape. The handrails on the bridge are not available for love or money, and would need to be scratchbuilt. The bridge abutments? At least those would be easy to scratchbuild from some styrene with a bit of work.

3d printing to the rescue

The 3d printer sitting there in the corner seemed like the perfect item to solve some of these problems; the piers, abutments, and bridge details all came out of the 3d printer.

Drawing the pier using SketchUp's "Follow Me" tool. I drew the oval base and a single cross-section of the pier, then dragged the cross-section around the oval.

The Piers

I started off with the piers because the SP’s booklet on the bridge showed the exact plans. The cast piers were 15’ 2” wide at the top and 5’ thick. There was a 4” lip at the top of the pier. A 1 in 24 slope on all faces made the pier 16’ 3” wide and 6’ 9” thick at the bottom. The pier’s curve on each side had a 2’ 10” radius, with 8’ 6” spacing between the two half-circles.

With all these measurements, making a 3d model of the pier took only around 30 minutes. Sketchup has a feature called “Follow Me” where you can select a cross section, and move that cross section along a line in another plane. Sketchup automatically creates a shape using that profile. For the pier, I drew the oval (for the top of the model), then drew a cross section of the base - hollow to use less material with printing. With “Follow Me”, I had a rough pier done. The pier printed from the top to the bottom. I tweaked the design to get the wall thickness right, but soon had two piers ready to paint and install.

I could have added form impressions on the design, but decided against it - I assumed I could fake some with paint when the model was done.

The Abutments

The abutments came next. I needed the abutment to serve two purposes: they needed to mark the limits of the roadbed, but they also needed depressions to hold the 4x12 beams that sat atop the trestle bents on either end of the bridge. I could have done these in styrene sheet, layering multiple pieces to get the shape I needed, but once I had the 3d printer running, sketching out a quick design and sending it to the printer was quick.

The Wrights bridge has wooden trestle bents leading to the steel truss bridge in the center. I made these from scale 12 x 12 wood; I’d done this kind of work before, and didn’t mind switching to stripwood and white glue for the project. My big surprise was that getting these short trestle bents right was a bit of a challenge.

In the past, I’d sort of eyeballed how quickly the trestle bents spread out; this time, with the drawings from the “Southern Pacific Lines Common Standard Plans” (published by Steam Age Equipment Company a few years back), I knew the precise arrangement - piles on 2’ 4” centers, 12x12 cap, and three 8x18 stringers under each rail. I also knew the piles sloped out at 1 in 12 and 3 in 12.

My first couple attempts to do these by hand failed miserably -I couldn’t get the slopes quite right, and the short pieces were hard to cut and fit. I finally 3d printed a template to help me cut the pieces to length and hold them in place while gluing, and ended up with decent parts.

Handrails installed

The Walkways

Finally, I moved on to the walkways. The bridge itself was a Micro Engineering plastic model; Micro Engineering’s bridge track had appropriately long ties for the trestle and girder sections of the bridge. Getting those handrails and walkways on the bridge, though, didn’t have an obvious solution. The ties weren’t long enough to hold a walkway at the correct length. The individual posts, with cross-bracing sticking out from the bridge and in both directions along the bridge, were complex and tiny shapes that would have been tough to scratchbuild, especially because they had bits sticking in all directions - they weren’t just something that could be assembled flat on the workbench. Because these parts stuck out from the ties, there also wasn’t any good way to glue them onto the plastic ties. Worst of all, building the handrails out of stripwood seemed awfully fragile for an operating layout; I didn’t want to do hours of handwork only to have me break them off while track cleaning.

The 3d printer again called out to be used. For the problems of attaching the walkways and handrail, I realized a 3d part could both stick between the ties, and have a gluing surface to attach to the outside of the ties. The 3d printer could handle the multiple supports (as long as I oriented the parts right.) I could add the walkways and handrails as separate pieces, and add notches for the stripwood to align with the part.

Handrail part. Large projection fits between ties in bridge tie flex track.

Again, an hour of sketching gave me a simple part that worked. I printed a couple dozen of the supports, then sanded each to fit between the ties, superglued them in place, and the next day attached the walkway boards and handrails. Apart from some fiddling to get the supports attached (because of different tie spacing), assembly went quick and easily.

The Conclusions Rebuilding the bridge at Wrights started off as a straightforward process - redo some scenery based on some new facts I'd learned as part of research. Although I've used 3d printing for many projects, I was surprised how going to the 3d printer was my first choice for the piers, walkways, abutments, and pier template. If I'd been sending my parts out for manufacturing at Shapeways, I can't imagine asking for so many parts. But with the 3d printer already on my desk, the 3d printer becomes the tool of choice.

Movie Night XXV: Wrights Bridge

While we're talking about the new bridge at Wrights, let's check out some video of trains rolling through the new scene!

Replacing the Wrights Bridge: Part I

Sixth Crossing, Los Gatos Creek

I love research because it convinces me to throw away perfectly serviceable parts of my layout.

Wrights, located at the top of Los Gatos Canyon, is a key scene for my model railroad. It has a photogenic location at the top of Los Gatos Canyon, with the tracks suddenly jumping across the canyon to dive into a tunnel. Photogenic structures - the old general store, tiny station, and abandoned warehouses - fill the scene. A siding, originally intended to go to the Sunset Park picnic grounds in the 1890’s, provides a way to hide a reverse loop at the top of the layout.

Original scene

The Wrights scene is also one of the earliest bits of scenery on my layout. During the first nine months of building, I focused on getting track laid all the way to my upper level so I could confirm that I knew how to build my two-level benchwork. Once the track was in, I decided I ought to do the messy scenery on the top level first; I’d hate to dump plaster on a good-looking scene below.

The resulting scenery was a mix of good and bad. I matched the rough terrain of the location deep in the canyon, and captured the look of both the redwood-covered hills above the tunnel and the creek deep in the canyon. I reproduced the wooden trestle from narrow-gauge era photos. I also made the model a bit "more interesting" with trestle bents that weren’t perpendicular to the rails, and a split-level concrete foundation matching an odd trestle bent I’d seen on Jack Burgess’s Yosemite Valley railroad. I also rushed construction of supports for the road bridge just upstream of the railroad trestle, plopping down plaster onto the hillside and shaping it to look like a massive concrete block supporting each bridge end.

Of course, then I started reading more about the actual location. Later photos showed a different bridge - a wooden truss bridge - in place of the trestle across the creek. I found some maps hinting that the road from the new Wrights station, on the other side of the creek, dipped under the bridge to make it to the road bridge and the road up-canyon to farms in Austrian Gulch and beyond. Adding that road was one of the few improvements to the scenes since 2006.

Then, last year, while searching up at the California State Railroad Museum, I found a little stapled set of blueprints, set up like Powerpoint slides. (I wrote a bit about those blueprints and maps I found back in August.) I’ve been claiming (without proof) that the booklet must have been the work of some summer intern in the engineering department. That intern had remarkably good lettering skills...

That booklet showed pictures and drawings of the actual bridge… which didn’t look anything like the actual bridge I’d made. Now, that’s not uncommon; I’ve found plenty of scenes on my model railroad that turned out not to match reality. In some cases, I ignore the mistake. Perhaps I needed to swap two scenes to fit my garage, or perhaps I believed the difference wasn’t noticeable. In other cases, I'm annoyed by the difference - but not so annoyed by the mistake that I’d do something about it.

And in some cases, I get annoyed enough to rip out completed, decent scenery, just to match details that the summer intern sketched out a hundred years ago, and stapled in a cool little booklet.

The Prototype

For the railroad, the bridge at Wrights was the “sixth crossing of Los Gatos Creek”. Los Gatos Canyon was an awfully narrow place to survey a railroad, and the railroad reached the headwaters by bouncing from bank to bank to keep grading costs low. Two of the bridges were just above downtown Los Gatos in the narrows at Lexington Reservoir. The third was near Alma. The fourth was near Aldercroft Heights. The final two crossings - just below Wrights, and just above Wrights - were the fifth and sixth crossings.

The South Pacific Coast Railroad laid all that track back in the 1870’s in their attempt to break the SP monopoly and get access to the lumber traffic from the Santa Cruz mountains. The SPC was narrow gauge - smaller trains and bridges kept the fledgling railroad’s costs low. Their original bridges met their “cheap” image, with most bridges being trestles with piles driven into the unstable soil holding them up.

The sixth crossing of Los Gatos creek, up by Wrights, was originally a trestle built on pilings by the South Pacific Coast. The tracks, on the east side of the canyon, suddenly made a right turn, cut across the creek and rolled across a filled-in gulch before diving into the mile-long summit tunnel. Photos from the 1880’s and 1890’s show a trestle that looks like it would have caught ever bit of debris rolling down the creek in the winter storms.

The SP leased the line in 1887, planning to make the line into a solid, first class railroad… eventually. When the plans to standard gauge the line started in earnest in the early 20th century, the SP widened the route and put in some slightly more solid bridges. SP finished dual-gauging the tracks to Wrights by 1903. The Wrights bridge, according to the intern’s slide deck, was replaced in the same year with a straining truss wooden bridge, built just as the tracks up to Wrights were being standard gauged. The intern described it as:

Old Structure. 80 ft. Straining Beam Deck Span on frame piers, with concrete footings with trestle approaches. Designed for narrow gauge track and equipment. Constructed 1903.

The plans to complete the standard-gauging of the line from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz got interrupted on April 18, 1906 as the Great San Francisco Earthquake hit the region. Landslides buried the track on both sides of the mountain, and the summit tunnel at Wrights was cut in the middle.

After the earthquake, the Southern Pacific spent three frantic years rebuilding the Santa Cruz branch. In Wrights, the railroad cleared and widened the summit tunnel, moved the station across the creek, and standard gauged the line. They didn’t replace the bridge, though, leaving the 1903 improved crossing in place.

And then we come to the project described by the intern. In 1915, the SP finally got around to improving both the 5th and 6th crossings of Los Gatos Creek. It wasn’t quite a new bridge; the intern noted that the new bridge was “Second Hand 50 ft Deck Plate Girder from the Santa Clara River (Montalvo Bridge). (Our 1915-vintage Sixth Crossing bridge was very lucky to get replaced and yanked out of Southern California. The bridge that superseded it was washed out to sea when the St. Francis Dam burst in 1928. Cue obligatory music.) The old wooden piers disappeared, replaced by a pair of concrete piers placed on the existing concrete foundations. Even if the bridge wasn’t local, the concrete was; gravel for the new piers came from Campbell, and the cement came from Davenport.

Road crossing under the bridge

The SP spent $6,556.98 on that new bridge: $3500 in labor and the rest on material, spreading the work over fourteen months from November 1914 to February 1916. The intern even broke down the costs - $1500 for the piers, $600 for the pilings for the trestle approaches, $700 to install the new steel bridge, $700 for the trestle approaches themselves, and $200 for ties and guardrails for the bridge. They also accounted for the corporate expenses - $500 for falsework, $300 for use of the work train, $600 for rental of equipment, and $180 to haul the materials up to Wrights.

Now, I just needed to figure out how to build that bridge to match the intern's drawings.

Coming up next time, I'll talk a bit about how I built the scene, and how many of the key parts of the scene were actually 3d printed.

---

Excerpts from blueprints were taken from "Sixth crossing of Los Gatos Creek Near Wrights", a booklet created by the Southern Pacific Coast Division engineering department to describe the project. Original in the California State Railroad Museum library, Sacramento.

Bureaucratic Railroaders, Paperwork, and Car Locations

Most of us are interested in railroads because of the glamour - gleaming passenger trains running crossing the continent, crews performing dangerous work in good weather and bad, and heroic engineers keeping their train right on the schedule’s times.

Talk to real railroaders, and you’re likely to hear a different message. You’ll hear about all the jobs we don’t model on the railroad. Car clerks typing out waybills. Station agents keeping precise records of the petty cash box. Salesmen taking shippers out for a two martini lunch. Most of all, you'll hear about the bureaucracy needed for a large, distributed company in the days before e-mail. The real railroad was all paperwork, processes to be followed to the letter, and multi-day delays for the simplest of questions.

My glamorous illusions of the railroad got dashed a couple months ago. I’m still looking for information on those Hart gondolas, you see, and a couple Google searches pointed out that the University of Texas, El Paso had a bunch of records from the Southern Pacific’s El Paso shops. Now, I’m unlikely to make it out to El Paso to look at the files in person any time soon, but I’m willing to spend a little bit of cash just in case the records are interesting. I sent the Special Collections librarian a note asking about getting copies of a couple files, and gave them a maximum amount I was willing to spend on photocopies. It took a little while; the SP records don’t appear to be referenced very often, so the library keeps the boxes of material in off-site storage in a warehouse somewhere. But within a month, I got a thick envelope from U.T. El Paso.

That stack of papers in the envelope had a few interesting finds. One file on reinforcing the Hart gondolas in 1927 gave some details about where the Hart gondolas were used on the SP. More amusingly, that particular file told a lot about SP bureaucracy in the 1920’s.

Guess We Better Ask the Big Boss

Excerpt from SP's Campbell, Calif valuation map showing the station and Sunsweet plant

The first bit of bureaucracy involves big expenses. Railroads, like most capital intensive businesses, are very careful about how they spend money. If you’ve ever seen an official Southern Pacific railroad valuation map indicating the location of tracks, signals, and railroad buildings, you’d see that some of the sidings had “G.M.O. 73914” written next to them on the map. These were “General Manager Orders” (probably - I’ve never found an official definition for the acronym). G.M.Os gave official permission to do the big work of laying track, and the original G.M.O. would probably explain exactly why the track must be built. It turns out the G.M.O.s were for more than track; the U.T. El Paso file contained the order allowing the modification of the cars:

Office of General Superintendent, Motive Power, San Francisco, December 26, 1926
Authority for Expenditure of $9,820.00 is requested for the purpose of Improvements to the property as follows:
Reinforce underframe Hart Con-vertible cars, class W-50-3 Series C.P. 10880 to 10959 incl & 12220 to 12239 incl…
These cars were constructed with trussed intermediate sills without proper bracing, thus permitting the bottom of sill to deflect inwards, also drooping of sides.
It is proposed to reinforce cars by applying two additional cross ties, change present location of two cross ties so that intermediate sills will be properly braces laterally at each pair of side stakes between bolsters, also to apply reinforcing plates to intermediate sills.
Authority: General Manager’s letter file 414-0013-2 of August 27, 1924.
… Cost of reinforcing one car:
Material (including percentages): $95.29
Labor (including percentages $80.51
Dr. A&B Acct #55: $173.80
…


Image of G.M.O. order

The records give us an idea of the process of repairing these cars. We now know that these cars were starting to fail in the 1920’s, and we also know how they’re failing - that the sides would droop and sills would deflect. We know the cost - it was worth spending $10,000 to fix a few hundred cars. We know that George McCormick, the superintendent for motive power, was responsible for deciding when to repair freight cars. We know the decision wasn’t a minor one; the railroad's general manager, J. H. Dyer, had to sign off on the purchase because the repairs would cost more than $100 per car. We know the problem had been lingering for a long time - the work had been going on for at least two years, and only only 25 out of 200 cars in this subset had been fixed already. I don’t even want to think of how many meetings McCormick had to sit in arguing whether to do this work or not.

Inter-Office Memo

The second bit of bureaucracy was just the effort of communications, both in the 1920’s and in a physically distributed railroad. In our era of e-mail and iPhones, it’s easy for decisions to be made easily. However the packet of papers had 50 or 60 memos from the El Paso division archives. Some letters asked for updates on progress; the work apparently went slow. On May 4, 1927, the El Paso superintendent sent a response to one of the queries stating that no work had been done on any cars, but they had one car (SP 12281) in the shops for the work. (El Paso was doing better than the Tucson division - A. J. Burke admitted no work had been done on repairing the cars. Like e-mail, memos and letters were often cc'd to relevant people in other divisions, giving the file a view of the Hart repair beyond just El Paso.) Another Hart gondola was loaded with slag and somewhere out on the New Mexico division; Superintendent Irwin ask for the car to be returned ASAP for repair.

By August, budgets must have been getting reworked, for George McCormick in San Francisco asked the divisions to hold off on repairing any more cars on one of the G.M.Os . By September, 46 cars were reported repaired - 16 in Los Angeles, 7 at Bayshore, 14 in Sacramento, 8 at Brooklyn Yard in Portland, 3 in Gerber, and the two in El Paso. I can’t imagine trying to carry on this conversation via a months-long chain of letters, memos, and telegrams. By October 1927, all hundred cars had been repaired, and the GMO was declared complete.

We need to talk about your TPS report covers.

Letter from George McCormick asking about a $15 difference per car in costs billed.

And finally, there was just all the odd little exchanges. A bunch of letters in early 1928 from San Francisco asked R. U. Lipscomb why El Paso spent over expectations on the car repairs.

Auditor of Disbursements advises GMO 71402 now overrun $524 and GMO 71403 overrun $113.00.
The original cost per unit for this work was estimated at $173.80. Los Angeles Shops have verified this figure ample for the 1928 program.
Below is a tabulated list of units in excess of the estimated cost as shown in our records. Please give reason for the increase in cost and state whether this represents cash or second-hand value or if credit adjustment will be arranged. Please give this matter preferred attention.

Ah, nothing more fun than getting e-mails from a manager questioning charges. The El Paso division files includes Lipscomb’s page of math as he figured out the costs to answer his boss, responding ten days later with:

While we have been able to perform work on labor authorized, you will note from the above that the material cost is in excess of amount estimated on Form 30. Set of reinforcements for one car amounted to $100.30. In handling this with the Store Department, they advise this was the cost of one set of reinforcements carried over from 1926 and that the remainder received are invoiced at $85.00”

Even with that bit of information, the questions weren’t ended; two weeks later, McCormick writes back wondering if the Stores cost already includes labor. El Paso responds that the Sacramento Stores apparently double-charged them by including labor costs; L.A. had lower costs because the L.A. accountants were wise to the Sacramento Stores budget tricks. It still took a couple months of mailgrams between A. J. Burke and R. U. Lipscomb in El Paso, Edward Blumenstiel in the El Paso office, and McCormick in the head office before the whole double-charged for $15.00 a car battle ended.

So What Did Those Memos Actually Fix?

Even with all these accounting and responsibility and cover-your-ass memos, there were some nice tidbits for modelers. One of the letters was kind enough to include the L.A. Shops list of parts needed for car repair. (A separate accounting by the El Paso shop superintendent tells us exactly how many bolts and rivets were used on each car. I'm not interested in those because I'm not one of those "rivet counter" model railroaders.)

1.101.33

Description	Weight	Cost
8 Intersill Stiffeners	752 lbs @ 2.59 Cwt.	$19.48
2 Cross Tie Channels	322 lbs. @ 2.60 Cwt. $8.37	...
4 Cross Tie Top Plates	120 lbs…	3.13
8 Intersill Stiffener Fillers	42 lbs
4 Stake “U” Bolt Brackets	12 lbs	0.32
2 Cross Tie Gussets	51 lbs
4 Intersill & Cross Tie Connections	48 lbs	1.25
4 Stake U Bolt Brackets	12 lbs	0.66
4 Outside Inter Cross Tie Gussets	105 lbs	0.32
2 Inside Inter-Cross Tie Gussets	50 lbs	2.74
2 Do	50 lbs	1.31
4 Hopper Sill Brackets	8 lbs	0.21
4 “” “”	5 lbs	0.14
4 Hopper Top Plate Supports	25 lbs	0.65
4 Intersill Reinforcing Places	20-130 lbs,	3.38
Labor, laying out, shearing, forming and punching…		22.65
Labor, apply to car		42.16
Shop expense		16.10
Use of machinery & tools		4.02
Total Labor		84.53
Total Cost		$141.70

Parts needed for the Hart gondola repairs

And We Also Know Where the Cars Were

So far, all the information I've shared has been pretty dry. The correspondence should be familiar to anyone who's worked at a large company, and it doesn't tell us too much about the models of the W-50-3. The list of parts for strengthening the car might hint at how the W-50-3 class cars changed between construction and later years, although it'll still take a bit of work to understand exactly what changed.

But the file does contain some tidbits that could be very interesting for a model railroader. The letters discussing cars fixed not only documents which shops around the Southern Pacific system performed repairs, but also suggests where the Hart Convertible Gondolas were being used in the 1920's.

41 cars were specifically identified as converted in 1927:

• 14 at Los Angeles,
• 6 at Bayshore,
• 5 in “Southern District” (Los Angeles?)
• 5 at El Paso,
• 3 in “Northern District” (Portland? Dunsmuir?)
• 2 at Tucson,
• 2 at Sacramento,
• 2 at Brooklyn (portland),
• 1 in New Mexico,
• 1 at Gerber.

These details hint at where those W-50-3s might have been found in the Southern Pacific system. If you model Northern or Southern California, or El Paso, W-50-3 cars should have been visible. If you were in the southwest or Portland, you might see them. If you're in Nevada or Utah, you're out of luck - they're nowhere to be seen. This information doesn't replace photos as evidence for where particular cars or locomotives might have run, but if we're looking for a rough answer about whether the Hart gondolas would have been seen in the Bay Area in the 1920's, this is a good bit of confirmation.

But There's Still More

All this information came only from the first chunk of letters in the files I got from U. T. El Paso. Another 50 pages came from the work to remove home-built snowplows from 7 former El Paso and Southwestern gondolas. The third packet covered GMO 79727, another year's attempt to fix the Hart gondolas.

The last packet had twenty pages documenting the saga of two CS-35A flat cars, SP 79075 and SP 79026. The correspondence was triggered by the cars being used for maintenance-of-way service without officially being charged to the MOW service. By doing so, the SP probably was missing a bit of a tax break by writing off the remaining value of the cars. Every time you letter a car "SPMW", you're actually missing the months of back-and-forth memos needed to throw those cars off the roster of revenue cars.

From George McCormick, back at the head office in San Francisco:

Mr. E. A. Gilbert inspected these cars Jan. 18 at El Paso and found they were assigned to a concrete outfit on the New Mexico Division for sometime past and are permanently fitted suitable for such service, where they should remain. Also it will cost but $5.00 per car to restencil, while cost to return them to revenue service would be approximately $300. each.
Please submit form 30 in the name of Southern Pacific Railroad to convert…”

If you ever dreamed of working on a railroad, I imagine answering telegrams from San Francisco about $10.00 overruns and restenciling cars wasn’t why you wanted to join the railroad. You probably would have had more fun dreaming about being an insurance actuary.

So How Do I Find Records Like These?

Although rare, a few research libraries and archives do have former SP files and drawings in their collections. The files that exist are a tiny fraction of what the railroad kept, but occasionally you can get lucky (like I did here) and find documents relevant for a subject you're either interested in for history research or model building. Generally, find the libraries that might have the correct documents, then look for finding aids which will tell you the actual documents that were saved.

For the SP, common sources are Stanford Library (various records, including freight cars and some land records), California State Railroad Museum, U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library, University of Texas El Paso (Rio Grande division), San Francisco Maritime Museum (Southern Pacific ferry records) and California State Railroad Museum. The Online Archive of California website provides a single place to look for relevant collections in many different California libraries.

In each library, you'll be searching for collections - related boxes of records, usually donated together - related to the Southern Pacific. Each collection usually has a "finding aid" - a document that summarizes what records are in a specific collection. In Stanford's finding aid for its Southern Pacific records, you can find exactly which corporate records survived, a list of folders for specific land or track improvement projects, or photos for specific freight cars. With the name of the collection and the identifier for a folder inside that collection, you now can ask the owning library about viewing the material at the library, or, like I did, ask whether they can make a copy of particular materials.

---

Records from GMO 71402 and GMO 71403 from the Southern Pacific Company (Rio Grande Division) records, MS 077, University of Texas El Paso Special Collections department. Thanks to the librarians who pulled these files out of dusty boxes and photocopied a couple hundred pages of telegrams, mail, and assorted scribblings. Excerpt of Southern Pacific valuation map for Campbell, California excerpted from an original drawing at the California State Railroad Museum Library.

A Model Twenty Years in the Making

Original Rio Grande Oil model, from 2001 or so.

It's amazing how long some projects take to build. Take, for example, this gas station. The original Barnsdall Oil company filling station, located outside of Santa Barbara, showed up in a Model Railroader magazine article back in April 1979. Teenaged-me probably saw the article just as I was getting serious about model railroading (and still reading issues at our public library.) It took me well into the 1990’s before I tried building a model of the gas station myself.

I'm really proud of that model. The cupola, dome, and roofline required some fiddly work. I'm also particularly proud of the beam ends and post detail on the roof over the gas pumps. I still see all my flaws, though. The actual building had alternating blue and white tiles - too hard for me to paint. The dome, carved out of balsa, isn’t very round and I didn’t really get the feel of the multicolor tiles covering it. I also showed the cupola as four-sided, when photos of the actual gas station show height lath-covered openings.

Worst of all, I didn’t bother to reproduce an elaborate set of detailed terra cotta panels along the roofline. The original Model Railroader article highlighted the geometric patterns on the terra cotta, and suggested lines could be carved into plaster applied on the model. I tried a different approach during the original build; one of my junk boxes still has the sample panels made of Fimo clay, hand-scratched with lines approaching the design. The Fimo result was too coarse, so I gave up on the detail and instead just cut out plain styrene to hint at the outline of the panels. I hated the lack of detail, but at least the model was done.

Why Bother With That Detail? Why did I bother to put all that detail into a little plastic model for my layout? Because even though the actual gas station is far away from San Jose, the design is eye-catching and very representative of the 1920’s in California. The gas station's style is called Spanish Colonial Revival. The style had a bunch of origins - interest in Spanish California starting in the 1880s (with publication of the novel Ramona) and hotels in Florida, but the style really exploded after the San Diego Panama-California Exposition used it for all the exhibition buildings. You can still see them in Balboa Park in San Diego. The style dominated Northern and Southern California in the 1920’s and 1930’s, for commercial and residential structures — just like mid-century modern took over thirty years later, or post-modernism changed our shopping malls and houses to brightly-colored stucco in the last 20 years.

Spanish Colonial has several branches, borrowing inspiration and details from the California Missions, classic Spanish architecture, and the architecture of Mexico and other Spanish colonies. Buildings tended to be low to the ground, with simple rectangular shapes, thick stucco walls, and hand-build details - doors with board detail, hand-forged ironwork and lamps, and tile roofs.

But many buildings went one step further - to the Churrigueresque style from Spain. Churrigueresque - definitely not a word you see much - refers to a very decorated and ornamented style often seen in Spain in the 17th century. Churriguesque buildings had facades absolutely covered carved or cast detail. Patterns could be abstract (like Moorish architecture), natural, or include human sculptures, shields, and the like. The Balboa Park exhibition buildings are particularly good examples of the style.

The Barnsdall Oil station, like most Spanish Revival buildings of the time, borrowed from many of these influences. The tile roof, rafter ends, plain stucco walls, and primitive bathroom doors all scream Mission Revival. The alternating-color tiles might be Moorish - or might be just practical. However, the two-story tower is completely twentieth century, built so the station would be visible as a Ford Model A driver accelerated up the hill from Goleta. And all that terra cotta at the roof line? Churriguesque.

This gas station isn’t the only building I know with that kind of detail. Another model I'd love to build is the Borchers Brothers building supply store, located next to the old Market Street station in San Jose. When Borchers built it in 1923, they built a brick building, but borrowed a bunch of Spanish Colonial Revival styles, then topped it off with a large window framed with similar elaborate terra cotta churrigueresque detail. I’ve got a great place for a model of Borchers Brothers, but I never knew how to pull off that window. I suspected 3d printing might help, but all my attempts ended up in the trash.

Inspiration

Rio Grande Gas Station, Goleta (Elwood) Calif.

So fast forward to a few weeks ago. We were driving back from a family trip to Disneyland when I realized we’d be passing that famous gas station, and I managed to convince Dear Wife that we ought to stop to stretch our legs. The gas station's still there along old Highway 101, just west of Goleta. It's boarded up and has obviously been unused for years, but somehow managed to survive. I got quite a thrill spotting all the details I got right - the rafter ends, carved detail in some of the posts. I also saw the elaborate terra cotta panels on the tower. There were bits missing, but the majority of the panels were still there

Detail of terra cotta panels.

The photos in that 1970's Model Railroader article were good, but they didn't really highlight the detail on those panels. Being there in person meant I could see the pattern, and also reminded me just how the tiles were the centerpiece of the whole building. Back home, I realized that my existing model - with flat styrene in place of the panels - really missed what was special about that gas station. Time for me to try again to capture the model.

The Panels The key for reproducing the panels would be getting the basics of the pattern correct. Terra cotta details for a Spanish Revival building can go a bunch of ways. Patterns could be geometric (as in Moorish Revival). Others, like the Borchers Brothers building, have floral patterns - acanthus leaves from Corinthian columns. Looking closely at Barnsdall Oil, I realized most of the patterns were swirls and spirals - volates, as the art historians would call them. Most patterns actually have two spirals going in opposite directions joined by a short segment. Many were paired together, looking like a U or shield.

I tried two approaches. First, I tried avoiding all that nasty 3d drawing, and instead tried to get a line drawing of the art from the photo. My plan was to take the detail as line art, emboss it so that the details stuck up, then 3d print the result. Photoshop and similar photo editing packages have ways to take a photo, square up the image, and adjust contrast enough to highlight the detail. However, I wasn't able to convert the photos into the shapes on the panels.

Instead, I simply started trying to reproduce the curves in the design in SketchUp, the 3d drawing program I use most. Once I spotted the volutes, the drawing process was straightforward. I just needed to build up some of the repeating shapes from multiple spirals, then plop in a few extra to fill in. To be fair, it’s actually more difficult than that - there’s several different spiral shapes and carvings.

SketchUp isn't great for compound curves, but three nights of work gave me a decent first version. I was also able to reproduce that round window, sunk well back in the wall. My original version of the model used a round Grandt Line window set just behind the wall - decent, but not faking deep adobe walls like the real gas station faked.

3d Printed Terra cotta panels, O scale

Once I had a 3d design drawn out, I 3d printed a set on the Form One printer, test-fit them to my model, and found I'd misjudged the dimensions of the tower. I stretched the design, printed again, and got some decent versions. Finally, I took a deep breath, picked up my original model, and pulled off that plain styrene sheet trim, cursing how well I'd glued it on the whole time. I even had to break out the Dremel to grind off some particularly well adhered bits. A bit of superglue attached the new, detailed panels. I repaired the stucco with the same technique I'd used originally - a mix of white glue and gesso. The combination dries really quickly, so I brushed it on then stippled it with a brush so it would have a stucco-like finish. A fresh coat of white paint (gesso) made the new stucco match the old.

I also printed a full set of panels for an O scale model, just in case I want to build another model of this gas station from scratch. Being able to scale up the part and print it for a different scale is easy to do with a 3d printer, but impossible with any of the 1970's approaches to making the gas station.

The Finished Model

Original model with new terra cotta panels.

Here's photos of the gas station with its new detail. There's still some incorrect details - the terra cotta "point" isn't quite the right shape, and the pattern isn't a precise match to the actual gas station. Still, I'm really pleased with how the extra work came out. I'm more pleased that 3d printing helped me solve a problem I couldn't fix twenty years ago.

Passenger Car Inspiration

Quick note: I've occasionally gotten interested in modeling the Southern Pacific passenger trains that went from San Jose to Los Gatos. Part of the fun and challenge is figuring out which cars actually ran on the Santa Cruz branch, and figuring out how to make models of those from available plastic, resin, and brass models.

Jason Hill is now sharing how he's customized existing models to match many of the trains going over Tehachapi Pass. Check out his Night Owl Modeler website to see his projects, including his recent work on a baggage / railroad post office car. Jason also has an illustrated guide to Southern Pacific passenger cars where he describes good starting points for each car.

Jason's interest in Railroad Post Office cars convinced me to learn a bit more about mail service over the Santa Cruz Mountains. In the 1930's, one train a day carried a Railway Post Office car. Inside, U.S. Mail clerks sorted mail and distributed it to the towns along the route. Here's hoping I can find some good details on the mail service!

Odd Finds in Dusty Drawers

Part of doing research - historical or otherwise - is the luck of the draw. Who knows what got saved, or what you’ll find if you search in that odd dusty box?

Back in January, I was up at the California State Railroad Museum for another day of research before our annual Bay Area Layout Design and Operations meet. (Thanks to the upcoming Super Bowl booking all the hotels, we got the chance to wander a little farther than usual.) I had a rough idea of documents I wanted to see - some car records for the Hart gondolas, blueprints for the CS-35A flat cars in preparation to refine the design, and drawings for track arrangements at various places in San Jose.

The CSRM is a great research library; the staff are helpful, the rules aren't draconian, and the materials are well-organized and unique. I’ve looked at a lot of freight car plans there over the last year, and I’m still amazed what got saved. There were still holes in the historical record; I might find some blueprints for SP’s Battleship gondolas, but might not find details identifying how the cars were assembled. I might find drawings of New Almaden after they tore down the station in the 1930’s, but little on the arrangement of the tracks in the town’s heyday. It all depended on what SP manager decided to save from the files… or what drawings a railfan pulled out of a dumpster.

I’ve been particularly interested in the arrangement of the brake system for those Hart gondolas I’ve been selling. Personally, the exact arrangement of the brake gear is not the biggest concern for me. For my own models, I’m willing to do something that seems reasonable; as long as the cars look plausible and run well, I’m happy. But when I’m selling the cars, I know that many others do want to get the brake gear precise, and expect that I’ve done the research to make the cars accurate.

The initial kit instructions described a plausible arrangement for the brake gear based on photos and some guesses about arrangements - my best information at the time. However, I’ve always been bugged that I didn’t understand the cars better. Without another source for information, I was stuck.

So take in the scene. I’ve driven two and a half hours up to Sacramento on Friday morning, grabbed a sandwich in Old Sacramento, and I’ve been sitting in the library at the museum since it opened at 1:00. It’s a bit after 4:00 on a Friday afternoon.; the library closes in maybe 45 minutes. I’ve found all the material I’ve wanted, and I’m trying to decide whether to head over early to the Old Spaghetti Factory to socialize with a bunch of other model railroaders, or spend a bit more time looking for anything interesting. I stand up, stretch my legs, and go wandering around the reading room to see what else might be there, and find a three ring binder that’s an index to a bunch of Union Pacific drawings. The index is all handwritten, printed with fat letters done apparently written with a Sharpie and photocopied a couple times; I'm guessing it's a genuine handwritten artifact from the U.P. shop foreman.

I’m ready to discount the contents as modern stuff outside my interests, but I ask Kara, the librarian anyway. “These look interesting; is there any chance I can see these drawings?”

“Oh, we got those years ago. The index never got computerized, and I don’t remember the last time anyone looked at those. The microfilm is over in this cabinet here.” She shows about six file drawers, packed tightly with old-fashioned microfilm rolls. We pick one roll that looks promising, Kara shows how the microfilm loads, and I start looking.

The roll turns out to be a random mix of technical drawings for freight cars, mostly not from my era. I dive in like I’m in Minority Report, quickly checking each image to see if it’s interesting, and learning how much to tap the “forward” button to advance to the next image in a single step. Tap, look, tap, look, tap, look, tap, maybe two or three seconds per image. Part of my speed is just disinterest, but I also realize I’m on a deadline to finish before the library closes.

At 4:50 p.m., I hit pay dirt.

It turns out in 1919, the Union Pacific drew four sheets of drawings for an “Air Brake Folio”, describing the mechanics of the air brake system on a bunch of recent freight cars. For each car, the folio gave some details about braking power and force, formulas for calculating hand brake force, and schematic drawings describing exactly what the brake system looked like. Somehow, those sheets got saved by the UP into the 1970’s when they dumped them but not before microfilming them.

And sheet three includes drawings for the brake systems on Union Pacific’s Hart gondolas.

So I pull out my cell phone and quickly take photos of the interesting bits of the drawing. I also manage to find a couple drawings showing how the Union Pacific lettered their gondolas a few images later. I finished at 5:02. With profuse apologies and thank yous to the staff, I rewind the microfilm and head out the door.

I’ve put details of the brake system up on the Dry Creek Models blog. The drawings give more accurate details for the cars - length of the different rods, and how the brake rodding snakes between the truss supports. One surprising fact is that the Union Pacific cars have an obvious difference from the SP cars. On the SP cars, the brake wheel pulled the piston of the brake cylinder directly - a rod and chain go straight from the piston end over to the brake wheel. On the UP cars, the brake wheel was at the opposite end of the car, and a pulley reversed the direction of the brake chain. According to the Air Brake Folio, UP apparently did this on many of its freight cars (including their version of the H-50-5 hopper and B-50-13 boxcar). If anyone knows why the UP did this, I’d be interested in hearing.

Discovering these drawings is all part of the magic of research - whether for model railroads, or for local history, or for academic, formal history, or even for garage sales. I’m really grateful for all the material that has been indexed or listed in finding aids, for it means I can spot interesting things from my desk at home. However, part of the fun of re-discovering the past is searching in the places that haven’t been curated, indexed, or pored-over by others. I’ve heard that same fun of discovery from a friend searching for depression-era glassware at Goodwill, and from historians like Alex Wellerstein searching the National Archives for the history of nuclear weapons.

And no matter how fun the search might be, we’ll also learn exactly which way the brake cylinder should point on our freight cars.

Oh, if you're curious, here is my original guess about the brake gear layout (as found in the kit instructions), and the brake gear as suggested by the UP engineering drawing:

---

Air brake drawing from Union Pacific Railroad’s s “Air Brake Folio”, dated March 5, 1919, book 430, drawing 5242-30) , from the California State Railroad Museum.