For earlier Construction Logs, see: The First Year 2007-2008 The Second Year 2008-2009

August 11, 2010

The high temperatures in the area have really made it easy to stay inside and work on railroad projects this month. The interlocking signals for Orford Junction have finally been finished and are ready to install. There are a total of four high lower quadrant masts with one to three blades per mast. In addition, there are also two dwarf lower quadrant semaphores. Work on the interlocking frame itself is under way but that is a long job with lots of hole drilling and tapping for screws. As soon as I get a few weeks in a row without an operating session, I will be installing the signals and their opeating mechanisms. To do this, I have to remove the fascia at Orford Junction both to install the signals plus add some sub-roadbed for anothing siding.

Along with the signals, I've also managed to put together ten coal cars (yes, that's what the SP called them). These will be used to carry the increasing coal trade from Amador Coal at Holden to its customers.

This past month, I've had operating sessions every two weeks. Along with my regular monthly sessions, we had a group of modelers come in from Bella Vista, Arkansas and some from Omaha to operate on the S&C and a few other railroads in town. They're all a great bunch of guys and we all enjoyed ourselves.

July 11, 2010

Another busy month with not a lot done on the railroad. Part of the time was spent on vacation in Colorado seeing, among other things, a lot of narrow gauge roadbed, artifacts and so on. It was a great trip. I did, however, manage to do some more scenery work on the Milton branch. Finishing off the scenery on the hill east of Milton was something I wanted to accomplish so that was done. The other side of the hill needs more work but I need to build some structures for Felix before I start the rest of that scenery.

While the scenery before Milton was very arid with little or no vegetation, once you started to climb Gopher Ridge, more greenery in the form of manzanita bushes and oak trees started to appear. The road winding its way up the hill is the Copperopolis Road which disappears behind some trees and bushes and will eventually appear in its namesake city.

More progress was made on the interlocking signals for Orford Junction and they are now in the paint shop.

June 2, 2010

It's been another busy couple of months with lots of household things to do so the railroad has not progressed a great deal. There is a new project in the works, however, which involved a trip to California for research. In Peters, there has been a siding reserved for an oil refinery. Newhall, California is the site of that state's first oil refinery dating to the 1870s and several of the original structures still exist. The best thing is that it was served by rail by the Southern Pacific.

Researching a California industry was a little difficult to do from Kansas City. With some help from the internet, I was able to locate period descriptions of the refinery and Chevron Oil was gracious enough to send me a few photos of it after its restoration in 1930. This was good but not enough to build a credible model so a recent trip to California included visiting the site and measuring the items that were left. Unfortunately, time and vandalism have taken their toll and the beautiful 1930 restoration has mostly been lost. What was left, however, did date from the 1880s operation and will fit right in on the S&C.

After my return, I prepared some drawings based on my visit and the photos I had. Now, I just have to order all the pipe fittings I'll need and begin construction. First, though, I think I'll finish the interlocking signals I'm working on for Orford Junction.

April 18, 2010

The new Pullman cars have arrived!!

Capital Flyer No. 104 pauses at Peters on March 1, 1895 during inaugural run of new train.

Five new models of Pullman 1890s passenger cars have been added to the fleet and will be used on the Valley Flyer No. 103 and the Capital Flyer No. 104. The new train debuted yesterday during the monthly operating session. For more information, see the Passenger Car Roster page.

April 15, 2010

Household tasks took up most of the time during the last month or so and, in consequence, not a lot of work was done on the railroad. Kansas City's bi-annual Prairie Rail event took up a week or so during the first part of March. During this event, we had about 115 visitors from all over the country come into KC to operate at four different railroads over a Friday-Sunday period. The S&C had eighteen operators in the two sessions it operated and all seemed to enjoy themselves. The train of reefers mentioned below made its first appearance running as an extra through train. Eventually, there will be more packing houses from which it will pick up reefers loaded with fruit destined for Eastern markets.

What I have done during the month was add some sidings. One of sidings at Holden was extended along the backdrop. Along this wall will be building flats of various fruit and produce packing plants similar to what was present at Newcastle, California during the 1890s. These industries will provide cars for the reefer traffic. You can see in the photo what I call my tilt-up cardboard buildings. They serve as placeholders for the meticulously crafted (I hope!) structures which will later be in that location.

Another siding was added at Orford Junction. During operating sessions, the interchange traffic was really too much for the initial siding so I did what the prototype would have done and added the extra trackage. This has allowed crews to spot on-line traffic on one siding and off-line traffic on the other. Through sleeping and express cars for Stockton are also spotted on these tracks and an additional siding dedicated to these will be added later.

Last, but not least, after many "suggestions," I added two crew conveniences. The first was a new chair for the dispatcher to replace the rather flimsy one that I had previously used. Another suggestion was to add a larger clock so off-duty crew members could keep track of time while relaxing in the crew lounge. The clock is connected to the fast-clock system and should result in a better on-time response with the crews.

Next on the workbench is to finish up the passenger cars (I've been waiting on parts) and then start work on signals for the Orford Junction interlocking. More on that later.

March 3, 2010

While waiting for the weather to warm up a bit to paint, I decided to build some refrigerator cars. In the 1890s, most railroads did not own their own reefers. They considered them too specialized to use only in the fruit harvesting season and then let them stand idle the rest of the year. To get around this, they leased cars from such companies as Armour Refrigerator Line, Swift, California Fruit Transportation, California Fruit Express and Continental Fruit Express. Fortunately, lettering sets were available for these companies from Clover House and Art Griffin so I could duplicate these cars. The cars were all built up from Model Die Casting 36-foot truss rod refrigerator kits, painted as to prototype and then lettered. The MDC trucks were replaced with Central Valley trucks. It was an interesting project and has provided a reason to run a solid reefer train to pick up the cars from the packing houses and get them to the Eastern markets.

All told, I completed four CFT cars, six CFX cars, one Swift, one MDT, one GAT, one Armour and a Cudahy Refrigerator Line car.

 

February 15, 2010

I really wanted to paint the passenger cars I had been working on but it has been pretty cold in my spray booth area and I didn't want to screw up the paint job so I decided to work on scenery. Cardboard strips were glued down in the mountainous area between Miltona and Keystone Ravine. This part of the railroad contains some 2-2.5% grades getting up and over Gopher Ridge. While the prototype did not actually do the construction, the route was surveyed and I decided to correct the shortsightedness of those nineteenth century financiers and built it. On my previous scenery using the plaster gauze, there was a tendency to get a sag between the strips of cardboard. To help prevent this, I decided to cover them with brown wrapping paper hot-glued down. This give the surface a little more smoothness and should make for better looking terrain.

The first photo above shows the line curving up the side of the hil toward the tunnel beneath the ridge while the second photo shows the Felix area.

These photos show the same areas after the wrapping paper was applied. While the scenery is not finished, it gives a little better look to the railroad and lets everyone get a better feel for what the finished product will be. I also applied wrapping paper over the Duck Creek area between Peters and Farmington.

The monthly operating session is this coming Saturday so this is probably all I will do between now and then. At the beginning of March, the Kansas City area hosts an invitational get-together called Prairie Rail. This year, about 115 people are coming in from all over the country to operate the local layouts for three days. Each attendee has the opportunity to operate on four different railroads in the area. We've been doing this now for for several years on a bi-annual basis. It will be the first time for the Stockton & Copperopolis to be on the tour so my next few weeks will be spent making sure that everything is working properly.

January 28, 2010

Another year has begun and, with it, more challenges. During the last month, I was able to install the remainder of my train order signals and get them working. Now, the Operator can throw the TO signals right from his desk. I think that train crews will probably look at them a little more closely than they did the paper signals I had made.

While I was in the signals mood, I investigated my proposed interlocking at Orford Junction. This will be a mechanical interlocking with lower quadrant semaphores. While using the Railroad and Company software as described by Bill Darnaby in the new Model Railroad Planning is a neat solution, I am opting for a strictly mechanical machine. This will mean a lot of machine work but I think it will be worth. It's down the road a bit but I do want to get the signals installed at the Junction. There are a great number of signals in a fairly small space so I decided to use servo motors. These have been described in the model press recently (most recently in the Model Railroad Hobbyist ezine) and are a lot smaller than the Circuitron setup. Nothing against Circuirtron. Their signal actuators work great but take up a lot of room. The servo motors can be precisely set to whatever positions are desired and they remain there since the settings are stored electronically in the driver board. My servos and drivers were bought from Tam Valley Depot (www.tamvalleydepot.com). Duncan McRee, the owner, was kind enough to modify some of his stock drivers to fit my needs and then charge a very reasonable price. The semaphores themselves will be assembled from Cal-Scale parts that were made for an old article in Model Railroader (January-April, June, 1961). I don't believe that they are made any more but I got mine directly from Cal-Scale several years ago.

More progress has been made on the passenger cars I mentioned last time. Two sleeping cars and a diner are complete with the parlor car and combine now sitting on my workbench. They should be done and ready for paint sometime next week. Westwood Sunset Limited cars were the basis of the cars which were then modified to represent earlier narrow-vestibule Pullman-built cars. Some on the Early Rail Yahoo Group have talked about Westwood cars trying to find out how they went together. Westwood basically made several different styles of doors, windows, platforms and roof parts. These were then put together along with scribed wood to match the particular prototype being modeled. Roof were built up with vacuum-formed plastic roof coverings supported by cast styrene ribs. It takes a bit of care to put them together and I recommend swapping Evergreen scribed siding for the scribed wood but they do look nice. I'll take some photos and post them next time showing the construction methods.

You can see the basic construction of the cars in the photos: window and door castings glued onto wood stringers with roof support ribs and more stringers.

December 18, 2009

There hasn't been a lot accomplished this month mostly due to the typical Christmas sorts of things. My main thrust has been to get some train order signals installed. I had some old etched brass upper quadrant kits that I had purchased several years ago and had intended to convert them to lower quadrant signals. The Tomar blades that I had planned to use turned out not to be usable since the lenses did not line up with the light on the upper quadrant signals. I had decided to scrap the rebuilding idea and just buy some Tomar TO signals. After they arrived, more time was spent adapting them to the Circuitron semaphore actuators I wanted to use. Now, one signal has been installed and just has to be wired to the panel at the Operator's desk while the rest are in process of being assembled. Like most simple projects, this one expands because now, I have to determine the final locations of several structures before I can install the signals. Some kind of mockups will have to be made, etc., etc. I just remembered that I also have to paint the signals. Although the Tomar signals come in aluminum paint, in 1895, the SP painted their signals black and white.

While waiting for the signals to arrive, I found some time to work on new passenger cars for the MSN. These will be built from old Westwood kits that I have. The main effort in the last couple of weeks has been designing the artwork for the lettering. The cars are all 79-foot Pullmans and Pullman was very fancy in its decorations in this period. I have tried to duplicate a particular lettering design and I think I have been successful but that will be seen once the cars are put together. More on this later.

Some scenery has also been done in the Farmington area. I installed some plywood in what will be the town site of Farmington and installed some cardboard strips to form the base of the plaster gauze to come later.

December 1, 2009

Finally, the traveling is over and I could get back to work on the railroad. I finished the scenery from Peters to just beyond Waverly and then started on the second of track from Copperopolis past the bridge down to Felix. It turned out to my liking but it was a bit of work. I don't know how many packages of static grass went into the two sections but there was a bit.

As part of this, I also took the time to assemble some nifty little etched brass high-wheel bicycles. These are from a company in the Czech Republic and are really nicely done.

The monthly operating sessions have been going well. It looks like the railroad is going to need about nine operators to keep it working. This allows everyone to run more than one train but the session isn't so busy that the crew can't take a rest once in a while. I'm really trying to get all this narrowed down by next February. We have a bi-annual event here in Kansas City called Prairie Rail where modelers from all over the country are invited to come operate on the railroads. Last time, we got about 125 people to attend. This coming year will be the first for the Copperopolis Road and I want to make sure that everything is working the way it should.

The next project will be to work on the train order signals. We have been using paper signs up until now and that's somewhat less than adequate. We just now have to assemble the signals and figure out the best way to mount them.

October 27, 2009

It's been over a month since the last update and it has been a busy month. I spent a long weekend in Tulsa with their local LDSIG and OPSIG groups for their annual get-together. It was a great weekend with some good talks and interesting layouts to visit. October began with another long weekend in Carson City, Nevada with the Nevada Railroad Symposium. This is an annual event that I regualrly attend and this year, I gave a talk on the Golden Gate Special which was the first luxury vestibuled train in the West sponsored by the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads. It only lasted six months but it paved the way for the Overland Limited which last for years.

Somewhere in all that, I did manage to get some work done on the S&C. The couplers for the boxcars finally came and they are now all out on the railroad. I also started work on the long bridge on the Milton branch. The bridge itself was from my old layout and is 231 scale feet long. With the trestle approaches, the total length of the structure is 366 feet. Since there is going to be several trestles on the railroad, I made a jig to built the trestle bents. It is just bits of scrap glued to a piece of plywood. The dimensions for the bents is copied from the standards of the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad, a short line operating in the Napa Valley of California. Stockton & Copperopolis standards were not available but this line used about the same equipment so I adopted its standards. The thing that looks like a piano keyboard is a jig for the bridge ties. I place a tie in each slot and, when it is full, a piece of masking tape is laid over the ties and the whole thing can be lifted off and placed on the trestle in one piece. It saves installing each tie individually and makes tie alignment a lot easier. Everything is ready for me to set the bridge in place which I will probably do next week when I return from another trip, this time to the Prototype Modelers' Seminar in Naperville, IL.

Also, work was started on secenery on the Milton branch. I installed the hard shell from Peters up to the trestle just before Milton. The trestle hasn't been built yet and I want to do that before finishing the scenery. The hard shell was made using cardboard strips arranged in a lattice array and then covered with plaster cloth. When dry, I painted everything with earth-colored paint and sifted real dirt over the area. Part of the hills were then covered with the Silflor static grass I used in Peters. The rest will be done when more grass arrives.

For earlier Construction Logs, see: The First Year 2007-2008 The Second Year 2008-2009