Building a WWII ATSF fleet II—Boat Flats

Continuing on my quest for an accurate model of the Santa Fe’s Bay area operations, I was motivated by a post on the Rail Marine Yahoo group to re-look at my references for boat flats.  The railroads used idler cars to reach cars on the car float without putting the heavy engine on the ramp or float itself.  This was more for traction and balance rather than ramp or float capacity as the engines at San Francisco and Oakland’s Alice Street routinely transited the bay on floats to their shoppings at Richmond.  It was important though, to maintain balance on the floats, and using idler cars as a handle to reach cars on the back of the float allowed that balance to be more easily maintained.

My principle source is the Work Equipment Car book by Bill Childers published by the ATSFH&MS.  It can be ordered from the society at http://www.atsfrr.org/store/bookFrt.htm, although at this writing it is currently out of stock.

I am an engineer and analyst and find it much easier to gain insights if I can rearrange data and look for patterns.  To that end, I transcribed the data in Bill’s book to an Excel spreadsheet.  I find spreadsheets are a good way to manipulate the data and add information from other sources.  Using the class and former number info from the Work Car table, I added former class info from the Live List.  This allows the modeler to make a good stab at the under frame and side sill configuration without a picture.  Bill lists 64 unique cars in the series of 191700-191749 which were assigned to boat flat service.  Most would have been used at Richmond and other Bay area points, but their was a Gulf Coast operation between Galveston and Port Bolivar Texas that operated in the late 30’s.  The cars in Bill’s table listed as converted at Port Bolivar almost certainly operated there. 

Based on the former car numbers and class information, you can infer the identity of the donor cars.  Further work is needed to determine the original cars for the work cars converted to boat flat service.  For those converted from cars with revenue numbers, the following classes were used as boat flats during the period that they had dedicated boat flat numbers.

Ft-, Ft-G, Ft-H, Ga-V/Ft-G could have been used with minimal or no modification.

Bx-B, Bx-13, Bx-D, Bx-O, Bx-W, Fe-L, Rr-R, Rr-S, Sk-H, Sk-V, Sk-W were former house cars that most likely were cut down to their floors and used as flat cars. 

But which of these cars operated in my era?  To answer that question I used the sort feature in my transcribed spreadsheet to separate the cars that had disposition dates after the 1943.  And here are the results:

Number	Class	FClass	Former #	C Date	CShop	Disp	D Date	DShop	Note
2/191700				4/10/45	SF				Blt by ATSF from Scrap
191701	Wt	Ft-H	92922	2/28/23	SF
191709				6/25/41	RD				Blt by ATSF from Scrap
191710	Wx	Bx-D	21845	10/8/31	RD
191711	Wx	Bx-O	33717	12/19/35	RD
191712	Wx	Bx-O	35320	3/7/36	RD
191713	Wx	Bx-O	35246	3/7/36	RD
191714	Wx	Bx-O	28160	3/7/36	RD
191715	Wk	Sk-V	52645	2/23/37	CY	Ret	10/29/46	SF
191716	Wk	Sk-W	52784	2/23/37	CY	Ret	5/23/45	SB
191717	Wk	Sk-W	52851	2/23/37	CY	Ret	3/17/45	SB
191718	Wk	Sk-W	52878	2/23/37	CY	Ret	5/15/45	SB
191719	Wk	Sk-V	52635	2/23/37	CY	Ret	7/2/48	RD
191723	Wr	Rr-S	10385	11/27/35	RD	Ret	5/17/48	SB
191724	Wx	Bx-O	28318	11/9/38	RD
191725	Wx	Bx-O	28342	11/9/38	RD	Sold	9/17/47		Sold Hyman Michaels Co.
191726	Wx	Bx-O	33783	11/9/38	RD
191727	Wx	Bx-O	34348	11/9/38	RD
191731	Wt		194974	2/1/24	RD
191732				4/14/41	RD				Blt by ATSF from Scrap
191733				4/14/41	RD				Blt by ATSF from Scrap
191734				4/14/41	RD				Blt by ATSF from Scrap
191735				4/14/41	RD				Blt by ATSF from Scrap
2/191742	Wa	Ga-V/Ft-G	80296	10/13/41	RD
2/191743	Wa	Ga-V/Ft-G	80391	10/13/41	RD
2/191744			190764	10/13/41	RD	Sold	10/1/46
2/191745			190765	10/13/41	RD	Sold	10/28/47
2/191746	Wk	Sk-H	51446	9/19/41	LA	Ren	10/29/45	SB	Renumber Second 190741
2/191749	Wt	Ft-G	94927	12/10/38	LA

These are my candidate cars for Bay area boat flats during WWII.  All the others had been retired or converted to other purposes before 1944.  The Galveston operation had closed down by then and some of the Galveston cars may have migrated west as the Sk-V based flats that retired at San Francisco and Richmond seem to indicate.  This is an interesting mix of older flat cars, cut down box and refrigerator cars, and purpose built cars from scrap materials at the Richmond Shops. 

John Barry

Cameron Park, CA

25 April 2014

Building a WWII ATSF fleet

I model 1944 and the westernmost end of the Santa Fe in the Bay area.  I have been doing a lot of research on the Valley and SF Terminal divisions, but this post is applicable to anyone modeling the war years.  How do you get a representative fleet to run on your pike?  I've been a student of Tony Thompson's blog on the SP and he has posted many ideas applicable to building a realistic sample of cars.  Tony models 1953, a few years after my time, but his techniques are applicable to my era.  His layout is a good size for his location in Berkeley, but is a branch line and smaller than what I hope to build for Time Table & Train Order operations.  I have adapted his methods to my planning and obtained the Westerfield January 1945 ORER ($22 + shipping from their website  https://id18538.securedata.net/westerfieldmodels.com/merchantmanager/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=orer&sort=2a&page=2 )  This is a more convenient format and closer to my era than the April 43 and October 45 hard copies I picked up at train shows years ago.  I printed the ATSF pages and marked them up with notes from Larry Ochello's live list and the other volumes in the ATSF reference series.  Not something I care to do with my originals.  After a few days of work, I had a hard copy that included all of the ATSF/SFRD freight car classes, their numbers, dimensions and number of cars.  I transcribed all that info into an Excel workbook which I posted on my Google drive at

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Ussn0SB6pfUDk0akNfRmJ3Zm8/edit?usp=sharing

This is a work in progress, the freight car tab is a complete transcription of the Jan 45 ORER entries with added fields for the ATSF class.  The Refrigerator car tab has all the cars, classes, and numbers, but lacks the dimensional data which I have yet to enter.  The summary tab has a listing of cars by class for each of the Santa Fe car types. The numbers to the left of the designation are the actual number of cars from the ORER.  The number just to the right of the designation is the number of cars needed to build a scale fleet based on 1 model per  250 ATSF cars.  This can be changed by altering the value of cell V1.  As it is, the number of ATSF/SFRD cars would be 257 if I followed the plan.   You will note the dimensions are all in feet with two decimal places.  The Eng-Dec tab has a table that I used to enter the Feet-Inches (English) measurements found in the ORER as decimal feet. There are 96 unique decimal equivilents to a foot divided into 1/8 inch increments.  Using decimal feet makes the tables much easier to sort.  The Significant Groups tab is derived from Richard Hendrickson's Warbonnet article and Peter Aue's updates.  It too is a work in progress and currently only has the house car info.

I will update and revise the spread sheet as I have time, meanwhile, it is usable as is.  I figured out how many of the current Shake & Take end sets to order using the info to look up the number of Bx-28 and Bx-31 cars I would need, which works out to one of each.  I will need one of the forthcoming Bx-32, two of the Bx-33 and six of the Bx-36 sets.  I hope someone redoes the "Buy War Bonds" decals that came with the Sunshine Bx-36.  That is just too cool and timely for it not to appear on its way to the San Francisco Port of Embarkation. More to come.

John Barry
Cameron Park, CA

Modeling after Major Surgery

As we grow older, we face an array of challenges that we never thought about in our youth.  Many of you are much older than I and have faced your challenges with dignity and grace.  I am now 57.  I had a tumor removed from my right CP angle (the space between your brainstem and inner ear, just below your brain) June 11^th 2012.  Before the surgery, both the doctors and I were optimistic for a quick and complete recovery.  I even dragged my camera to Houston in anticipation of attending the Temple Santa Fe Railway Modeling and Historical Society convention two weeks later.  That was not to be.  The surgery was more complex than the MRI led them to believe.  They insulted a lot of my nerves scraping the tumor off, leaving me with stroke like symptoms.  Double vision, sagging face, slurred speech, loss of motor control and coordination on the right side, I was a mess.  Would I ever?  Insert a thousand questions here.  I couldn’t even type on my I phone.  But with the support of my wife, who fought to get me into the best rehab hospital around, the encouragement of a fellow modeler, and the dedicated staff of Houston Memorial Hermann TIRR, I made a lot of progress.  It helped that at my wife’s insistence, I wrote a document about who I was and what I had done before I ended up in intensive care.  I included pictures of the ram we had back on the farm, me working a cow on horseback, and the farm.  I wrote about my background as a pilot and engineer, mentioned my hobbies including model railroading and building scale models. And I laid out my goals.  With my speech problems and the number of specialists coming in, this was a quick way to let the doctors know that I wanted more than to retire to the couch in the condo.  Maybe I should have talked more about fine motor control, but I really needed to lift a 100 pound bale of hay.  Your goals will certainly differ.  I showed this document to the orderlies that helped me bathe too.  It really helped me make a connection with those who were trying to help me and in turn, they gave me a tailored boost to meet my goals. 

I left Houston in a wheel chair six weeks after my procedure.  My vision improved.  I was able to drive again.  Physical therapy helped me walk.  Occupational therapy helped me do important stuff like sort pills, make coffee, build freight cars.  Say what!  Yes, I started a Tichy flat and brought it to one of my OT appointments.  I got a lot more fine motor exercises after that and an assignment to keep working at it.  The stake pockets were a little too much for me at the time, and I shelved it for other projects after several attempts.  I’m now ready to finish it though, and have gone on to do other things.  Currently I am working on converting a Walthers 8-1-2 to a Santa Fe assigned Steam Ejector Air Conditioning equipped version.  I will explain how I did that conversion in future posts.

Meanwhile, health issues are not necessarily the end of the world as far as model railroading.  If you like ops, consider designing your next layout to be wheelchair accessible.  If you enjoy the camaraderie of an ops session, have the courage to continue to host as Gil Freitag from Houston has done.  His regular crew helps with the maintenance and all enjoy the ops sessions.  Depending on your and your family’s wishes, and the support of your ops crew, even death need not put an end to ops as Angus’ layout in Petaluma is still holding regular sessions.  Angus built and operated it from his wheel chair.  I never met him as he passed before I moved to the area, but I am grateful to him and his crew for sharing that vision with me.  One aspect of his design, the entry through an operating lift bridge, has direct applicability to my layout with the bascule bridge at Middle River.  The lower height is also attractive, both for showing to younger folk and accommodating me in older age if I ever need that chair again.  Persevere, have fun, and you may even get a prescription like the one I got from my cardiologist to reduce stress:  Do more model railroading!

John Barry

Cameron Park, CA

PS  If you want to see what I wrote from my hospital bed as an introduction to myself and goals, I uploaded a PDF here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Ussn0SB6pfR1pUVk9VcURoVk0/edit?usp=sharing

PPS
I to clarify, I am no longer wheelchair bound, walk, run, and have even been back on my bicycle and a horse.  Need to do more of the last to keep improving my balance.  Vision is not a problem and I really appreciate what I can do with a Zona saw (much superior to the old X-Acto razor saw) and an airbrush.  Yes, I am back, although I have learned that all of us are only temporarily abled people.

Brass Mystery Solved

Thanks to my fellow modelers the mysteries are no longer.

I now know what I purchased direct from Mr. Kim at Daeki back in 85.

Great Northern Steam Heater Car #3,  imported by Oriental.

New England Rail Service Boston & Main #104000 series wood caboose.

Many thanks to those of you who responded, including Don Valentine, the original caboose importer.


John Barry
Cameron Park, CA

Mystery Brass

Back in 1985 while stationed at Kunsan with the Air Force, I visited the Daeki Model Company’s factory in Seoul, Republic of Korea.  Mr. Kim was a very gracious host on my tour and I witnessed the assembly of beautiful models from piles of brass castings and sheet.  The patience of the assemblers amazed me as they worked in a chilly, not too brightly lit industrial building in downtown Seoul.  Their skills working with brass, still far exceed mine, and I am still in awe of their accomplishments.  At the end of the tour, Mr. Kim showed me several models that his company had produced.  I inquired if any of the models were available for sale.  He said yes and I selected four that returned to the states with me at the end of my tour.  He had no Santa Fe models at that time, so I selected a Southern Pacific MM-3 2-6-6-2, NYO&W Y-2 4-8-2, a caboose and a steam heater car.  The first two boxes had labels, but the second two did not.  I think Mr. Kim told me the prototypes, but my notes of that have disappeared as have my recollection of his words. 

I have since figured out that the Steam heater car was based on a Great Northern prototype.

The Caboose, I have and can recall no information on other than it was built by Daeki and so marked.

If you can identify the importer of either or the prototype for the caboose I would appreciate a comment or an e-mail at northbaylines at att dot net.

John Barry,

Cameron Park, CA

Sale locos updated

I just uploaded photos to my sale loco post at
http://northbaylines.blogspot.com/2014/01/brass-and-plastic-locos-for-sale.html

I also have two unpainted Key 1400 class Atlantics that I am willing to trade for operating painted versions.

Please look at the updated post and give one or more of these deserving models a new home.


John Barry
Cameron Park, CA

WWII Boxcar Graffiti and a Virginian Automobile Car

We tend to think of graffiti as a modern problem with taggers painting colorful trash on the sides of Hi-cube freight cars.  But bored individuals have been scrawling doodles on available surfaces since long before the invention of language, let alone the rattle can. 

I first saw a photo of one of the VGN auto cars in the box car collection of the City of Vancouver archives.  Walter Frost made the image on 16 November 1952 and I thought it was a cool looking car with its rounded roof edge.  Their website says the image is under copyright, so I’ll not post it here.  But the following is a link to the photo and full citation.  It has links to download a higher resolution image for your own personal use.  I include it because it shows the full car.

http://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/virginian-rly-co-automobile-boxcar-62019;rad

I checked my 53 ORER, and saw that there were only twenty five of these cars on the VGN.  Way too short of the one of 4800 foreign cars that I need to be a representative fleet on my nominal 400 car layout.  So I didn’t think too much more about it until several days later, I was browsing the Jack Delano collection at the Library of Congress.  Among all the neat shots of Santa Fe workers, vistas and trains were some detail shots taken in the San Bernardino yards.  Among them were two consecutive images of a Virginian Automobile Car. 

Full citation for this one is at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001022902/PP/  It is in the public domain and you can obtain a higher resolution JPG and very high resolution TIFF through the links on the page at no cost.

This next picture is what really grabbed my attention though.  Some enterprising yard clerk must have had a soft spot for kitties and Alfred Hitchcock.  I had to model this car.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001022901/PP/ for the citation and links to hi-res.

Maybe it is too rare, but here I had two photos of this series in the west, bracketing my era, one of which was on my home road, ATSF, albeit in the LA basin rather than SF.  But with the Ford plant in the Richmond inner harbor, I will need an above free running mix number of Auto parts cars, so there is the justification, backed up with photos, one of which is too cool not to try to duplicate.  The hook was set, I’d taken the bait, but I had no idea how to land the fish.  Then I saw a post by Eldon Gatwood on the STMFC list about Bowser.  Needing about 14 PRR boxes and knowing that Bowser builds a LOT of Pennsy prototypes, I decided to give their website a gander.  I was looking for PRR boxes and gons, as I will need a lot of both.  They did not have much in stock, and most of that was in too new paint.  But when I opened the X32 page, I was floored.  In stock was the Virginian car that I had just been obsessing about.  Serendipity!  I ordered one before they ran out. 

Given the humongous VGN fleet of 25, I avoided the temptation to model the whole shebang and just got one as a representative.  I’m already stretching things by having one car or 4% of the VGN fleet when 0.02% is what is warranted if I stuck to the percentage of free rollers.  The car should arrive next week, along with a PRR X32 and gon.  Had to amortize the shipping costs.  Now to find a way to duplicate that chalk graffiti. . .

JOHN BARRY

Cameron Park, CA