Monterey Sand Sources

Richmond was a long way from the sand pit on the El Segundo Branch that served the LA division.  Photographic evidence shows sand shipped to the sand house in SP drop bottom gondolas as shown in my previous post http://northbaylines.blogspot.com/2014/04/locomotive-sand-at-richmond.html.  But where did this sand come from?  Could have been from the central valley or the Sacramento River, but there were a group of sand sources on the coast at Monterey served solely by the SP from their Monterey Branch.  My search for which companies could have provided the sand turned up a 60’s era geological report, Mines & Mineral Resources of Monterey County, CA, by the California Division of Mines and Geology.  The full report can be found at https://ia700805.us.archive.org/14/items/minesandmineral05hart/minesandmineral05hart.pdf

This report has a 23 page section on sand and gravel operations in Monterey County.  Most of them are too recent or produced larger aggregate for cement and road purposes, but I did find documentation of sand operations going back to the 19^th century.  One of them that fit into the era was Granite Construction, but their description stated they mined sand and aggregates solely for use in their own adjacent asphalt and concrete plants.  Scratch that source.  Owens Illinois operated a plant at Moss Beach and shipped a lot of sand by rail.  But they shipped most, if not all of that sand to their glass plants in Oakland, Portland and Tracy.  This would be a great industry for an SP modeler shipping on line.  SP would have provided home road cars for this service according to the car service rules.  Del Monte Properties had an adjacent plant in Moss Beach that also produced a variety of specialty sands and remains a candidate.  But engine or locomotive sand is not specifically mentioned in the report, so this one has to be a maybe.  A strong maybe, but not a confirmed source.  Both of these plants are at the far end of the Monterey Branch west of Pacific Grove as indicated on the map.

M&MR MC p 92

Moving up the coast back towards Castroville, the older Monterey Sand Company plant at Marina has been operating since 1944 and the Sand City location formerly run by Sydney Ruthven in the 30s has been run by them since 1946.  Both locations are directly rail served by SP and Monterey Sand Company is listed as producing engine sand.  Bingo a confirmed source that operated at the time of the photos.  3459 did not arrive on the Valley Division until 1946, so the sand in the SP gon behind it could have come from here.

But wait, there’s more!  A bit further to the north on the Lapis Spur off the Monterey Branch is the Pacific Cement and Aggregates (formerly Pacific Coast Aggregates) plant in Lapis.  This location has been in production since 1906 and owned by Pacific Coast/Cement since 1929.  They are listed as having produced Locomotive sand for track sanding.  How cool is that?  It’s not every day that you find a reference to a specific (very specific) commodity produced 70 years ago in what many consider to by a dry bureaucratic trieste on esoteric ephemera.  Thank You California Division of Mines!  And for those of you interested in modeling a beach side sand operation, that report contains a number of photos of drag lines, dredges and processing facilities that  can add interest to your layout.  And sand was processed a lot more than simply scooping it off a dune and dumping it into an open top rail car. 

An excerpt from the Monterey Mineral Map covering the coast and sand production sites follows, the full map and key are the last several pages in the PDF linked above.  Many other opportunities for SP modelers to be found there.

JOHN BARRY

Cameron Park, CA

28 April 2014

Locomotive Sand at Richmond

The Richmond Roundhouse was the locomotive servicing facility for the west end of the Valley Division and the San Francisco Terminal Division.  Sand was loaded into locomotives from the sand house located between tracks that ran just east of the brick portion of the round house and slightly to the south.  In this 1903 photo taken from near the car shops looking south, you can see the sand house with what appears to be an elevated water tank and spouts just beyond it. 

Santa Fe Railway Photo

Later pictures show details of the sand house with the sand tower roof perpendicular to the tracks with a roof pitch of about 1:1 and no drying room or trestle on the south side, but a single level room and bin on the north side.

Post 1944 dated photos, into the diesel era, show a shallower roof pitch on the sand tower perpendicular to the tracks, a lower bi-level drying room on the south side with similar pitch, but parallel to the tracks at about the height of the sand spouts, and an elevated receiving track reached by a sloping trestle on pilings.

Author’s collection from the Harre Demoro Collection

It seems likely that the reconfiguration took place either at or near the time of the turntable expansion and Depot relocation in 1944.  Since I have chosen to model the extended turntable, I will also model this final sand house configuration.

 The Santa Fe transported sand in that era in drop bottom GS gondolas and emptied it straight into the receiving bin from the elevated trestle.  One of the several series of Caswell dump cars that were prolific on the Santa Fe would seem to be appropriate for this company service.  Intermountain makes several variations appropriate to my era.

But what about those composite sides on the Caswell?  They don’t seem to be there in the photo above.  Here’s a close up view.

Author’s collection from the Harre Demoro Collection

And yet another view of a different car on a different day behind the 9020. 

Author’s collection from the Harre Demoro Collection

What are these SP cars doing at an ATSF locomotive facility?  Delivering sand of course.  But where did that sand come from?  Tony Thompson had a comment on his blog about a large sand operation on the Monterey Branch of the SP.  That seems to be a likely spot for the origination as it would have been plentiful and clean.

Although neither car has it’s complete number visible, the last four are clear in both cases, 3019 and 2459.  Thanks to the Railgoat SP freight car site, gondola page http://www.railgoat.railfan.net/spcars/bynumber/gon/gon_below_100xxx.htm, we can positively identify the first as 93019, a G-50-12 class gondola and the second as 92459, a G-50-10 class gondola.  Both of these classes can be modeled with the Ulrich General Service Gondola kit. I have one, courtesy of Tony, but am looking for one or two more.  Of course, now that I’ve posted these pictures, demand for the OOP kit will put it out of my budget, but at least I do have one to build and recreate the scene.

All of which is to say to model the Santa Fe accurately, you also have to model the SP.

John Barry

Cameron Park, CA

26 April 2014

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