Model Railroad Blog

Weathering A Rapido Reefer

Backdating the LAJ layout to the early 1960s has entailed educating myself as to the types of rolling stock that were on the rails during that era. It’s been a slow but fun process.

First up was the need for an era-suitable reefer for Federal Cold Storage. I chose Rapido’s Santa Fe RR-56 mechanical reefer (pn 156002A). This is simply an exquisite model with the finest of details. Many of said details are fine as a hair and therefore a bit delicate.

Today, I’ll walk you through the weathering process. With all things weathering, you want to focus on a number of light/subtle layers and shoot for finely feathered edges. The trick, and it’s a hard one to learn, is to…..know when to quit. Once you go one step too far, lay things on too thick, you’re pretty much screwed. There’s no going back. Not sure if you applied enough? Take a break. Walk the dog, mow the lawn, shovel the driveway. Then re-evaluate. You can always add another layer.

To build momentum, I start with the easier more forgiving steps, the underbody. I swapped in Kadee 158 scale couplers, cut off the trip pin, and carefully painted them with Model Master “Dark Earth”. Use a small brush and take care not to get any paint on the coupler’s hinge points. I painted the airhose Tamiya German Grey and the hose aircock Tamiya Dark Iron.

Remove the trucks and mask off the treads. Apply four or five light coats of Rustoleum Dark Gray Primer (rattle can). Spin the wheels between coats to get full coverage. Finally, dust on one or two light coats of Rustleum “Earth Brown” camo. paint (rattle can). If you need a break, nows a good time before moving to the next step.

Now for the primary step and one where you need to be totally rested and focused. This is where, if you’re too heavy-handed, you’ll ruin the model. Apply three or four light coats of Dullcote (rattle can) from various angles. I use a hair dryer to speed up drying time.

For coloring, we’ll be using Bragdon FF-69 “Weathered Brown” weathering chalk. It’s crucial to note that weathering powders are like paint from the standpoint that they bite hard and fast. Especially, with a dull surface, you can’t wipe them off after they’re down. Apply the powder with a 3/4″ wide, flat-tipped brush, starting with the roof.

Dip the brush in the powder. Now, the most important part of this entire blog, WIPE MOST OF THE CHALK OFF THE BRUSH, on a paper towel. Apply it exactly parallel to the roof ribs. Seal with Dullcote.

Now for the sides (and ends). Using perfectly vertical strokes, brush the chalk down across the car. It’s very easy to slant your strokes here and there. It’s not a good look and very hard to correct, so be careful. Work in very light layers. As before, know when to quit; better too little than too much. Because 3/4″ is a fairly wide brush, you’ll need to grab a smaller brush to work chalk into any tight spots.

To prevent damage to the underbody while you’re working, it’s easier to set the piece on a block of wood. Also, I always wear latex gloves during the weathering process.

Finally, we’re going to (very lightly) highlight the rivets on the ladders and grab irons. Artists’ felt-tip pens are very easy to work with and allow pinpoint accuracy. I picked up a pack of earth colors by a company called Tombow that I like. I think I got these at Michaels, but you can get them online also. Take a dark brown pen and lightly tap the ladder rivet heads. Once everything is done, apply one more light coat of Dullcote, and it’s a wrap.

From Aerials & Maps to (some) Clarity.

Conceptual sketch, with thoughts and notes, on where I’m thinking of taking the LAJ 1960s version.

For a number of reasons, I plan to focus my upcoming efforts on the LAJ layout. I like the feel of the room, its openness, the mid-century modern interior design, and the way the sun floods the space in the afternoon. I’ve been drawn to the LAJ since I was a teenager. Finally, the Alco S2 switcher is a simply superb runner, a joy to operate.

I’ve been stumped on where to take it for a while. Problem 1? It’s “stick a fork in it” DONE. Even going full Tom Johnson on it with details, there just isn’t anything left to build. Maybe some rolling stock and vehicles, but nothing on the layout proper. Second, it does offer the potential for decent operations, but it would be nice to have a little more. I don’t want to encroach on the open room space, though. I learned my lesson with the N scale Brooklyn Terminal that used to be the center of the space. After a lot of cogitating, I was finally able to find a way out by doing three things.

  1. As much as I love the modern era, the number of industries is far less than it used to be. By moving the era back to the early 1960s, I can avail myself of that era’s much heavier car flow and industry density.
  2. When I carefully studied the track charts and aerials, I noticed something interesting that I could use to my advantage A lot of the spurs had a ton of industries on them served by a single turnout. I also noticed that some of these long, multi-industry spurs had a grade crossing in the middle. That adds interest, too. I’ve also noticed how often tenants change in industrial parks. Through a simple re-labeling and assigning several industries to a spur, I could plausibly pack more in. I noticed that the spurs that curved away at ninety-degree angles served multiple industries. These curved leads also add visual interest.
  3. Finally, I still had the removable module I built a few months ago for possible use as a team track. I dug that out of storage and did some track re-arranging to more closely represent the prototype. Being removable, I can take it down in a few minutes if and when I want to open up the room.

Here’s a simplified schematic of the “spurs off of the spur” on The Horn Lead in 1964. Note the numerous industries served by a single turnout. As modelers, we can use this to our advantage to get a lot of structures and operational potential out of a small amount of space without resorting to model railroady gimmicks. Note that as time went on, most of these spurs were abandoned, hence my decision to model the line during earlier times.

Here’s an aerial of the same area (1964). It’s not as easy to follow as the schematic above, but if you zoom in, you can see what’s going on.

A shot of the removable module. Note the cross street. I’m not sure if I’ll keep the second track on the right. It would be handy as a sorting track. I could also make it an industry. If go that route I can’t put a structure in front. I learned my lesson the hard way on a previous iteration with Modern Pattern and Foundry.

Free money. Just through a simple label change I can plausibly assume that the building above represents two industries.

I’ve found that, more often than not, the answer to difficult planning problems can be found by studying the prototype. Also, for smaller layouts, you’re far better off doing your planning in 3D with mockups as opposed to spending too much time on 2D drawings.

Vehicle Composition

Vehicles are noticeable enough that their overall composition against the canvas of our layout warrants some thought. For your era and location: What’s the best mix of tractor-trailers, panel trucks, and passenger vehicles? Within the vehicle realm, what selection makes the most sense in terms of make and model (Domestic? Import? Luxury? Non-luxury?) Where should the vehicles be placed? Traffic lanes? Parking lanes only? A mix? What color mix matches your era? Do you want to alter that slightly so that vehicle color doesn’t compete with layout elements? In this scene, District Blvd. is the only major street so that’s the only one where I’ve placed vehicles in the traffic lanes. The rest are parked. (Notice the blue car parked behind the liquor store.) All have received a coating of Dullcote to account for the impact of viewing over a distance through the atmosphere.

Consider the common refrain, “I didn’t think if I did X that Y would be the result”. Note that the first three words are I….didn’t….think. Such was the case when it came to composing the vehicle composition on the early ’60s version of the LAJ.

Composition covers: the types of vehicles (tractor-trailer, box truck, or passenger car), their make and model, their color, and their position on the layout. I never really thought about it much on my previous layouts because plausible results came intuitively. If you model “now” you instinctively know what things should look like. You know that two-thirds of the colors are white, black, or silver/charcoal. If you have any doubts all you have to do is look out the window.

Moving to the early ’60s LAJ it hit me that I couldn’t rely on instinct. The good news is that working with vehicles is one of the easier aspects of the hobby. There isn’t a lot of modeling involved, and you can move them around at will to test different compositons and color mixes out. If you make a mistake you can just put the car back in the drawer and replace it.

The two images above were taken on Everett Avenue in The Central Manufacturing District. Although it’s the present day you can still learn a lot. Streets are wide and quiet (as opposed to say, Wilshire Blvd.) The area is laid out in a city block format and is populated by mid-sized industries in boxy warehouses (i.e. not like a pulp mill, steel mill, etc.) Workers park on the street and drive average cars, not beaters, not Porsches. Looking at the photos, we have a mix of about two-thirds passenger vehicles, one third semi’s, box trucks, and utility trucks. Notice the density and placement. All vehicles are parked. There are none in the traffic lanes. This would change if you were looking at a different part of town. There would be more vehicles in the traffic lanes and fewer trucks.

Nailing down color for this era will take more research. In the 1940s and early 1950s you had a lot of black and olive. I already mentioned the modern mix. The sixties seemed to go through more of a rainbow phase. A Google search of the phrase “Vehicle Color by Decade” gives a ton of great information. In the ’60s, imported cars hadn’t really caught on yet. So it was mostly domestic manufacturers.

Fortunately, there is a large selection of quality model vehicles on the market. If there is one gap, it’s that the offerings are slanted more towards luxury vehicles and brighter colors as opposed to what your average Joe drives to work. Want a brightly colored Thunderbird or Caddy? You’re in luck. Want a more muted Impala, and you have to look a little harder.

Random Thoughts and Observations

-Even though the colors in that era were brighter, I’m inclined to lean harder towards more muted hues so they don’t distract from the layout.

-You can’t put convertibles in the traffic lanes. It becomes quite obvious there isn’t a driver in them!

-Although most vehicles have a gloss sheen, this disappears with distance and atmosphere. They look much better when hit with Dullcote.

I put a lot of emphasis on buying higher-end vehicles. They run twenty to thirty dollars but are worth it. The example above is Oxford Diecast. I lean towards more muted colors. They all get license plate decals from Microscale (yellow for California during this era). They all get a spray of Dullcote (after masking off the windows).

LAJ ops, Putting it all Together

The crew keeps a watchful eye out for traffic as it works Longview Fiber.

My post on the 1960s era version of the LAJ layout garnered more interest and questions than usual. That being the case, I thought it would be helpful to circle back and have a quick review and pull some of the previous posts together in one spot. Prototype knowledge translates into opportunity from the standpoint of “stretching” a layout. By picking and choosing which practices to copy, you can add time and interest to a session without resorting to silly tricks, crazy props, or enduring mind-numbing boredom.

In summary:

  1. It’s the number of car spots not the number of turnouts that drives operational interest.
  2. Representing hand brake operations is a simple, interesting, and highly prototypical way to add time to a session. You can add this dimension via a simple pause in the action or using the TrainCrew app. When a car, or a short cut of cars, is set out, the hand brakes must be set. When you want to pull a car, the hand brakes must be released. When spotting, the brake is set before the loco. pulls away. When picking up, the loco. couples on first, and then the brakes are released. (If you have a cut of several cars coupled together, you only need to set the hand brakes on one car)
  3. In LA’s Central Manufacturing District most of the grade crossings are blind and not protected by crossing flashers. How do they handle that without having daily accidents? A retired LAJ explained, “Normally, you would just slow down at each crossing, almost to a stop. Most of us would throw flares out at crossings as we approached.” During an op. session I add this procedure of slowing down or stopping at crossings.
  4. A common complaint among professional rails is customers who are super slow unloading their cars. Referring to Longwood Fiber the same conductor wrote, “They would get switched almost every day, but not releasing all of the cars. We always had a couple coming out empty, a couple going in loaded and a couple set backs not unloaded yet.” In other words, when they came in with a cut of incoming cars to be spotted, they needed to temporarily pull cars that were still being unloaded, spot the new cars, and then put the cars back that were still being unloaded. Doing this at more than one industry in a session gets old quickly, but done once, it does stretch a layout.
  5. I was asked where the cars for a switch job are sorted, in the yard beforehand or on the road. My experience has been that before leaving the yard, the train is “neat, tidy, and blocked”.

Here’s a 1964 aerial of LAJ’s Horn Lead. To put things in perspective, it’s only about a twenty-minute walk from B Yard to Longview Fiber. Not far at all. A train would be assembled and blocked in order in the yard (as opposed to sorting things out on the road). In modern times, the switch job often makes up their own train. Real railroads don’t share model railroaders’ love for artificially fabricated, “make-work” run-around moves. Every single turnout on the lead, all twenty-five of them, faces the same direction (facing point). There’s a design lesson to be learned here. The switcher is on the back and shoves up the lead. A series of push/pull moves is then performed to work the industries. No runaround moves are performed.

Design lesson number 2. Operational interest and op. session length is driven by the number of car spots NOT the number of turnouts. This is a helpful reality for the space-starved modeler. The spur I’ve highlighted has a whopping TWELVE car spots and seven industries and only one turnout. (Charlie Slater article. 2003 Warbonnet Magazine)

Unlike Miami or Baltimore, very few grade crossings in LA’s Central Manufacturing District are protected by crossing flashers. As you can see from the photos, the rail crew and oncoming traffic are totally blind to one another. Crews come almost to a halt at every crossing. This video shows the practice in action.

I’ll close with a diagram of how operations are handled when one of the industries you’re trying to work still has some cars that haven’t been released for pulling.

A train of incoming loads bound for Longview Fibers leaves the yard. The job entails replacing empties with loads, but things are made more complicated by the fact that the car in the middle isn’t ready to be pulled.

To begin, all of the cars are pulled from Longview and placed on a sorting track. Then, using a series of back-and-forth moves, the loads are spotted and the re-spot is put back in its original location.

When the loads and re-spot are in place, and the hand brakes set, the empties are taken back to the yard.

Feeling Like You’re “There”

A recent scene on my Los Angeles Junction layout. My current focus is on putting a lot more thought and attention into the background sky/horizon photos that I crop in.

The laws of physics being what they are, it’s impossible to look at our models and have the same sensory experience as actually being at a prototypical location. As humans, gazing down at ten-inch-long pieces of plastic, helicopter style, it will always be…well… it will be like gazing at a collection of plastic. That will be the case no matter how perfectly executed the models are. Putting your head on the layout and closing one eye doesn’t work. Believe me, I’ve tried….many times….with the same result. Until the laws of physics change, and I’m doubtful they will in my lifetime, we need to find a workaround. We need to find a way to experience our world as if we are actually “there”.

Fortunately, such a workaround exists. It’s photography. Mastering the subject is a lifelong pursuit and photographing miniatures comes with it’s own challenges. If you make the effort, the results can be quite rewarding. You’ll be able to experience your work the way you intended. You’ll see it as if you are there.

There are few basic rules you need to stick too that are unique to our hobby.

  1. Keep the camera very low. Helicopter views are fine for documentation but not for what we’re talking about here.
  2. You need to use an editor to remove the background of your layout and crop in an actual sky image. (The exception being if you’re working with something small enough to take outside)
  3. In most cases you’ll be fighting depth of field problems so you’ll need a focus stacking program so that everything is in focus front to back. These programs are inexpensive and easy to use.
  4. You’ll need to set up a light source so you get a few shadows here and there. Without them, the image will look flat and lifeless. All it takes is a simple ten dollar bulb.

All of this is a preamble for the lead image. No matter how much experience we have, we learn over time. There were some aspects of my photos that I wanted to improve. I’m speaking specifically about the sky I crop in after editing out the layout’s actual background.

Looking at the background sky above, there are a few things I don’t like. An actual horizon goes from sapphire blue near the top and then progressively lightens, almost to white, the closer you get to the horizon. Also, the above shot needs a hint of “something” behind the structures where they meet the sky. It could be the tips of trees, maybe some poles, maybe a distant structure. As is, the transition is too stark.

In an attempt to get a better look at the layout-to-horizon transition, I dug out this shot I took over the LAJ’s “B” Yard a few years ago. It makes for a better background for my Los Angeles-themed model photos. Note the white to blue color transition working up from the horizon. Note the signature, but subtle, power line poles emblematic of Vernon. I’ve also come to realizedthat the climate in Southern California is such that white puffy cumulus clouds are rare. Whispy clouds are more the norm. In the actual prototype photo, there are only two towers. I copy/pasted the center tower and inserted it on the left to make a third one. The layer containing the third (left) tower was enlarged slightly so as to make it look closer.

After many years of experimentation, I’ve come to the conclusion that the camera/lens combo that comes closest to what the human eye actually sees is the older, single lens, smart phones. I use an iPhone 6, which I bought on eBay for fifty dollars. I do use an SLR too, but in many cases get better results with the old phones.

Finally, there is composition. It’s a subjective, highly personal subject. Personally, I prefer less dramatic scenes that capture what I’m used to when I’m out rail fanning. When I’m in the field, I only get “lucky” about a third of the time and see an actual train. Most of the time, I’m looking at cars spotted in front of industries and in yards. I find that equally interesting. Three-quarter angle roster shots of passing trains are fine, but are a dime a dozen.