One of the big attractions of Proto:48 for me is the chance to build highly detailed models, and freight cars in particular.
But what cars do you buy and/or build and how many do you "need?" Where do you start? A lot has been written on this topic already, and a particularly authoritative and well-considered discussion can be found on Tony Thompson's "Modelling the SP." Start with this post and then pour yourself a drink and dive into the links to previous posts on the subject Tony compiles at the bottom of the page.
So What Rolling Stock Do I Need?
The answer usually seems to be "it depends." Or at least, it depends on your specific circumstances.
Things to ask yourself first are:
But the same ten or so cars coming and going all the time would get old fast too.
So for my roster, I decided to develop three numbers to help answer the questions above:
1. the minimum viable number and type of cars to support operations (what do I need to get going)
2. the number and type of cars to support operations with a representative roster, and
3. the number of cars that could (reasonably) accompany the layout (what I have the time, money, and space for)
All three of these numbers are scaled from two things:
- what type(s) of cars the consignees, industries or through traffic requires
- what cars are representative for that era and geographic location
Both of these are very complicated numbers to determine and require a lot of research (perfect for a research junkie like me). Tony Thompson's articles (see above) do a great job of starting you off on the right foot.
1. How closely do I follow a prototype and era?
2. How big is my layout?
3. What are the industries and traffic patterns?
4. How much time do I have to build or money to buy rolling stock?
North Point Street will only have a dozen or so places to spot cars. Really the layout could only comfortably hold about half that amount before it got crowded, difficult to switch and operate, and just did not look plausible anymore.
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| Images like this one can help determine what car types and owners you should have in your mix. Photo courtesy Bancroft Library Collection. |
Just like track, when it comes to rolling stock we tend to try to cram too much into our limited spaces. The results are industry spurs packed to the clearance points and yards with no empty tracks. While there is always a prototype example for everything, a study of real-world examples will lead you to realise you probably have too much rolling stock on your layout.
But the same ten or so cars coming and going all the time would get old fast too.
So for my roster, I decided to develop three numbers to help answer the questions above:
1. the minimum viable number and type of cars to support operations (what do I need to get going)
2. the number and type of cars to support operations with a representative roster, and
3. the number of cars that could (reasonably) accompany the layout (what I have the time, money, and space for)
All three of these numbers are scaled from two things:
- what type(s) of cars the consignees, industries or through traffic requires
- what cars are representative for that era and geographic location
Both of these are very complicated numbers to determine and require a lot of research (perfect for a research junkie like me). Tony Thompson's articles (see above) do a great job of starting you off on the right foot.
Another wrinkle all prototype modellers face is what is available on the market. In more "obscure" scales such as O this problem gets worse. There have been lots of fantastic, prototypical kits made over the years but the trick is finding them once they're out of production.
Making a Long Story Short:
... because it really is a long story. You first need to determine what commodities are shipped and/or received by the industries on your layout, in what tonnages or volumes, and at what frequencies (daily? weekly? occasionally?). That all needs to be scaled to the capacity of the layout. In my case, for instance, the real Simmons Mattress factory might have had space for four cars at the shipping dock, but I only have room for two.
Then, you need to determine what freight cars would most likely have been seen. For me, it starts with my modelling period of the spring of 1946. Then, which railroads would have originated the inbound loads (which depends on where the load is coming from). It also depends on the proportional representation of the major roads that interchange or serve the area - the State Belt directly connected with the WP, SP, AT&SF and NWP. The specific car types are determined by the proportions of each style or build owned by each railroad. So if the Southern Pacific, for instance, owned 10,000 of some style of boxcar and the Santa Fe owned 1000 of a similar car, it would be far more likely (ten times more theoretically) that an SP car could be seen than Santa Fe. But that is with several rather large caveats: what railroad the shipper used, where the load was going, and what suitable empty cars were on hand at the time are some of the other determining factors.
Photographs can help with some of this, but don't always tell the entire story. This leaves a lot of modellers doing what feels or looks right, or just using what is available or what they like.
In future posts on this subject I will talk a bit more about how I developed the fleet.
Making a Long Story Short:
... because it really is a long story. You first need to determine what commodities are shipped and/or received by the industries on your layout, in what tonnages or volumes, and at what frequencies (daily? weekly? occasionally?). That all needs to be scaled to the capacity of the layout. In my case, for instance, the real Simmons Mattress factory might have had space for four cars at the shipping dock, but I only have room for two.
Then, you need to determine what freight cars would most likely have been seen. For me, it starts with my modelling period of the spring of 1946. Then, which railroads would have originated the inbound loads (which depends on where the load is coming from). It also depends on the proportional representation of the major roads that interchange or serve the area - the State Belt directly connected with the WP, SP, AT&SF and NWP. The specific car types are determined by the proportions of each style or build owned by each railroad. So if the Southern Pacific, for instance, owned 10,000 of some style of boxcar and the Santa Fe owned 1000 of a similar car, it would be far more likely (ten times more theoretically) that an SP car could be seen than Santa Fe. But that is with several rather large caveats: what railroad the shipper used, where the load was going, and what suitable empty cars were on hand at the time are some of the other determining factors.
Photographs can help with some of this, but don't always tell the entire story. This leaves a lot of modellers doing what feels or looks right, or just using what is available or what they like.
In future posts on this subject I will talk a bit more about how I developed the fleet.
So, I'm coming to this a few months late but there is one possible source of data for this effort. When I was going through State Belt records a few years back at the CA Archives in Sacramento, I found five monthly switching list books for the years between 1898 and 1903--the sole survivors. Despite that, they were a revelation, showing cars in and out for each of the five railroads, with counts of cars and, at times, actual car numbers called out. The bulk of the accounting covers cars moved between each railroad's ferry and respective yard, which represented the bulk of the traffic movement at that time. But after 1898 the Belt started to allow individual spurs and the movements to those spurs slowly begin to show as handwritten additions in the books--industries such as to Dibb Lumber and Stauffer on Northpoint. I was only looking at the pre-earthquake era, except to chase down narrow gauge track removal before 1910 so there were many more boxes I didn't touch, covering later periods. It is possible that switch records exist for later periods in those boxes. There were also lots of letters between the railroad and shippers over putting in spurs and other changes, and accounts of accidents at spurs.
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