Modelingthesp

Many serious modelers choose a specific era for layout or rolling stock modeling. Richard Hendrickson chose to model rolling stock, mostly for the Santa Fe, for October 1947. Jack Burgess’s superb layout depicts the Yosemite Valley Railroad in the third week of August, 1939, because that was the last period that the YV operated a through Pullman to El Portal, at the National ...

A few years ago, I posted some comments about the Southern Pacific “Home Shop” form, a form used to direct a car for repair, which was attached to a placard board or route card board. You can read that initial post here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023...

This is another post in a series about route cards, the small tags of light cardstock, typically about 3 x 5 inches, attached to freight cars to inform switchmen how to switch a car. They were attached to small tack boards, which after 1937 were 5.5 x 9 inches in size (documented in a previous post:

Fruit Growers Express (FGE) was a very large refrigerator car owner, serving  most railroad in the Southeast and beyond, including, for example the Pennsylvania. Also included in the “family,” as they were wont to call it, were two of the Hill lines: the Great Northern and the CB&Q. The Northern Pacific, notably, did not join. 

The two Hill lines members o...

From time to time in this blog, I’ve mentioned writing by railroaders, especially ones that convey what the jobs were really like. A favorite railroader author, Linda Niemann, stated that you don’t really understand the work until you’re passing signals down a long yard to the switch engine with a hand lantern at 2 AM under a steady rain. (For more about her and her work, see...