Reefer Colors in the Acrylic Era

Finding the right color for freight car can be a real pain, and I'm not talking about the intricacies about boxcar red.

One of the worst color for me so far as been to find a correct orange reefer in acrylics. I've looked at many conversion charts and I'm certainly full of doubts, particularly for FGE and SFRD refrigerators cars of my era (late 40s-early 50s). While I've seen paint labelled as Orange Reefer, many modellers aren't convinced of their accuracy.

Actual pictures show us FGE reefers were kind of light orange closer to a dark harvest yellow than pumpkin orange. The same could be said about SFRD cars, which always have a kind of yellowish color though it seems FGE and SFRF had their own specific paint color.

Among suggested color, Microscale suggest Gunze Sangyo #109 Character Yellow as a substitute for Floquil PFE LightOrange. They even suggest Humbrol #18 Orange, which is quite a saturated orange shade a little bit over the top for SFRD reefers.

While many manufacturers now offer "Reefer Orange", I'm not that much inclined in testing a few of them only to be disappointed. Not all reefers were born equal and I'm pretty sure painting these cars is much more than just spraying some random stuff out of the bottle.

Thus, if anybody have suggestion on acrylic paints that can be airbrushed and suitable for FGE and SFRD car, feel free to comment. In the past, I wouldn't have minded and mixed my own custom color. However, as I'm building several cars at different moment, I'm not eager to have huge discrepancies among the fleet.

Edit: Reading again articles by Tony Thompson and others, it seems SP Daylight Orange would be a close match for PFE Light Orange reefers. Only need to find a correct color for the SFRD cars.

Kitbashing Erie 37500 Series Gondola - Part 2

Everyday we learn a new thing – at least we should – and modelling is probably a good teacher in that regard. While working on my pair of Erie 37500 series gondola I got a lesson where I expected it the less.

As a starting point, I’m using the old Roundhouse 40ft gondola. Some will object it’s a crude model by today’s standards but details are crisp and the number of panel fit the Erie prototype I’m trying to replicate. Certainly, there are some discrepancies in length, but this high side gondola fits decently the bill. My approach is to make it more credible by installing wire iron grabs, A-line metal stirrups, improving the braking gear, replacing the trucks, thinning down some section profiles and redetailing the bare interior. In short, it’s a typical rolling stock improvement project that should take a few evenings to complete at a leisure pace.

The problem arose when I made a new steel deck with hand-punched rivet details. I was quite proud of my work and thus decided to glue it on the bottom of the gondola. My first idea was to simply secure the bottom with a few drops of CA glue, however, the rivet punch process slightly warped the thin styrene sheet and I was afraid this could impeded the bond. Thus, I decided to simply brush a generous amount of solvent-based glue on the gondola and cement permanently the new deck. At this point, all was fine.

However, on the next evening, I found out the car sides had badly warped toward the interior and by a large margin. Using my hand, I carefully pressed the warped parts outward by applying a certain amount of force. I thought the sides were affected by the glue bond at the perimeter of the new deck… But imagine my surprise when the next day, the car sides were once again badly curving inside. Not only that, but now the deck itself was sagging the middle. It didn’t take long to find out the problem. The gondola bottom had warped significantly due to the solvent used to cement the new deck. When I installed the metal underframe, it no longer sat on the plastic shell but rocked on the curved bottom impeding the trucks movements. Big problem!!!

What happened was a simple and well-known phenomenon. When laminating two different materials, they have a tendency to warp when both have different characteristics. Generally, the process takes some time and is gradual. In my case, the generous use of solvent softened the plastic to the point that when materials hardened and cured in the following hours, their different rates of contraction created a disaster. The result was predictable to some extent, but little did I know a 1 mm bulge would manifest itself in such a spectacular way.

At this point, I was able to straighten the gondola sides. However, the only practical solution to repair the warped bottom - which should be better described as a belly - was to shave down the bulge with a chisel. It surprisingly went well, but it certainly didn’t address how badly warped the steel deck look. If it was a wooden gondola, I wouldn’t care since these cars were generally badly warped and sagging in old pictures. Unfortunately, steel cars generally keep their shape better.

From there, I had two options: try to fix up the deformation or simply cutoff the car bottom and replace it with a brand new one. In both case, it was a question of releasing the built up stress in the plastic. While at first I was leaning toward a full reconstruction, my long experience with resin figure garage kits kicked in. I plugged the hairdryer, set it to maximum heat, and applied evenly the hot hair on the car. I made sure to soften the plastic until it was malleable but was carafully enough so details start to molten. I didn't keep track of time, but it was less than a minute. When the car was soft enough to be reshape, I put it bottom up on a flat surface and gently pressed down the belly uniformally. When the shape was restored, I kept pressure until the plastic hardened again. As expected, the gondola sides straighened and the bulge disappeared once for all.

24 hours later, both cars were still keeping their shape thus I resumed the redetailing process. I was also a good occasion to address will laziness toward molded on ladders. At first, I'd planned to remove them, then decided to keep the ladder and save myself a tedious task. But after all the effort put on the cars, it was silly to still keep clunky ladders. I heard the voice of reason, took my chisel blade and scrapped off the unwanted details.

While I was able to repair my horrible mistake, I've learned my lesson. Next time I face a similar challenge, I will superficially glue the new deck with non-solvent based cement to eliminate altogether the risk of warping. I’m certainly not proud of myself for what initially seemed to be a well done job. Once again the old rule applies: use as little glue as needed. 

For some reason, we have a tendency to believe styrene is a stable material compared to wood or cardboard, but this is far to be true. Styrene (and other plastics) is surprisingly  vulnerable to warping and I've seen more than my share of projects going awry in a matter of days or weeks.

But enough about mistakes... The rest of the project was relatively straight forward, involving a new Accurail gondola brake apparatus, retainer valve and details from Tichy and a Kadee brakewheel. I went as far as adding the fulcrum and installing a bracket for a cut lever. Also, riveted steel straps were added inside the wall of the car as it did exist on some gondola. It was to reinforce the impression this is a real steel car and not a one piece injection-molded shell.

The goal is simple, these cars, even if they are prototypically accurate should at least have the same level of detail as a Proto 2000 or an Intermountain car. My reasoning being discrepancies in details are much more noticeable than overall accuracy. The model should look like a real car and have the basic features. From that point on, sky is the limit.

Kitbashing Erie 37500 Series Gondola

An so the endless waltz of car roster improvements starts with two old gondola to be bashed as close as possible to Erie prototypes. The idea is not to make exact replica, but to put enough efforts so the models can be credible. I've bought sets of dry transfer from Clover House suitable for Erie 37500 series. These cars were initially built as drop bottom gondolas until they were later rebuilt with fixed floor. While I've been lucky enough to find as built picture of Erie cars, my search for rebuilt car wasn't rewarded by any significant results. For more information, Ronald Dukarm wrote a short but informative story about these cars on railfan.net.

For this reason, I ask any reader that can point me decent sources of information about these particular cars to contact me. Many books and publications about Erie cars have been released over the years, but sometimes, it can be quite hard to find out particular prototypes when you have very little information about them except length, road numbers and sparse details.

In fact, I'll have to build (or rebuild) many boxcars and gondolas following Erie practices. Thus, I'm quite open to acquire relevant books/magazines on these subjects. However, I'm not that much familiar with Erie and would prefer to purchase books based on educated suggestions. Factual data over nostalgic books would be better. For the boxcars, Don Hanley's excellent series of articles in Model Railroad Hobbyist back in 2013 is an excellent starting point. I certainly would love to have better information on gondolas.

JMRI Operations & Car Roster

I finally succeeded in tweaking JMRI Operation until I got what I wanted. Until now, I got LCL cars playing ping pong all over the layout and unable to go back to staging. As expected, it quickly clogged layout spots. The answer what rather simple. Since I wanted to receive LCL but also send LCL, I originally created a single commodity called "LCL". Sounds logical... Many spurs were scheduled to receive and ship such commodity. But as expected, when a car was loaded it was routed to the nearest available spot, thus on the layout instead of the far away destination in the staging area. It was a disaster in the making, the endless waltz of cars shuffling around the place forever started.

To address this issue, I simply created a LCL-IN load for inbound traffic and LCL-OUT load for outbound stuff. The car swapping ended since going to staging was the most logical (and short) way to handle the loads and empties. A human brain is able to tell LCL is going in and going out, but that must be explained flat out to the software

Another problem emerged as a result of saturating the layout with incoming cars. This was due to the inbound traffic being set using the Walthers carfloat maximum capacity which is well over sixteen 40ft cars. That's a lot of traffic for a small crowded terminal and soon enough, the place overflowed with cars. JMRI - even if it was against it's own scheduling rules - had to route cars back to staging. Since the staging spurs weren't designed to accept such loads, the cars stayed stranded forever on the carfloat (acting as a yard) searching forever for a spot that didn't even exist and slowly but surely reducing the carfloat capacity to bring new cars in and get others out. Just like a Tetris game going wrong, the layout was destined to be game over in a matter of time.

However, the solution was once again very simple. I found out Harlem Station was served - most of the time - by platform carfloats. These special carfloats have a platform in place of the central track. This implement is generally used to unload cars directly on the platform which is linked by a sliding ramp to a pier or a warehouse (look at "Pier Platform" in the glossary). This is particularly useful when cars are bound to a non rail-served marine terminal. Why Erie did use the platform carfloats to serve Harlem Station is a mystery, but I guess they had them and it was handy at that time.

But that type of carfloat plays to my advantage: the number of incoming car is reduced to 12 cars maximum. Given most pictures and statistics show an average of 6 to 8 car was typical, I changed JMRI so the longest train is made out of 12 cars. Also, I made sure to set a random value in such a way the number of incoming cars varies and is generally around 8 cars.

Finally, I better assigned customers' and storage spurs following what I could understand from old pictures and historic sources. It certainly isn't 100% accurate, but it is a fair enough approximation of the real thing. Moreover, with less but better routed cars, I got rid of the loaded cars stranded on the carfloat. Now, every car is routed correctly to its scheduled destination and goes back to staging as it should be.

Given this is my first serious effort using JMRI, I'm quite happy to have reached a decent level of proficiency in less than 4 days. Certainly, this is enough for a small switching layout, but I'm well aware I could go further with it, taking in account the days of the week and cargo-specific conditions. This will be done in due time though I already made some adjustments that brings life and unexpected events.

On another hand, JMRI made me understand how much a small car fleet (about 60 cars) can get repetitive with a 55 cars layout capacity. As I said in my previous post, this is getting quite boring fast and it disrupts completely the suspension of disbelief. For this reason, I tracked down parts and decals to complete or kitbash cars in my collection that had no purpose. I'll probably be able to add about 11 new reefers and I still have decals to build more Erie boxcars. In itself it doesn't bother me since bashing and improving rolling stock is always a nice way to spend time in a creative way.

Until then, the next step is to clean out the rails and wheels for flawless operation and experiment first hand with the new switchlist. Jérôme is already working out the mechanical aspect of the fleet including trucks, wheels and coupler height. It seems I did a poor job protecting the wheelsets from over spray and it quickly gunked the rail leading to poor electrical pickup. Lesson learned!

Setting Up JMRI & New Discoveries

Work on Harlem Station recently resumed. I’m mainly motivated in finally implementing JMRI Operations on this layout to create automated switch lists. While the learning curve is quite steep, the software itself has a lot of potential, particularly for such a terminal.

Setting up a credible operating plan isn’t as easy as one could think even if this layout is rather small. It is quite a busy place and space is at premium. It quickly becomes a real issue when you run a few passes with JMRI and see how the car moves on the property.

As a matter of fact, most of you know I set the layout date to 1952. It is mainly based on information found in an article about Harlem Station that ran in Erie Railroad Magazine that specific year. It provides a list of customers and commodities handled by the terminal, which is premium information to start building a decent switch list.

But nothing is ever simple or straight forward with Harlem Station and I’m still struggling with the track plan even if I’m studying this terminal since 2010 (it’s been 7 years!). Erie Railroad Magazine mention there is 10 sidings for a total of 55 cars that can be handled. But on my layout, I’ve got about 13 sidings that can hold more than that. What’s the problem? Where did I mess up?

The answer is simple, but finding it required to study a lot of old pictures, most of them bad reproductions of printed material. To booth, some parts of the yard are seldom photographed, probably due to accessibility and the fact most photographers prefer to shoot locomotives. Add to that the fact I’ve never been in New York of my life, the prototype no longer exist and I’m stuck with limited access to primary and secondary sources… no wonder it’s so hard to piece up the puzzle.

Let’s identify every siding on the layout with a number in order of succession from the car float pontoon to the yard lead:

01 - Short coal siding near the pier and parallel to East 149^th Street

02 - Short siding to the pier on Harlem River

03 - Long siding parallel to the car float

04 - Long siding to the concrete loading ramp

05 - Long siding superposed to the freight shed/thawing shed up to the concrete loading ramp

06 - Siding #1 to gantry crane

07 - Siding #2 to gantry crane

08 - Siding #3 to gantry crane

09 - Very short siding parallel to Exterior Street

10 - Long siding parallel to Exterior Street

11 - Siding #1 to freight house

12 - Siding #2 to freight house

13 - Long siding between Freight House and gantry crane

Then let’s clarify some things about the different structures at Harlem Station. From now on I’ll call “Freight House” the large brick and concrete structure standing near Exterior Street. This is the office and it acts as the defacto “station”. The gantry crane was standing on the property, on the same spot, from day one until the terminal closed down under Erie Lackawanna tenure. The concrete loading ramp also seems to have been there since the beginning too.

Now, let’s tackle the freight shed/thawing shed issue. This is the long wood structure built by the concrete ramp and a lot of speculation exists about it. Without much fanfare, here are my findings. Reminder: please bear in mind most historic Harlem Station pictures aren’t in the public domain and by respect to their owner, I won’t publish anything. This freight shed is not an original building. On pictures shot in 1929 and 1932, even if not clear, the shed doesn’t show up. In the 1932 one, it is particularly clear two sidings run parallel up to the concrete ramp (sidings #04 and #05. My layout is based on that design and while not very accurate, the 1928 Sanborn Map do show the big freight house, the pontoon and what seem to be a structure over siding #09 (I wouldn’t be surprised this short siding used to be an engine house similar to the one standing at the adjacent CNJ Bronx Terminal.) However, no trace of the long freight shed which would have caught attention of people surveying the area.

The next piece of evidence is the 1942 Bromley Map which clearly depict the long freight shed built over what used to be siding #05. In fact, that siding is still – partially? – in place and run up to the shed wall. The next photo evidences are from circa 1951. At that point, we have relatively good shots of the shed.  While we can clearly see the turnout leading to siding #05 is still in place, there is not enough space to spot a car in front of the shed. Interestingly, a large pair of door exists on the end wall has if cars could have been shoved into the building. This is probably what lead peoples to propose – as an unverified hypothesis – it could have been a thawing shed for coal hoppers. While this idea would be great and logical, this is not my conclusion after carefully analyzing the architectural feature of that structure.

It must be noted the end doors, while sufficiently tall to clear a freight car, aren’t large enough. Also, some 1950s pictures clearly show a wooden platform serving that door with delivery trucks. This is further confirmed by the presence of a floor inside the structure. If I could describe it better, I’d say the freight shed was built over a wood platform erected on concrete bases. The presence of that platform or floor can be attested on every picture showing the freight shed. Thus, it would have been impossible to shove cars inside the structure. Finally, on some picture, it is clear siding #05 is buried in dirt and used by trucks to access the freight shed loading dock. All these evidences – combined with the fact the shed bear very little architectural resemblance to real thawing shed – proves it was a freight shed probably built to supplement lack of storage space at Harlem Station. It seems sacrificing a siding was less important than getting additional warehousing capacity. Thus, it is not a mystery this structure disappeared circa 1957 when the freight house was substantially enlarged. Since many sidings were removed at that time and the wooden freight shed was redundant, siding #05 was put back in service again.

Now, some people will ask what happened with siding #05 when the freight shed was built. My educated guess is the siding was left there and the structure built over it. There was little incentive to remove the track and maps and photos all agree the turnout and rails were still in place when the freight shed was still standing. This is interesting because it could indicate the freight shed was a temporary measure and Erie didn’t thought it was required to remove the track since they could be used later. It should also be noted the freight shed was quite a hastily-built structure clearly not made to last a long time.

But how all that new information impact the layout is interesting because it helps to understand the discrepancies between Erie Railroad Magazine description and my track plan. So let’s see things through new lenses.

Clearly, the sidings referenced by the 1952 article could be #01, #02, #03, #04, #06, #07, #08, #10, #11, #12 and #13. But that brings the count up to 11. Certainly #05 didn’t count since it was buried under the freight shed and unserviceable at that time. #09 was very short and all photographic evidences (including aerial photos) show this track was not accessible by road vehicle (no concrete pad, no dirt road and no grade crossing). It seems it was only used as an extra off spot car storage (some pictures show a car spotted there), maybe still used as an engine track from time to time. Unfortunately, is it hard to tell what was the last siding omitted. All of the remaining ones were actives and used to load and unload cars. My first idea was that one of the very short sidings at the pier (#01 and #02) was omitted. But both had a road access and were in use. Even the shortest one did hold two hopper cars for Miranda Coal. Could siding #01 have been only a storage track for Miranda since it would have been hard to unload a car there into a truck? I can’t tell, but on aerial photographs, there is a hint of a small concrete pad build against 149^th Street retaining wall. Anyway, there is no trace of coal handling at siding #02, confirming that commodity was unloaded on siding #01.

Then could it be that siding #02 was used only to hold extra cars even if it was perfectly accessible by truck? It could be. After all, a 1957 photo shows a loaded PRR coal hopper left there but in a spot that couldn’t be used for unloading purpose. Also, cars are seldom seen spotted on siding #02. A set of picture shot there in 1951 show a boxcar on the pier while the locomotive is picking up and setting out cars on the car float while a color picture from 1955 show a flatcar hastily left on the siding in similar conditions. This brings me to think this track could have been used as extra space when sorting out cars. It is perfectly located for the task and can be used to store extra cars the rest of the time. It would have been really handy and if required, it could have been used as an extra spot on demand.

Thus, I can now affirm with a decent level of certainty the ten sidings used by customers (this precision is critical) back in 1952 were #01, #03, #04, #06, #07, #08, #10, #11, #12 and #13. Erie Railroad Magazine mentioned the terminal could handle 55 cars at once which, incidentally, is exactly the capacity JMRI computed for my layout. This, I feel, is a great achievement.

Thus, I reach the conclusion of my research. Certainly I could go further, but the hours invested wouldn’t probably pay off in term of enjoyment. The layout is as accurate as can be with the data I can reasonable gather. At this point, continuing the search would divert resources, time and money that would better be invested directly on the layout. Such efforts would be to scratchbuild the freight shed and modify (or replace) the Walthers car float so it has only 2 tracks and a center platform as it used to be the rule on Harlem River. This would bring the maximum of cars brought to the terminal at 12.

According to 1951 Erie statistics, about 1800-1900 cars were handled that year. With a 6-day per week schedule, it would be an average of 6 cars per day, which is consistent with period photographs which show about 6 to 7 cars on the float. Doing so would reduce the exhausting workload generated by JMRI (16 cars per carfloat) and help alleviate the layout saturation with cars. This little detail as caused many car routing issues due to the impossibility to find open spot. And we must keep in mind that with an average of 32 moves per sessions, at about 3 minutes per move, operating the layout can take over 90 minutes which seems to be a little bit over the top if it happens to often. On the other hand, an average of 6 cars brings the session length to a comfortable 35 to 45 minutes, which I consider optimal to ensure the crew isn’t exhausted and isn’t bothered taking time to operate as prototypically as possible.

Finally, another aspect that JMRI brought forward was how often cars come back on the layout even with more than 60 cars on the roster. It became almost a joke after building several virtual trains. At some point, many cars were in and out at every session to the point suspension of disbelief was no longer working. It means three things: bringing the number of car per train lower will reduce the need to feed cars onto the layout, fine tuning the schedules will be required so cars won’t magically appear the next session when they should be traveling thousands of miles  and the roster will need to be buffed up. This last item isn’t truly an issue since I have many cars in my stash that could make great modelling projects. The diversity of rolling stock handled by terminal such as Harlem Station is also a great opportunity to learn better about railroading all over North America.

By the way, I’d like to point out I’ve been using OPSIG customers lists [ML1] to bring life to my layout by using real life customers for the layout. It certainly isn’t required, but felt it brought a sense of purpose to the layout. Isn’t it great to know that specific reefer is loaded with Carnation Milk from that plant or this Bronx based waste paper broker sell is stuff to a large paper mill in upstate NY? No need to go in great details, but knowing a few real customers of Harlem Station, the commodities handled and the roadname of cars seen on photographs really helped to shape a credible and immersing world.