GBW 7080 - Part #1

This and successive postings of this title will follow the project to convert this 2-rail Atlas Trainman model of a ACF 50' boxcar lettered for the Green Bay & Western into a Proto:48 model.

The prototype is a lot (#11-06860) of 150 50' boxcar built in June 1979 by ACF Industries.
(Transcribed ORER data at the previous link is courtesy of the Green Bay & Western Historical Society).

They were used in general service and lacked any special equipment for one of GBW's signature traffic lanes: finished rolled paper.  However, quite a few other products were generated in their service area, so I should have no trouble determining a suitable lading for this car while in service on the Fairgrounds Branch.

I've only been able to find photos of these cars after they'd left GBW ownership; many were transferred to short lines, including these four that went to Hartford & Slocumb:

• HS 6474
• HS 6475
• HS 6482
• HS 6483

Serveral other photos of adjacent car series are also available: See this reference photo and the one included below as examples of the ones built by Evans-SIECO.

The 74xx cars were slightly more populous (200 cars in the lot) and are nearly identical, except for the squared off sill plate.

Proto:48 Conversion
Here's where the fun begins.  There are a few discrepancies between the prototype and the model, most notably the side sill.

Side Sill
Atlas' model appears to be a combination between the various GBW car series in what I could only describe as an attempt to please everyone.  The model has a two-step sill that is full height across the door and the adjacent four panels on either side.  It then steps down for one panel's width and runs about half height for one more panel length.  Along the length of the outermost panel, the sill is gone and the stirrups hang directly from the body there.

The stirrups and lack of sill match the 7450-7649 series car by Evans.  The angled transitions in side sill height match none of the 7xxx series cars, though having two different heights is reminiscent of the 7450-7469 series, except that the extra height reinforcement was limited to the space directly under the door.  I've seen examples of the height transition being both vertical and angled.

The cars in the 7400-7450 series that were constructed around the same time by FMC have a longer side sill reinforcement spanning more of the car length, but the sill runs all the way to the end of the car.

It would be nice if the Atlas model at least represented one of the series correctly and then the recovery process would be limited to decals.  Alas, some styrene and paint will be required to fix this up.

Summarizing the options:

To Series	Positives	Negatives
7000 to 7049	Has the two-step side still	Was built by FMC
7050 to 7199	Was built by ACF Is lettered correctly (lot #, car #, etc.) Has correct size door	Need to build out side still to full length Need to add under door reinforcement
7200 to 7407	Was built by ACF
7450 to 7649	Closest match for sill  at car ends Closest match for stirrups	Model has corner posts Was built by Evans/SIECO Latter half of this series was blue

The build out of the sill to match the 7050-7199 series car appears to actually be a combination of addition and removal.  The model's current 13" side sill seems appropriate for the reinforced portion under the door (based on some crude scaling in a few prototype photos) and would need to be cut down to approximately nine inches on the rest of the car and then extended at that height to the car ends.

This seems like the smallest amount of work, so the target car series will be the one the model intended -- by the manufacturer's car numbering, at least -- the 7050 to 7199 series.

Minor Details
The only other cosmetic upgrades I can see right away would be wire grabs since in this scale, the shadow behind those should be noticeable.  Plus, I already have to make new stirrups anyway.

The model has the newer "black-box" style COTS markings, but I'd have to confirm when this started to appear.  Atlas populated theirs with original dates, so it may very well be correct.  Followup: Seems that this is correct.  Tony Thompson's excellent research on the SP resulted in this rule applicability timeline, and two-panel COTS stencils were required on new cars starting in 1974.

The stenciling has the inside length off (short) by one inch.  ORER data indicates 50'7".

If I get excited, I'll see if there's an easy way to make a thinner lower door track.  Prototype photos show this being considerably thinner and having a shadow against the car than Atlas' representation.

Trucks and Couplers
Based on comparisons to the prototype photos, the trucks themselves look to be correctly size and proportioned.  Atlas' model has rotating end caps on the roller bearings.  Of course, I'll need to narrow the bolsters (planning to use parts from James Lincoln here) and get replacement wheels from Protocraft's selection.  I'll probably also go with the couplers from Protocraft or maybe San Juan Car Company

O Scale Resource Magazine & Korber Models

I found myself at Korber Models website today and while browsing their building kit offerings, noticed that they offer a Quonset hut that will be of use when I get around to building Motor Parts Distributors -- it has a double Quonset hut at the top of the property next to Terrace St.

Some of the detail parts that they offer might also come in handy -- the steel storage tanks and possibly the rooftop water tanks would fit on some of the Fairgrounds Branch buildings.

I didn't just happen to find this site -- I followed it through an advertiser link in the O Scale Resource online magazine that was just released today.  It's free, so if you are into O scale, you have no reason not to subscribe.  Or, for that matter, since it is free, follow along anyway and learn some techniques or information that will likely apply to your chosen scale.

Battenfeld Grease & Oil Company

Updated 22 June 2015 with a few minor details on the company history and inbound commodities.

This installment of the Fairgrounds Branch tour examines the Battenfeld Grease & Oil Company, which was spot #327 on the 1972 Map.  Operations began around 1911 and I found this ad from 1924.

J. R. Battenfeld started the company at 3148 S Roanoke Road, which is actually across the street from the Farigrounds Branch, more on that later.  The company was involved in research into lubricating greases beginning in 1938 through 1940 (the time of the documentation).  At least one of their products was 'Tube-A-Kalk', first manufactured around 1949.  From an article about the owner's house, I learned that they made a lot of grease compounds: "... in 1947, his company was one of the largest U.S. manufacturers of grease and oil. Even during the Depression, the company produced 20 million to 30 million pounds of grease a year and supplied more than 1,000 oil companies ...".  It is unclear if all of that production took place at this location, though I have no reason to suspect otherwise.  30 million pounds is about one railcar's or six truckloads' worth of production every weekday.

A service bulletin for Piper Aircraft published in 1982 listed them as a supplier of a lubricating grease for a fuel plug on their airplanes, which confirms the company was still in business then at that date.

Today, there's a more modern-looking office building on the site with a sign that's not for this company.  City permit data indicates that that a significant remodeling took place in 1986, so the company may have folded or moved on around that time.  Interestingly, there is a company of the same name located in the state of New York that claims incorporation in 1939, however, according to a reputable industry source, the association between these two companies is by name only.

Now, about the difference in building location versus rail spur location.  Battenfeld Grease was served by two local railroads: The Frisco from the Fairgrounds Branch and the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (MKT) Railway from a short spur that diverged from their Rosedale Yard (which, interestingly enough, was captive to the Frisco's mainline; the Katy had trackage rights from Paola, KS into Kansas City).

First a map for orientation:

(Click the map above or this link to the current Google Maps view)

On the map, the upside-down "Y"-shaped green lines in the center are the Katy spur, while the brown "S"-curve at right is the Frisco branch.  Battenfeld's plant was in the area outlined in red and across Roanoke Ave in the blue highlighted area was the tank farm.

I've pieced this together from multiple sources of information:

• A topo map from 1971 revealed details about the Katy spur
• Historic Aerials views from 1959, 1966, and 1969
• This photo of the 1951 flood aftermath; the tank farm is at upper left

As for rail service throughout the years, the track with the tank car spots is busy in the late 1950s, less so in the mid-1960s, and, frankly, looks overgrown with weeds in 1969.  The Katy's rail spur has cars on it in all of these photos, so perhaps their product mix shifted from making greases from raw or bulk material to more of a distribution role.  The tank farm was served by the Frisco and the warehouse / manufacturing area was served by the Katy.  Frisco's spur did include on dock spot in addition to five tank car spots, so maybe smaller quantities were shipped from there or other smaller items were received.  The main inbound commodity would have been "base oil" used to make the various greases.

In any event, I'll plausibly be able to include the tank car spot and / or the edge of the tank farm on the model.  It remains to be seen how active this company was at this location in the latter part of the 1970s.

Elevations

I'm a follower of Ben Brown's blog chronicling the construction of his Maine Central layout and his posting regarding the compromises to fit the prototype into a physically constrained space inspired me to look closer at solving the problem I have with designing the south end of the Fairgrounds Branch where the elevation changes are a signature element of the scene.

In Proto:48 (O scale), grades and vertical dimensions require even more space to accomplish and I'd like to avoid un-prototypical compromises like 5% grades in the process of recreating the Fairgrounds Branch.

First, a review of the prototype:

The red lines are the rails

The blue line running east to west represents a vertical rise to the east in 170 feet

The orange line running north to south represents a vertical rise to the south in approximately 766 feet

The purple line running north to south represents a vertical rise to the north in approximately 867 feet

Using a topographic map available on HistoricAerials.com, I was able to approximately measure elevations at the following points:

Safeway Bakery:	815ft
34th St Lower:	825ft
34th St Upper:	852ft
Wolferman driveway:	840ft
Karnes Blvd:	852ft

That translates into the blue line equaling approximately a 25ft rise, the orange line an approximately 15ft rise, and the purple line an approximately 10ft rise.

Thanks to some dedicated area Frisco modelers, I obtained a set of GPS data points, but it contains some fairly wide variations and I don't know the accuracy of any of the devices.  Arithmetic means should help smooth that out and the addition of the data points read from the topo map paint a reasonable picture. 

Location	GPS Mean	GPS #1	GPS #2	GPS #3	GPS #4	Topo	Mean w/ Topo
34th St Lower	840.00	843	846	841	830	825	837.00
34th St Upper	858.25	873	859	861	840	852	857.00
Wolferman's	852.25	846	856	851	856	840	849.80

Using the mean values including the points from the topographic map results in the following grades:

Segment	Rise	Run	Grade	Notes
34th St Lower to 34th St Upper (blue)	20	170	11.76	Seems OK for a road...
34th St Lower to Wolferman's (orange)	13	766	1.69	Steep enough to roll away...
Wolferman's to 34th St Upper (purple)	13	867	1.49	...better set more handbrakes!

Except that 13ft rises on each rail leg doesn't align with only a 20ft rise on the road leg, so that one is actually 15.29% when a 26ft rise is used.

There's another spur serving Southwestern Bell Telephone and U.S. Engineering (not shown on map above) that I'll probably just keep even with the lower 34th St crossing elevation.  There will still be plenty of visual contrast and operational challenge as the "main line" of the branch rises behind it to climb to Wolferman's.

With at least the relative difference between these elevations reasonably figured I can continue with the track planning process.  It remains to be seen how much I will have to steepen these grades to compress the model length-wise into available space.   Stay tuned...

Prototype Rail

As mentioned recently, I was able to visit the Fairgrounds Branch in early April 2015, even if only briefly and at night.  After a short tour of the line again, I stopped near the still-active northern portion to check off two pending research items:

• Switch numbers
• Rail size

For the first, I paced out one of the switch and found the tip of the diverging rails in the frog to be eight size 13 shoes away from one size 13 shoe perpendicular between the diverging rails.  A bit crude, but we modelers have to work with the available tools.

For the latter, I took some pictures of the side of the rail as show below:

The pictures -- admittedly grainy cell phone ones in low light -- have rail markings of "ASCE 9040" on them.

A third picture shows a date of "1919", making this track nearly 100 years old and still in service.  I suspect it has not been located here that entire time, having most likely been used new on a mainline track somewhere and then re-laid here as the original Fairgrounds branch rail wore out and this rail had outlived its service life on the main line.

However, now I was left with a quandary...What exactly does "ASCE 9040" mean?  My first rough guess was that it probably meant that it was 90lbs/yd rail, but I wasn't sure about the "40" part.

Fortunately, I follow Chris Mears' Prince Street blog, and in a recent posting, he was musing about an idea to catalog the various types of track as a reference for model railroaders.  In the same vein as Railpictures.net, I'd say that's a great idea.  Prototype photos are the best resource and realistic track weathering is one of my top priorities as well.   Chris' idea generated some comments on his blog, one of which was a link to a rail-markings database of sorts.

Sure enough, "ASCE 9040" is in that table and reprinted here for completeness and archive purposes:

Weight (lbs/yd)		Height (inches)		Width of base (inches)		Width of head (inches)		Type
90		5   3/8		5   3/8		2   5/8		ASCE 9040 1940

Coupling that data with another reference site serving all of the major scales, and I've now learned that I need approximately code 117 rail to accurately depict the Fairgrounds Branch in miniature.

So, in short, while I was only able to manage a short trip, I was able to check off two particular prototype details and heavily influence design and early construction.

It's Alive!

Well, the real thing anyway.   Sorry, no modeling progress to report as one might expect.   I had the opportunity to be in Kansas City in early April and, naturally, squeezed in a visit to the spur.  To my delight, I discovered that it is still in use, serving Schutte Lumber.  This car spot is all that's left of the Fairgrounds Branch in the modern day.  My apologies for the grainy cell-phone photo-at-a-distance, but any photo is better than one not taken.

New Page

I recently added a new top-level page to the blog as a starting point for prototype information, chief among them, the location of this industrial spur in the larger world.