Mike Brock wrote:

....I'm also curious about bauxite. There are photos of
a bauxite train...loaded in box cars no less...going west over Sherman Hill
in the 50s. Wonder what its destination was and how often this happened?

Mike, in the 1950s some Bauxite was mined in the southeastern US, but the
most important source was Jamaica, with Jamaican Bauxite being transported
by ship to Gulf Coast ports. During WW II, when there was a tremendous
increase in demand for aluminum, primarily for use in aircraft
construction, several large plants were constructed in the Pacific
Northwest because ample hydroelectric power was available and the
production of aluminum requires a great deal of electricity. No doubt
bauxite trains bringing southeastern and Jamaican ore to the plants near
the Columbia River ran fairly frequently on the UP, which would have
provided the western part of the most direct route.

Richard H. Hendrickson
Ashland, Oregon 97520

I'm also curious about bauxite. There are photos of
a bauxite train...loaded in box cars no less...going west over Sherman Hill
in the 50s. Wonder what its destination was and how often this happened?

Mike Brock

Major aluminum plants were constructed on the Columbia River ( near The
Dalles for one) to support WWII aircraft production...lots of electricity
required

Dave Nelson writes:

Samples: 68% of sugar beets travelled less than 50 miles. 60% of frozen
fruit travelled 2000-2999 miles. 41% of coal went 200-399 miles. 33% of
beer went 600-999 miles. etc.

Dave, I'm curious. Any notion of whether the coal mileage was higher or

lower for the other 59%? I'm also curious about bauxite. There are photos of
a bauxite train...loaded in box cars no less...going west over Sherman Hill
in the 50s. Wonder what its destination was and how often this happened?

Mike Brock

Fer instance, Bannanas: some small quantities into NJ. and CA.

There were PFE cars dedicated to this service (That is, labelled "Banana
Service") between L.A. Harbor and Vernon, a tiny industrial city near the
southeast corner of central Los Angeles.

Jeff English wrote (defensively):

AFAIK, the only NY wineries that bring in CA wine are the
larger corporate operations such as Taylor. There is a
considerable wine industry in four regions* of NY which consists
primarily of small, family-operated wineries that produce estate-
bottled wines of varieties that lend themselves to the climatic
conditions. If you can look that far down your nose, Richard, you
might actually find some of these acceptable if not wildly fabulous.

Been there, done that. Some are, indeed, acceptable (barely). And, as I
certainly haven't had the opportunity to try all of them, it's entirely
possible that there are a few real gems I don't know about. In my
admittedly limited experience, however, I have been singularly unimpressed
with New York State wines. Though fine wines are produced in many regions
of the world (e.g., Australia, New Zealand, Chile, as well as Europe and
parts of California and the Pacific Northwest), the fact that wine grapes
will grow in upstate New York, Southern Ontario, Virginia, etc. doesn't
mean that it's possible to make good wines with them. I might add that
some very bad wines are made in California, and not all of them are cheap
wines in boxes or jugs. But the fact remains that, owing to certain
combinations of soil and climate, some growing areas on the West Coast
produce wines that are vastly superior to those made anywhere else in North
America. That could certainly change. Twenty years ago, I wouldn't have
expected much from eastern Washington or the Willamette Valley, but they
are now producing some excellent wines of several varieties. However,
they've been making wine in New York for several generations with results
that don't live up to their sometimes rather pretentious hype. No
reflection on the Empire State, which has a great many other virtues to
recommend it, but wine is really not, in my opinion, one of them - though
I'm open to being proven wrong.

Richard H. Hendrickson
Ashland, Oregon 97520

Thought I'd add a description of the material I was working with yesterday
at Stanford:

1) Carload Waybill Analysis, 1950 - State to state distribution of Products
of Forests.
2) Carload Waybill Analysis, 1950 - State to state distribution of Products
of Agriculture.
3) Carload Waybill Analysis, 1950 - State to state distribution of Products
of Manufacturers.
4) Carload Waybill Analysis, 1950 - State to state distribution of Products
of Animals.

I copied #1 and #4 fully, got most of #2, and sampled #3 (e.g., auto
industry commodities)

The contents of these 4 follow the same pattern: state-to-state movement,
carloads, tons, revenue, ton miles, car miles, and several averages from the
above. The order is by commodity class, then originating state. All data
is based on the 1% waybill sample, so many of the numbers are small.

Fer instance, Bannanas: I had always assumed they all came thru LA. (the
port of New Orleans). Not so. Both AL. (Mobile) and MD. (Baltimore) were
likely ports as well, and some small quantities into NJ. and CA. Most LA.
originated bannanas went to IL. (no surprise), but there were no indications
of movements out of IL. to other states suggesting there was no warehousing
of this fruit for later distribution (we Illini must love our bannanas).

I wanted Forwarder and LCL traffic, but these were the last 2 pages and have
been torn off and lost.


5) Carload Waybill Analysis, 1949 - Percentage distribution of tonnage by
milage block.

This one is a simple list of all 220+ commodities citing total tons measured
by the 1% sample and calculating what percentage of those travelled in each
of the 10 mileage blocks (e.g., 0-49 miles, 50-99, 100-199, etc.).

Samples: 68% of sugar beets travelled less than 50 miles. 60% of frozen
fruit travelled 2000-2999 miles. 41% of coal went 200-399 miles. 33% of
beer went 600-999 miles. etc.


6) Carload Waybill Analysis, 1950 - Quarterly seasonal comparisons from
1947, 48, 49, 50.

Again, all 220+ commodity classes having calendar quarter data for carloads,
tonnage, average mileage and revenue, for each of the 4 years cited.

Absent exact seasonality data from an individual railroad, this will form
the basis for any seasonality adjustments that could be applied to annual
commodity reports -- the data I posted for Jeff English on the Rutland.


7) Tons of revenue freight terminated...[by state], 1st Quarter 1950.

This is the total tonnage, not the 1% sample, of each commodity, as
originated and terminated by state.

So, in 1Q1950, 27585 tons of bannanas originated in Alabama, 0 tons
originated, 21072 tons terminated in Illinois. 64891 tons originated in
Loiusiana. 23041 tons originated in Maryland. Etc.

Unfortunately I ran out of coins before I could get the other 3 quarters of
data. Some other trip no doubt. And were I to obtain a couple of years of
data, the utility of item 6, above, might diminish being replaced by
seasonal data from this source.

and lastly:


8) Tons of Revenue Freight for each class 1 railroad... 1948.

As shown in the first sheet of the file I put out on egroups. I did the
Rutland and the Sac Northern. I had intended on filling out my 1950 data (I
have all the central west roads, plus one or two others), but the book had
gone walkabout so there I with time and money and no first target and all
that other neat stuff....

-----------------------------------
Dave Nelson

Jeff,

Perhaps New York wine no longer moves by rail today (or even much
California wine for that matter, except perhaps from mega-producers like
Gallo), but at one time Taylor and Great Western did a lot of business
by rail. The Bath & Hammondsport wasn't known as "The Champagne Trail"
for nothing. Long ago MODEL RAILROADER did a feature on the B&H for one
of their "railroads you can model" books. It makes interesting reading,
and has some data that would be useful in understanding how wineries in
general used railroads to make and ship their products in the past. And
after all, this group is largely about the past, isn't it?

We're getting pretty far afield here, but at one time Brookside Winery
(in Southern California's Cucamonga area) had an extensive rail system
between their vineyards and the winery. They owned a really charming
Baldwin 0-4-0T in the 10-ton range. The locomotive is long gone, as is
the railroad, but they used to proudly display a photo of it in their
tasting room.

Kind regards,


Garth G. Groff


Jeff English wrote:

Richard Hendrickson <rhendrickson@opendoor.com> wrote:

Small quantities of Calif. wine are still
shipped in bulk to some east coast wineries, notably in upstate New York
where (despite all the promotional hype for Finger Lakes wines) the summer
is too short to bring up the sugar in the grapes so their wines are
blended with California wines to make them palatable.

AFAIK, the only NY wineries that bring in CA wine are the
larger corporate operations such as Taylor. There is a
considerable wine industry in four regions* of NY which consists
primarily of small, family-operated wineries that produce estate-
bottled wines of varieties that lend themselves to the climatic
conditions. If you can look that far down your nose, Richard, you
might actually find some of these acceptable if not wildly fabulous.
Unfortunately for freight car content, probably none of this NY
wine ever moves by rail, unless in individual shipments in UPS
trailers on intermodal flat cars.

* In addition to the Finger Lakes (where Taylor got their start, and
Walter S. #$&^*^ still makes wine in his interpretation of that
family's tradition, under the Bully Hill label), the other regions of NY
that are known for producing good, award-winning wines are Long
Island, the Hudson Valley and Chautauqua (shore of Lake Erie).


---------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff English Troy, New York
Proto:64 Classic Era Railroad Modeling
englij@rpi.edu

| R U T L A N D R A I L R O A D |
Route of the Whippet
---------------------------------------------------------------

"Dave & Libby Nelson" <muskoka@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

As a favor to Jeff English, I included the Rutland data . . .
. . . and posted it to the files list here at egroups.

Thank you.

As I know nothing of the Rutland I can't say if anything in the data is a
surprise. Jeff, what say you?

Um, I'll let you know when I find some time to study it.
Besides the holiday busy times, for the last couple of days my ISP
seems to be unable to maintain a connection longer than what it
takes to exchange about 75KB of data per login, which is rather
odd. In any case, due to this problem I haven't even been able to
download the data yet.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff English Troy, New York
Proto:64 Classic Era Railroad Modeling
englij@rpi.edu

| R U T L A N D R A I L R O A D |
Route of the Whippet
---------------------------------------------------------------

As a favor to Jeff English, I included the Rutland data in some copying I
did this afternoon -- transfered it to my standard excel format for this
kind of data and posted it to the files list here at egroups.

There are 5 worksheets:
- Commodity data as reported to the ICC
- Computed commodity carloadings by movement type
- A paretto list of commodity carloads for originated movements
- A paretto list of commodity carloads for terminated movements
- A paretto list of commodity carloads for bridge movements

There are only two assumptions present in the data:
- I have assumed LCL tonnage per car as 5 tons, which seems to correspond
well enough to AAR data.
- I have assumed tons/per car remains constant w/o regard to movement type
(i.e., same tonnage for bridge movement as inbound).

As I know nothing of the Rutland I can't say if anything in the data is a
surprise. Jeff, what say you?

Enjoy.

-----------------------------------
Dave Nelson

Hello,

This email message is a notification to let you know that
a file has been uploaded to the Files area of the STMFC
group.

File : /Rutland1950.xls
Uploaded by : muskoka@ix.netcom.com
Description : ICC Commodity Stats from 1950 for the Rutland

You can access this file at the URL

http://www.egroups.com/files/STMFC/Rutland1950%2Exls

To learn more about eGroups file sharing, please visit

http://www.egroups.com/help/files.html


Regards,

muskoka@ix.netcom.com

You guys might know what the ORIGINAL scheme was, prior to WWII, but I
don't. MDC offers their SS 40 foot
7 panel Pratt truss car in an overnight black scheme, and while I know the
car itself is too tall, wrong ends, roof, etc., the SP did have 7 panel
Pratt truss box cars. So hard do we laugh at this version?
(Reminds me of the hard times we Rutland modelers used to face, when Karline
did a "Route of the Whippet" scheme on an Athearn steel box car and
Train-Miniature did a green and yellow scheme on their wood box car, and
while neither car is that close to what the Rutland had, the Whippet scheme
should be on a wood car and the green and yellow on a steel (PS-1)). - John

Richard Hendrickson wrote:

That's correct, John. The original black overnight paint scheme was
applied to B-50-24 class cars in the 97620-98069 series...

Richard forgets what I know he is well acquainted with: the ORIGINAL
scheme for the Overnight cars was all black with orange lettering and
striping, used before WW II.

Quibble, quibble. Of COURSE I know what the "original" overnight scheme
was, but it was never applied to B-50-24s. My point was to differentiate
the original scheme applied to those cars from the later aluminum paint
scheme.

Richard H. Hendrickson
Ashland, Oregon 97520

Richard Hendrickson wrote:

That's correct, John. The original black overnight paint scheme was
applied to B-50-24 class cars in the 97620-98069 series...

Richard forgets what I know he is well acquainted with: the ORIGINAL
scheme for the Overnight cars was all black with orange lettering and
striping, used before WW II.

I understand that's what T. Thomspon intends to
do if he ever gets what's left of his Coast Line layout reincarnated in his
attic in Berkeley. FWIW, the overnight cars weren't supposed to go
off-line, so they'd be out of place on any layout that didn't model the SP
Coast Line (though there is a well known M. D. McCarter photo of a nearly
new one at Peru, IN, so obviously there were occasional exceptions).

Hmmm. It may be a race whether it's Richard or me who first hosts an
operating session on his new layout. But until that happens, I would
classify comments such as these as pure speculation.
And the operative word in Richard's comment about off-line service is
"supposed," since clearly that wasn't always true.

Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2942 Linden Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 http://www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, thompson@signaturepress.com
Publishers of books on railroads and on Western history

"Stafford F. Swain" <sswain@TOTAL.NET> wrote:

This early 1940s timing of shifting painting open top cars from black to a
freight car red coincides pretty tightly with the CNR's dates of doing
exactly the same thing to the same groups of cars. Could this be a
wartime supply issue??

Indeed, the conventional wisdom among modern-day followers
of the NYC is that this was a wartime economy move. Black
returned to NYC freights cars ca.1955 , when times were better, at
least for freight (the bitter end of steam on NYC was 1957, so this
tidbit is still within STMFC list scope).

and Richard Hendrickson <rhendrickson@opendoor.com> wrote:

I think I knew most of what you posted, but I didn't have it all in
one place, Now I do.

I thought it would be good to put it all in one place with a
descriptive subject line, so it would be a useful resource in the list
archive. You're welcome.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff English Troy, New York
Proto:64 Classic Era Railroad Modeling
englij@rpi.edu

| R U T L A N D R A I L R O A D |
Route of the Whippet
---------------------------------------------------------------

PS - I had thought it was copper oxide that made the Pullman Green, too, but
Arthur Dubin in Kalmbach's Pullman Painting Guide said that Pullman combined
the yellow of rural dirt with the black of the industrial areas to make the
color, which would suggest a combination of raw siena and raw or burnt
umber. While the patina of copper certainly is stable, I don't recall any
jade green paint shade being common until the late '50's, when again
something must have made it possible.
- John Nehrich

Richard - Yes, there must have been some improvement
in paints in the early '50's, as autos went from somber maroons, dark blues
and greens, cream, light gray, or black, to brighter colors. (Period ads
often featured bright red autos, but several people remember the extra cost
of such a color and how fast it faded.)
On the other hand, I remember the story of how the Rutland's 4-8-2's
were delivered in green and yellow in '46 and within 6 months, looked so
sooty they gave and painted them standard black. (Yes, the Rutland was
poor, but they seemed to maintain their engines pretty well.) Yet the
Rutland went to green and yellow only four years later with their diesels.
They might have gone to a brighter color, but I'm thinking that one reason
for the explosion of the freight car paint palette in the '50's was the
demise of the steam engine.
Whatever the reason, a bright pine tree green seems to have led the way
(M&StL, MEC, REA, Cities Service), with the blues and bright reds coming in
the mid-50's.
- John Nehrich

Richard Hendrickson wrote

You're right Garth, I'd forgotten that Martin had produced a resin kit for
these cars. It's a model I can't use, and I have a hard time remembering
all the different cars in the Sunshine line.

HO kits are available for SP boxcars:

B-50-1/2/4/6/9/12/12A/13/14/15/16/18/19/20/21/22/23/24/25/26/27/28/29/30

That should be easy enough to remember! ;o)

Now if we could just get a B-50-17....


Timothy O'Connor <timoconnor@mediaone.net>
Marlborough, Massachusetts

John, with regard to your interesting observations and speculations on
paint, the development of synthetic enamels was, indeed, a major
breakthrough. Prior to that, railroad paint shops mixed their own paint
from bulk linseed oil, pigment, and mineral spirits, and the resulting
products took a long time to dry and didn't last long under the onslaught
of weather, dirt, corrosion, etc. to which railway equipment was exposed.
Synthetic enamel also made it practical to apply paint with spray guns, and
the car builders and major railroad shops begain to do so on a large scale
in the 1920s.

With few exceptions, however, the railroads continued in the
1920s-'30s-'40s to use paints with organic pigments such as carbon black,
iron oxide, and copper oxide (which produced the olive green colors used on
passenger cars), presumably because they were more durable. Apparently WW
II and its aftermath stimulated some improvements in paint technology which
then made long-lasting paints in a variety of bright colors economically
feasible, accounting for the more colorful paint schemes of the 1950s and
'60s.

Richard H. Hendrickson
Ashland, Oregon 97520