(This is another one I’m not sure is in the right place, so moderators if not feel free to move.)
Picked the October Trains magazine a couple of days ago for the “Freight Car Doctors” article and was wondering how much of the equipment mentioned in that article would be accurate for a car shop in the 70s era. I have a Walthers car shop on my layout as part of my freight yard and would like to get it detailed so that it doesn’t look like just an empty shell. The only detail that I’m faily sure of is the arc welders. (The ranch I grew up on had one in the early 80s and it was used until probably the mid 2000s at least.) Of course, I’ll have to look up how to make a lighting circut to repricate that. Other than that I’m stumped. I’m working in HO scale for parts purposes.
As usual, any assistance that can be provided would be most welcomed.
A lot depends on what you are really building. Are you building a RIP track that does running repairs for a railroad, a contract shop that upgrades cars for anybody that hires them or a car manufacturer that builds the original cars? The RIP track for reapirs at a yard will have the least machinery since it does the lightest repairs. The contract shop will have the most variety since it has to deal with all sorts of cars and the manufacturer will have a lot of the same machinery since they will be churning out runs of hundreds or thousands of the same type of car.
A yard generally has a RIP track to repair bad order cars it finds in trains. That shop is rarely a big brick building. Most are a metal or wood shed, some older ones may look like an older style engine house (like the old Revell engine house). The big Walthers buildings are typically former car or locomotive manufacturers.
I can only speak for truck shops, but I assume train shops are similar.
For the most part, as long as there is a place to stash it, old equipment never goes away. There is always that belief that “we will need this again someday, and we don’t want to need it and not have it.”
As such, in older truck shops you will find stands for obsolete engines, lifting brackets for transmissions that have not been made in thirty years, and line boring tools that will never be used again.
I have seen shops where they have replace broken transmission jacks, but the old ones going back several generations are still there “waiting to be repaired.”
Even old forklifts and service trucks seem to hang about long after they should have been scrapped.
Shops are kept clean and neat for the most part, but old equipment tends to linger on in the corners and shadows.
When we moved our Atlanta shop to the new location in 2016, four 40 foot containers full of scrap metal (old tools) went to the recycler. The old shop had been there since 1962.
What I have is the Walthers car shop with tracks extending about 6 inches or so out the east end. There is 3 way turnout on the west end that then runs into a single track running across the east yard ladder via a 12 1/2 degree crossing and connects to the west yard ladder (a good two to three feet actual track) to move the cars to other tracks. (Probably not the greatest design but I couldn’t come up with any other ideas when I built the yard in the first place.)
The yard itself is part of my protolanced road (Forest Railway as seen in my avatar) who leases the old NP lines from the BN. (If you remember your prototype history those lines had a 100 year mortgage on them and they couldn’t be sold outright.) Something akin to how MRL started except in the mid 70s.
I would almost consider it an online repair shop for both the FRRY and the BN as a blend of the shops here in Miles City from the old Milwaukee which are still used to this day for car repairs and the NP shops in Brainerd, MN. I still would need a paint booth. Due to the track geometery, the only way to do it would have to add a turnout with the divergent route on a standard Atlas 22" curve and I don’t know of any HO turnouts off the top of my head that meet that requirement. (The shop would be on the straight leg.) Otherwise I would be running engines and cars throught the paint shop as a matter of normal operations and that’s probably not a good idea.
The B&O car repair tracks at Glenwood, Pa. (Pittsburgh) were entirely outdoors except for a locker and tool room.
The Union RR car shop at Mon Jct. where I worked for a time was the same, although there was a large building with an overhead crane that handled heavy repairs and new or rebuild car construction.
There were small buildings that housed a storeroom, an office/locker room, a tool room, and a blacksmith shop.
Since I don’t have that issue of Trains, I don’t know what it showed but, you will find the same things anywhere people work on large things with heavy, awkward components. Especially steel components. First and foremost will be oxy/acy rigs for cutting and welding. In the 1970s oxygen/acytelene was much more common (economical?) than arc, and, railroads sucked the last dollar out of any investment.
Another item necessary for freight car work was elevated work platforms. Pneumatic hammers, chisels and other such tools abounded along with air supplies. There was also a limited sand-blasting capability. Most of the wrenches were much over sized, compared to your 5/16 X 3/8 inch box end. There were all sizes and types of hammers. Chain hoists and floor cranes were available for hoisting items as far as the roofs of cars. Not to be forgotten are the jacks used to raise a car off its truck(s) and the stands to support the body, while necessary repairs were made.
One of the last things most smaller shops were concerned about was painting.
Most smaller shops doing repairs to keep equipment safe to operate, simply touched up what they did to the car, often using whatever color their railroad’s standard color was. Then, there was always red oxide and good ol’ black, if you didin’t like Penn Central green or Daylight orange. I doubt a paint booth would be part of a smaller shop. That space would be used for smaller component shops or storage.
Unless this shop was a daytime only operation, lighting would also be necessary for working on, in, and under the cars. Portable lighting is a must in any car shop. By the 1970s mechanical material handling equipment had taken over the movement of that which had gotten a lot of men maimed and, killed. Think about trying wr
If I remember the prototype torch one that I grew up around, that can be represented by a couple of tanks painted the right colors. (I don’t don’t remember the colors off the top of my head as it has been a few years sine I looked at it in person.) I also don’t exactly know how to represent the flame with lighting. I has seen arc welding circuits but not oxy/acy torches.
I knew I would need the car jacks. (I think I have a few around somewhere. More can be obtained if needed.) I also remember the ranch I grew up on using 1 1/8" and 1 1/4" wrenches as well, so I’m familiar with bigger wrenches. I’m not exactly sure how to represent the mentioned tools in HO. Air supplies could probably be hidden in a side structure. Platforms could be scratched from regular styren
This harks back to the question about what are you building. There are RIP tracks that are attached to yards and handle normal running repairs on cars. They normally only handle the cars that that railroad is handling. They are at most medium to large yards. They also have smaller building, that don’t look anything like the Walther’s buildings.
What the walther’s building is is a major car construction shop. Only major railroads or large established car builders would build a building like that. A major class one railroad might have two or three locations on the entire railroad that has one of those buildings. Only railroads that built their own cars from scratch would have one of those buildings. They didn’t handle running repairs in those buildings (they were handled at the RIP track).
In the 1960’s or 1970’s the major railroads started merging and consolidating shops and began selling off railroad shops. Many of these were bought up by private companies and shortlines and used as contract shops.
Railroads used them for “surge” capacity and the rising number of private car owners used them to maintain their fleets. They were generally not used for bad orders straight out of the yard.
They were also different than the shops used by the more modern car builders. The more modern car builder shops would have fixtures to work on an entire car side or car, some could even rotate an entire car to work on all sides of it. Since contract shops worked on small batches or onesie/twosie projects they wouldn’t be able to use fixtures.
Your railroad probably bought the shop from the BN and it would have had the equipment from the BN when it sold it. So it would be 1950’s, 1960’s era stuff.
There would be floor jacks, portable welders, portable and overhead cranes. There would be metal shears, lathes, drill presses and all sorts of heav
What the walther’s building is is a major car construction shop. Only major railroads or large established car builders would build a building like that. A major class one railroad might have two or three locations on the entire railroad that has one of those buildings. Only railroads that built their own cars from scratch would have one of those buildings. They didn’t handle running repairs in those buildings (they were handled at the RIP track).
In the 1960’s or 1970’s the major railroads started merging and consolidating shops and began selling off railroad shops. Many of these were bought up by private companies and shortlines and used as contract shops.
Your railroad probably bought the shop from the BN and it would have had the equipment from the BN when it sold it. So it would be 1950’s, 1960’s era stuff.
There would be floor jacks, portable welders, portable and overhead cranes. There would be metal shears, lathes, drill presses and all sorts of heavy power tools (drills, saws, grinders). They could be air or electrically powered.
The floor will be paved, probably with concrete by the 1970’s (brick or wood block if older). The building will have 25-50 ton overhead cranes. Any elevated work platforms will be portable since they are working on a wide variety of cars, one position wouldn’t be helpful. Forklifts would be used as mobile cranes and could be used to move parts around.
One thing that would be easy to model is that along the walls there would be workbenches and tool cabinets, plus bins of small parts (bolts, rivets, screws). they could be modeled with plastic or wood blocks and could be faced with photos to make them look like bins without having to make the detail.
As mentioned there would be store stocks of sheet metal, structural shapes and pipe. There would be stocks of