[%-)] Hi Everyone,
Could any of you help me by answering a few questions for me. As I am from Australia, I don’t know anything about American Railways.
Q1: Did or does ATSF, UP or SP run trains in Northern California ?
Q2: If so, which locos would they have run between 1970 and 1980?
Q3: What is the landscape like in this part of California?
Q4: What kind of industries would be serviced in this part of California?
The reason I am asking these questions is because I wi***o model a layout which features a seaside/beach area as part of my layout. I had thought of modelling in the area of Colorado. If anyone could give a new comer to ‘N’ scale any advice it would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks
good question! i live in in central california and my family have recently been making 5 hour drives up and down the valley. bad part, 5hours. good part. LOTS OF TRAINS!
Q1:SP, UP, and BNSF all own track in california. going north and south up and down the california valley, BNSF owns the track, but UP has trackage rights and runs plenty of trains through there. goin east and west UP has all the track.BTW ATSF is defunct. : - (
Q2: i dont know. im not old enough to know. im 11.
Q3: goin south from sacamento in the central valley it is very flat and dry. if you go north it gets more moutainus as you go north. but still very flat. not as dry though.
Q4:AGRICULTRE! corn, raisins, grain, lumber.about everything you can think of. Remember this Califorina is the agricultreal capital of the world!
if you have more questions i have lots more answers. feel freeto ask!
Northern California was SP (now UP, but that merger happened 20 years after your era) and the primarily-modeled portion was a heavy grade up a steep-sided river gorge. At the top, Mount Shasta, the US answer to Fuji-san.
There was a track plan in the April, 2005, Model Railroader that covered that portion of the country in exhaustive detail. (The down side is that it’s a club-size - 22x45 feet or 6.7x13.7m - multilevel mushroom, but it’s still full of ideas.)
Other than the railroad itself, about the only industries dealt with forest products. Unlike the LA basin, that region of California is rather sparsely populated. Most traffic was run-through, but had to take helpers and/or change locos. A little farther south, there was a lot of agricultural activity through the flatter portions of the Sacramento Valley.
I’m not well-versed on what SP would have run in the 70’s - I stopped keeping track about the time they scrapped the last cab-forwards. You might want to Google for a link to the SP historical society.
BTW another you might wan to madel or google atleast, Cajon pass in southen california, and tehapachi pass. wen through there on the way to Las vegas i cant even cout the trains. it was at night too and you could see 3 bright lights at least a mile away. AMAZING SIGHT!
Northern California is actually very diverse. There’s SP’s (now UP’s) coast line that runs through coastal mountains with some spectacular scenery. There’s the Central Valley which is mostly flat with farms and orchards and ranches and grain elevators.
You also have the Sierra Nevada with both SP’s Donner Pass line and let’s not forget WP’s Feather River Canyon line, both of which have rugged granite mountains and lots of evergreens, while the foothills of those same mountains are more rounded and covered with grasses and oaks and many other types of trees. SP’s line through Dunsmuir on the way to Oregon is another with great mountain scenery.
There are also lesser known lines like Altamont Pass, which used to have both SP and WP running on parallel tracks through grassy hills. ATSF’s (now BNSF’s) line through Franklin Canyon also comes to mind. If you like redwood trees, there’s also the NWP.
1970’s SP mountain power would have a lot of EMD’s, especially tunnel motors and SD45’s, as well as some six-axle GE U-boats. You could also still find a lot of SD9’s and GP9’s in that time period. On Donner Pass, even back then UP power was pretty common on SP trains.
So in short, it kind of depends on what kind of setting you want to model.
Yes. Currently, both BNSF and UP are the major lines in northern California. SP was absorbed by UP several years ago–ATSF and BN became BNSF.
Between 1970 and 1980 the picture was a little different–in northern California, there was Southern Pacific, which was the major line in California for the past century, the Western Pacific and its subsidiaries like Sacramento Northern, and the AT&SF, which was mostly in southern California but ran up to the Bay Area.
All of the above…depending on where you define where northern California starts (there are lots of opinions) northern California has a large central valley, with a wide river delta that feeds into San Francisco Bay. There are large mountains to the north, east and west, while the valley continues to the south and into southern California. The coastal mountains tend to be more rolling hills, the Sierra Nevada to the east and the mountain ranges to the north are gigantic craggy things.
Weather on the coastline of northern California is cool and foggy, with lots of rain. The central valley is dry and hot in summer with lots of rain in winter, but it is not a desert–it’s called an “alluvial floodplain.” The mountains to the east are dry in summer but get enormous amounts of snow in winter.
On the northern coast, logging is the most important industry. In the central va
A seaside beach area would me in tune with Central/Southern California from about Monterey southward. I grew up in Santa Barbara and remember plenty of SP. A nice coastal place to model is the Rincon area southward through Ventura which takes the train along the Coast and beach area. Lots of Agriculture in this area; canneries, cold storage…I’ve modeled this area in the past with a fleet of PFE (Pacific Fruit Express) cars…I plan on using this along with a cannery on my new layout. Don’t forget the signature of railroading in S. Cal…Eucalyptus Trees along the railroad route (a bit inland from the coast)…SP even grew them in past to be used for RR ties.
I am attempting central California and I live in Dover, DE.
Click Image to enlarge
I am chronicling on my website at:
http://www.pacificcoastairlinerr.com/
Thank you if you visit
Harold
If you go back to '40’s thru '60’s the Santa Fe ran into Richmond, SP and WP ran into Oakland. Only UP colors were on the City of San Francisco actually run by SP from Ogden. jc5729
Ahhh, a topic I love.
(Note my user name is CARRfan - as in, “California Railroad Fan”.
I grew up in Los Angeles, went to school in Santa Barbara, and have lived and worked between Santa Barbara and Ventura since college.
I plan on modelling this area. As mentioned above, Rincon would be a great “beach scene” - right between Ventura and Santa Barbara. (Unfortunately, this area has gained some popularity due to the La Conchita landslide a little over a year ago).
Big trains roll by several times per day. They’re UP, but you still see some old beat up SP loco’s, which is really cool. I’ve even seen some Norfolk Southern recently.
And of course, many passenger trains run daily between Santa Barbara and San Diego. Some of them continue north.
Check out Amazon.com for John Signor’s books. He has several books on California Railroading. I have his book on the history of SP in California - pure pleasure reading. I love it!
HAZMAT9, do you have any pics of your previous modeling of this area? I would love to see it.
There are plenty of rails running all through northern and southern California–and it can be said pretty accurately that the history of California is inextricably intertwined with the history of Southern Pacific! (Going to a presentation by Richard Orsi tonight…should be a blast, California railroad history wise!)
Around Sacramento we also see a lot of still-unpainted SP logos (except for the UP renumbering) trundling around town.
Just down the road a few miles in Oxnard - there was a ton of “retired” SP locomotives for a while. I wanted to head down with a camera and take some pictures of them a couple years ago.
Next time I drove by, they were gone : (
Bummer.
Just remember–TAKE A CAMERA WITH YOU and TAKE THE PHOTO NOW!!!
The Richard Orsi presentation was on his new book, Sunset Limited, which is pretty much about the positive things SP did for California and the development of the West.
No kidding Jetrock.
I was at a hobby shop about a year before finishing college. The owner said something like, “SP will no longer exist next week…”. I was thinking I should sure get out there with a camera.
Fast forward a year (still never got out to the tracks with a camera", and yellow loco’s were pulling many of the trains. Accckkkkk!
Yeah, I really should have gotten out to that railyard of retired locos also. I bet you still have a lot of them there in Roseville, huh?
Plenty in the Roseville Yard area, sometimes they scoot 'em around to blow the dust off–not hard to get shots driving around behind the yard. We still see mostly-unpainted ones puttering around doing the local switching chores in Sacramento. Of course, we’ve also got a few things boxed up at the Railroad Museum, like the tunnel motor, the E unit, etcetera…
hey jetrock, good to see a fellow modeller. im located davis about 17 west of you. Ever been to Bruce’s Train Shop? its my personel favorite.
earthqu8kes: Indeed, I’m there at least once a month, and have been shopping there since it was still The Whistle Stop and located on the end of the strip mall in the mid-seventies (they moved into the larger bank building a few years ago.) Nice folks there–sometimes I go out to Railroad Hobbies in Roseville, but Bruce’s is closer.
There are quite a few Sacramento-area modelers on this list, including some very accomplished modelers–I’ve just got a shelf layout, as I have been too busy writing about trains lately to do much modeling!!
UP and SP both ran through Northern California, i’m from a little town called Tehama about 30 or so miles south of redding, i remember spending many days as a kid standing by the tracks watching the trains. some of the best times of my life.
A good railroad to model in both steam and diesel is SP’s subsidiary, Northewstern Pacific. It ran ten wheelers and some consolidations in the steam era, through early '50s. During the diesel eral four axel Baldwins and SWs or six axel SD-7s and SD-8s were the norm because of light rail. I am modeling the NWP as it was in '54 and '55. Shorter consists were the rule for freight and passenger. This line is a good subject for railroading in limited space.
You mentioned wanting to model a seaside/beach area. Not much of the track in Northern California runs along the coast and the northn part of the state isn’t known for its beaches. For trains running near the beach you need to look at central and southern California.
The railroad with the route track along the coast is the Southern Pacific (now Union Pacific) “Coast Route” in the area between San Luis Obispo and Ventura. The Coast Range mountains are at the edge of the ocean in most of this area. There are many beautiful beaches in the area. Many if not most are at the bottoms of cliffs. The railroad and the highway run along the tops of the cliffs. Two excellent books on this line are Southern Pacific’s Coast Line by John R Signor and Southern Pacific’s Coast Line Pictorial by Anthony W Thompson and John R Signor. Both are published by Signature Press http://www.signaturepress.com
The Santa Fe (now BNSF) main route is in the Central Valley. However the SF line from the LA area to San Diego does run along the coast for much of its length.
Both The Southern Pacific and Santa Fe coastal routes are shown on thi