Red Brick - Yard Structures

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
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As I plan my yard structures, I was curious as to why most railroads across the US 1900 – 1950’s built their major yard structures (round houses, car shops, back shops etc.) using red brick, yet their wooden towers and other wood buildings are color coordinated.

Red bricks are one of the least expensive to manufacture but there are additional colors like white, gray and about a dozen other colors that are the same price and in a lot of cases cheaper depending on the region. Is red a safety color, a requirement, railroad rule or?

Thanks…

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Brick colours, in many cases, depend on the clay which is available locally.

F’rinstance, in my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, many structures, including houses, stores, and factories, along with public buildings were built of orange brick. Due to the amount of heavy industry in the city, it didn’t stay orange for long.

In the '60s, many owners began to clean those buildings by sand-blasting or pressure washing.

This is one of the five Westinghouse factories in the city…

…another Westinghouse factory, east of the first one…

This is one of the many textile mills which were in the city from the late 1800s…

…another one, likely cleaned more recently…

This was the Hamilton head office for Westinghouse Canada…it was empty at the time the photo was taken, but has been completely restored inside, and leased-out to various companies and businesses…

…this one’s had the orange bricks painted-over and had its mirror image attached, to the left, when I lived there as a child…

…here’s the back, unpainted, view

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I’m sure the railroads considered every possible option for building construction materials as far as cost versus return on investment. As you mention, red brick was the ubiquitous “building block” of the time.

Brickyards were local operations since shipping great distances added cost. Whatever clay was common to the area became the predominant color. Seems to me the tans and lighter colors were more common in the west and deeper reds in the east.

Fire resistance may have played a role and when studying the Sanborn Fire Maps there is important distinctions to building construction, fire apparatus, watchmen and sprinkler systems installed, etc. so there may have been a financial return for using brick over a more combustible material as related to insurance underwriting.

Railroads used their own B&B (Bridge and building) departments and I’m sure there were company standards adhered to in the specification of construction materials by the design engineers emplooyed at the time.

The railroads had close working relationships with brickyards located on their lines. There may have been advantages to using the products of an on-line customer for their own construction projects.

Regards, Ed

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Was that “Yard Structures” portion part of the original topic, or added while I was hunting for photos?

I have only two yards with facilities for locomotives, and both have service buildings (car shops, engine storage/shops and or roundhouses), all in brick.

This is the roundhouse at Mount Forest…

…with this background building representing changehouse facilities on the ground floor and general offices above. I’ll eventually add piping on supports from part of that building to represent a steam generating plant for locomotive pre-steaming…

The only other structure of significance that’s part of this area is the concrete coaling facility…

Lowbanks has a turntable with a brick enginehouse (which was originally a roundhouse)…

…and a brick carshop…

…there’s also a brick oil-house…

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Hello All,

“When life gives you melons, make melon-ade!”- -Victor; Still Game (Scottish comedy).

I, along with “She Who Must Be Obeyed”, her best friend and her new husband recently visited Central City, Colorado.

They live in Connecticut. He is a retired stonemason- -not by choice but because of inoperable shoulder damage from years in the trade.

As we were admiring the brickwork of the historic structures in Central City he made an observatory comment.

While looking at the pale yellow brickwork he mused, “I know a guy who has hoarded this color brick back home. It’s a rare color in Connecticut.”

Yes, some of the buildings in town were the traditional “brick red” color but he noticed how this “rare” colored brick was used so commonly in this region.

I pointed out that most of the roofs in town were tin, tar paper, or asphalt shingle.

He commented about the abundance of slate roofs in the New England states.

I grew up in the Los Angeles area, where historic Adobe brick was superseded by the ubiquitous gray speckled cinderblock, in construction.

Even Santa Fe advertising touted the South-Western Adobe architecture. Modeling many of their depots in this style.

Now, that being said…

Many forgotten lines had a “look” and/or style of their buildings. That’s why many prototypical modelers are true to a railroad to model the structures along the line.

For modeling purposes, you can compress scenes and miles.

One end of the line could be the unloading/transfer point to further destinations- -more modern brick facilities.

The logging operation, on the other end, would probably be based more on timber structures- -log cabins. Further advanced camps along the line would be tent-based.

Structures in between could model a transition from brick to timber.

In Central City, the ground-level facades w

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I would imagine that resistance to fire would be a prime consideration in the steam era, with all the fire-breathing dragons moving about the yards. A few unnoticed cinders might start a fire in a wood building, while a brick building would not be harmed.

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Northern Pacific’s shop buildings in Brainerd and St. Paul MN were made of an almost yellow brick. Not sure why, if they got them cheap from an online brickyard or what.

Found this online for the Brainerd shops, the St.Paul ones became the (unfortunately named) “Bandana Square” shopping / office complex.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Northern_Pacific_Railroad_Shops_Historic_District.jpg

Many brick buildings in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range communities are a soft red, about the red of Campbell’s tomato soup.

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Hello All,

When my family visited the Mesabi mine site in the early 1970s I got a souvenir packet of taconite pellets.

Unfortunately, I lost them along the way back home.

It would not surprise me if the buildings are colored “Taconite Red”- -a distinctive color indeed- -from the surrounding building materials.

Hope this helps.

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Wayne -

What paint did you use for the orange and red brick?

Rick

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A lot of my brick structures go back quite a few years, and those that have dark red bricks, like Bertram’s…

…may not have been painted at all, other than some washes of weathering. I’m guessing that the office building in the foreground (originally a LifeLike bottling plant) may have been painted to match the factory building in the background, but it’s also possible that I actually did paint all of those structures, and if that was the case, most likely the colour would have been custom mixed, either using Floquil or PollyScale paints, likely based on freight car colours.

I’m sorry that I can’t give you a definitive answer on those colours, but I’m pretty sure that this one…

…built from an MDC 3-in-1 kit, was not painted at all (other than the details), as I still have a couple left-over wall castings, which match the struture’s walls almost perfectly (the structure may have received a light wash of water-based weathering).

The orange brick structures were a later choice, and I was originally uncertain if the colour would look credible - just because lots of structures in my home town used orange brick didn’t necessarily mean that they’d be acceptable to viewers who’d never seen bricks in that colour. That accounts for some of my photos of orange bricks on real structures.
The first one I did was this Revell kit…the original one was based, I think, on one of John Allen’s scratchbuilt enginehouse structures. In the mid-to-late ’

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[zzz][zzz][zzz]

Bertram’s!!! Did someone say Bertram’s??? [:P]

Rich

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Thanks Wayne. I would never think badly of a long response. If someone takes the time to write one I will take the time to read. Most of the time I will get information that I can use.

Many years ago I was given a VHS tape of George Sellios discussing how he had just constructed the first section of his F&SM layout. He mentioned that he used rattle cans to paint the buildings.

I was at the stage where I wanted to do it “right” and used many of the same Floquil colors that you mentioned.

I don’t have a permanent paint booth/station so it is a PIA to get everything set up to use the airbrush. Lately I have decided that if rattle cans are good enough for George they are good enough for me. If I can get away with using one that is now my first choice on structures.

Edit: I don’t know how the first part of my response got underlined. Please ignore.

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Your comment is much appreciated.

My homemade spray booth was originally in a small room in a garage I built when we purchased our first home.

Several years later, we bought a building lot and I built a house on it. There wasn’t much room for a garage (I’ve never used a garage for our cars, but more for kids stuff, bicycles, etc. etc.)
A couple years later, we bought the house next door, which had a rather large lot (some of it extended behind our property) and a few years later, sold it for a good profit. Before selling, though, we severed all of the property behind us and an equal-depth portion of the lot beside us, which included a two car garage with an upstairs, and a workshop room in the back, adding it to our original lot.

Until then, my paint booth was in a small room in our basement, vented directly outdoors. However, my wife is very sensitive to the odour of paint (even water-based paints), and suggested that I build a room in the garage to use for airbrushing.

As usual, our garage is not used for cars (it’s about 100’ behind our house and, according to the people from whom we bought our building lot, is approximately 155 years old, and was once a home.)

Anyway, I built a small room in the workshop area, about 4’x8’, with a direct vent to the outdoors and electric heating, so I can paint there any time, day or night, summer or winter, with no worries about stinking-up the house or bothering the neighbours, as there are none nearby.

I built my spray booth from odds and ends and left-overs from other projects that I had on-hand. The exhaust fan is a remnant from air-powered hocky game, and has been in use for about 40 years, including a stint of commercial pain

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I have thought about a permanent spray booth many times. The big issue is venting to the outside. If I put it in one of the garages where that would be easier they are not heated. If I put it in the train room venting will involve a long run and much cutting.

It doesn’t seem to be worth the effort.

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What i did was have a portable spray booth with the exhaust attached to flexible dryer vent hose. I then took a piece of plywood and cut it to the width of a window sash and about 8" high. I then cut a dryer vent diameter hole in it and put an exterior vent on it.

I would open the window sash, put the plywood in the window and then lower the sash onto the plywood. Attach the hose to the vent pipe on the exterior vent and spray away. When you are done, detach the hose, remove the board from the window and close the sash. Work summer or winter. You might have to remove the screen from the window. All the benefits of a vented spary booth, no holes in the wall, no piping to run. Just 15-20" set up and take down.