When doing the 50's,what are some things to do and not do?

Well, don’t put 1990’s stuff on it or 1800’s stuff on it. It sticks out like a sore thumb! Gas Stations, barber shops and roadside motels dominated. Oh, and don’t forget about those fried chicken joints. Mmmmmm…

Off the top o’ my head . . .

  • yellow stop signs with black lettering
  • silver water towers and bridges
  • canvas awnings over shop windows

Several years back when I first got online, there was an email list for modeling the 1950’s in the USA. There was also one for modeling that decade in Canada. I don’t know if they still exist as they were on private servers, before Yahoo!Groups/Onelist, etc. existed. Sorry, I didn’t keep the URL as I’m modeling the late 1960’s. As others have mentioned, try to pick up some old mags at garage sales, etc. from the period and look at the old ads, etc.

Have fun with it!

For the freight cars,look at the built date on the car.This is usually found under the reporting marks/number of the car. this will give you an idea as to whether or not that the car will fit in with the rest of your fleet.

One big thing to keep in mind was the horrible obsession with everything that stood still being painted WHITE: houses, storefronts, fences, sheds, gazebos, etc. White paint had been expensive before WWI, but it took the “modern era” of the post-WWII world for white paint to really catch on witht he masses. White equalled clean and modern, and everybody painted this bland, impersonal, sterile color on anything they could find. Unfortunately, white is STILL the most popular house color in this country.

In other words, don’t paint Victorian houses in “painted lady” schemes, unless it was a well-known historical site (like colonial Williamsburg). Flashy, multicolored paint schemes on storefronts are also a no-no.

The “modernization” of smalltown America also meant the ripping out or covering over of Victorian storefronts, like the ones on the DPM kits. I have never really seen a hardcore attempt to model this craze accurately, but it’s easy to do. Just build the kit without the cast iron storefront, and replace it with either cinder blocks, square white tile or V groove siding, with smaller glass block windows. This sorry treatment of perfectly fine storefronts is still seen all over the country.

One other strange thing I’ve noticed while studying color photos of the 1950s: most personal automobiles around railroads were light blue. Don’t ask me why, but that seems to be the most popular car color of the rust belt back then (and I’ve looked at THOUSANDS of color photos from the 1950s).

One thing nobody has mentioned so far are the engines themselves!!

The Fifties were pretty much the last days of steam. The really big steam locomotives were still running, but diesels had pretty much taken over in switchyards, which were dominated by SW-series switchers and Alco S-series, or GE 44 and 70 tonners on smaller roads. E and F units were common. I think the first Geeps came out in the late Fifties, so if you have them they would be shiny and new. Cabooses were still common, and on Class 1 railroads the older wooden ones were being replaced by new metal-sided cabooses. They sold the wooden ones to short lines, or scrapped them.

Except for the really heavy lines, electric lines were pretty much dead: interurbans were killed off by freeways, trolley lines were replaced by buses in all but the largest of cities, and many electric freight lines went diesel or out of business. Many such vehicles were sold off and turned into storage buildings, restaurants, sheds, etcetera.

Wooden boxcars were still around but becoming rarer. Covered hoppers were just starting to come into use–if you ship grain on your line, use boxcars instead. Streamlined passenger equipment was common, but some old heavyweight metal cars might still be seen.

The first Geeps (GP7s) actually started shipping in late 1949. Here’s a great site that lists the start and end dates of all diesel locomotives – it’ll help keep your roster in the right time period:
http://www.urbaneagle.com/data/RRdieselchrono.html

Someone earlier mentioned Mail Pouch Tobacco painted on the roofs of barns. If you were in the southeast , See Rock City was more commonly seen on barn roofs. (red barn, black roof , large white block letters.
Also billboards appropriate to the era. From my distant recollections of being a child, the billboards advertised tourist attractions, (See Ruby Falls, Visit Silver Springs, etc.) or local motels and sometimes restaurants.

As a slightly off topic comment on the above, When I was a child we had a next door neighbor named Ruby. Whenever we would travel and I would see one of the ‘See Ruby Falls’ signs I would burst out laughing and say something like ’ Oh, Ruby fell agin!'. While this was uproariously funny to a seven year old, I’m sure my parents got tired of it after about the second sign.

The roads in the 50’s were much different than today. Each lane was only about 8 feet wide. There often was no berm, much less a paved one. The line separating opposing traffic was a single white line, the only states that I know of that had lines on the outside of the lanes of SOME roads were Pennsylvania, and in western North Carolina.

The signs along the road were much smaller. A stop sign would generally be about 18 inches, as compared to the 36 to 40 inches today. The speed limit signs, and all other information type signs were likewise smaller, and much less frequent. There were none of the large green interstate style signs anywhere, they did not begin to appear until about 1960. And do not put a yield sign anywhere, use a yellow stop sign instead, it had the same meaning that a yield does today (but not on a highway (turnpike) ramp, you were assumed to be intelligent enough to realize that traffic entering the highway had to cede the right of way so no sign was used). Some states only planted a speed limit sign where the speed changed. You could travel a long distance and never see a speed limit sign.

There were no guard rails in most places. Where protection was deemed necessary you had wooden posts with two strands of wire rope strung between.

The stop lights usually were a single set of lights suspended over the center of the intersection on wire rope. The older stop lights used a green - yellow - red - yellow - green sequence. And yes, both directions had yellow lights at the same time. Proceed on yellow at your own (considerable) risk.

Some places, New Jersey for one, had three lane highways where the center lane was reserved for passing for both directions at the same time. They were marked with solid white lines toward the center lane and broken white lines toward the outer lanes. There were small signs occasionally that stated that the center lane was passing only. And yes, many people lost thier lives in head on collisions whe

A good source of information about any time frame is The History Channel. It had an very interesting show on the history of fast food which had a good amount of footage of various roadside resturants of the 50’s and 60’s. There was also a series concerning US Route 1 which also had very good footage of buildings and neighborhoods of various time frames. Check the listings on Historychannel.com.

Depending on where you lived, at least 25% and up to 50% of homes in the area were heated by a coal furnace, therefore a town would have a coal distributor with small 3-8 ton trucks to deliver coal to homes and businesses. Many times these also doubled as the lumber supply yard thereby having coal and lumber delivered to them by railroad car.

The Two Bay Hoppers (50-55 Ton) were extensively used for this service. As the home fuel went to gas/oil these cars disappeared. My mother was a bookkeeper for a Coal Company and they were very active until the late sixties.

Rick

Wasnt everything in black and white?

It depends on where you lived, urban, suburban or rural. for the first two: paved roads, electric streetlights, etc would have been common. Rural USA still hadnt changed too much from the pre -war era.

New diesels would be shiny new, the pride of the RR, while steamers would be showing the end results of a hard life, most steam engines were really pushed during the war and were never really given adequate overhauls, just enough to keep them going until the shiny new diesels arrived.

I suggest two great books, “The Last Steam Railroad in America” and “Steam, Steel and Stars, The Last Steam Railroad in America” both by O. Wilson Link is an outstanding source, B&W pics but very very usefull for everyday living and RR’s in the 50’s on the Norfolk Western railroad.

I have found a lot of TRAFFIC and industry information for my 50s scene by going to public library and reading through the bound volumes of, of all things-- Business Week. Ads aimed at business owners about products for their businesses. I read through six years of the magazines. Lots of ideas for my specific industrial situation-- East Texas forests.

Can you imagine a prototypical way to use that Intermountain Staley tank car in a forest-related area??? Staley advertised that it made CUSTOM ENGINEERED STARCH to sell to paper mills to stiffen their corrugated cardboard for stonger boxes!!! Ever think of that?

On your courthouse square or on the school flagpole, don’t forget to use a 48 star flag until Alaska and Hawaii came in at end of the 1950s.

For my superette out on the highway, the first semi-modern market (still locally owned) replacing the store on the courthouse square, I went to the supermarket ads from 1950s newspapers on microfilm at the public library to check prices. Tuna fish, 17 and a HALF cents a can. I hand lettered the kind of silk-screen printed posters they used to have on store windows, made them four times scale size and reduced them in a copier. (Before I had a graphics printer for computer.)

I am building a fleet of petrolem tankcars to represent the brands of gasoline and oil marketed in TEXAS in the 1950s. I already have
Conoco (didn’t they merge with Chevron in 1990s?)
Gulf (became Chevron)
Magnolia (was Mobil nationally, merged w Exxon in 1990s)
Phillips 66
Shell
Sinclair (became ARCO)
Texaco

In some cases, mftrs came out with cars after I custom decalled them…

I am still lacking Humble (which was affiliated with Esso, became Enco, then Exxon). Have a shot of preserved Humble tankcar at Galveston RR Museum to model.

Billboards advertised cigarettes. Some of them had smoke generators to give the appearance that the cigarette was lighted. You could do that with a Seuthe smoke generator. To be accurate you would have to remember the brands of the time, but you can’t go wrong with Camels, Lucky Strike or Chesterfield.