The Original Whistle Stop Moves

In May, the Original Whistle Stop moved from the storefront at 2490 E. Colorado Blvd in Pasadena to a much smaller office front at 23 N. Altadena Drive. The old store was 3300 square feet; the new one is 800 square feet. There's a history section on the store's web site, but it's sketchy in places, and it's centered mostly on the store's current owner, Fred Hill, who has an ego. The headline on the site says of the move,

After 75 years of continuing service to the model railroad community, and 42 years at this location, retail businesses across the country are now sadly being forced to “redesign” how they do business.

I think this misstates the actual circumstance: Fred is 83 yeaes old, and he has no successor to run the business. My guess is that he's just selling out remaining inventory at the new location. This reminds me to some extent of Fred's last business move, the 2007 acquisition of former competitor Allied Models in Culver City. As a then-customer of both Allied and The Whistle Stop, I heard a certain amount of inside gossip over what was really going on.

What I heard was that Allen Drucker, then-owner of Allied, had invested quite a bit to construct an all-new building in Culver City for the store in 1992. Allied had previously been on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles; the problem with that location was that a big new West Side Mall was under construction, which would quickly make nearby parking impossible, forcing Drucker to move. The new building amounted to a huge expansion of the business, which had previously been in a conventional storefront.

On one hand, staff at Allied apparently began to hear Drucker's complaints about the level of business at the new location, as well as his remarks that if he simply rented the building out to another store, he could make as much in rent as he was taking in from running Allied. By the late 1990s, key Allied staff had left, recognizing there wasn't much future there, and by 2007, the axe fell, and the store was up for sale.

When I was up at The Whistle Stop one day, I asked Fred's partner, Brian Brooks, "So, are you guys gonna buy Allied?" meaning it as a joke. I was surprised to hear him take the question seriously, although he didn't sound optimistic. He said it was nearly impossible to get straight information from Drucker on how much the store actually made, and he certainly didn't seem completely on board with the idea, whatever Fred Hill may have thought.

It's hard to tell what Fred had in mind for the new Allied. The one thing I kept hearing at The Whistle Stop was that he didn't want to spend any time at the Allied operation. But Nick Barone, the former manager of Allied under Drucker, had been brought into the partnership that bought the store with Fred and Brian, so that shouldn't have been a problem.

In any case, the deal went through, although it included the Allied operation, now owned by The Whistle Stop, moving out of its new building and into a nearby storefront, which was owned by Drucker as well. Drucker rented the former Allied building to Samy's Camera. Whether for reasons related to tbe Allied purchase or not, Brian Brooks left both tbe Whistle Stop and Allied partnerships in 2011.

It's hard to imagine what Fred may have had in mind, but it very much appeared that the actual purpose of the new Allied store was simply to sell off the old Allied inventory at full retail prices. I visited the new store occasionally after the sale, but it seemed as though everyone was going through the motions, and there was little or no new stock.

If this was the case, it took eight years to sell everything off, and in July, 2015, the store declared itself insolvent and closed. A commenter on a forum observed,

In recent visits to Allied, the shelves were bare. I haven't seen any new stock in the store in quite a while. They still had the toys and model planes carried over from the old store. I was told they had a lot of NWSL and brass parts in the back room by one of the employees, but they never had the time to look for what I needed. They just started bringing out brass parts a short while ago.

I have to wonder if the lease was up and Drucker raised the rent. I was told, again by a employee, that they got a low rent for the store when the sale was made. Also, I have to wonder if there's a tax break for all involved somewhere down the road.

Only a few weeks after the shop closed, the vacant storefront burned in a mysterious fire. However, the remaining inventory was in the hands of the insolvency agents. Was buying Allied a good business move on Fred's part? It's hard to say. If his sole motive was to sell off the Allied inventory at full retail, it took a long time and a lot of unnecessary expense in paying store staff; he probably would have done better to sell it to a closeout specialist in the first place, rather than to wait eight years. If his motive was to rebuild Allied's business, it was a bust.

The Whistle Stop had been the subject of much hype over the years; as the history section of its web site puts it, "There was a lot going on in the model railroad industry during those years. Whistle Stop was right at ground zero."

But I gradually became disillusioned. Although The Whistle Stop only occasionally ran discount specials, as a longtime customer who wanted to be loyal in the face of on-line discounts, I took advantage of the ability to order items on special in tbe Waltners catalog through The Whistle Stop and pick them up the following week -- except that often, they just wouldn't come in. I eventually discovered that Walthers wouldn't ship orders for The Whistle Stop if the store was behind on its credit, and my orders were part of that freeze.

I wrote a letter to Walthers asking why they weren't shipping to one of the most reputable and best-known hobby shops in the country, and Walthers replied that they don't comment on the credit status of their customers, which of course was a comment on the credit status of The Whistle Stop.

My own view is that The Whistle Stop under Fred Hill has always been the creature of hype. Although it claims to have been at the forefront of the hobby, its specialty has always been brass, which over the years has varied widely in quality and now, if it's produced at all, has become wildly expensive. Converting vintage items to DCC, sound, and LED lighting is a major project. But The Whistle Stop never carried DCC, while other major train stores embraced it.

I would say that in making the move, Fred has effectively acknowledged the store is at the end of its life, although I think its real decline came around the time Fred bought Allied. Certainly this move reminds me of the Allied fiasco. Other high-end train stores in the area survive, The Train Shack in Burbank, Railmaster Hobbies in Bellflower, and Arnie's Trains in Westminster.

Walthers Mainline Susquehanna "Susie-Q" Boxcar

I'm a sucker for anything Susquehanna. I lived in northern New Jersey with my family until 1963, and around 1962, I was old enough to ride to Butler on my bike to railfan the Susquehanna. By then, it was owned by real estate developer Irving Maidman, and it had acquired the appearance it took in a couple of Pechulis Media DVDs, surrounded by knee-to-waist-high brown weeds, with not much happening. But that was my one dose of Susquehanna. Not ong ago, I ordered a Walthers Mainline Susie-Q boxcar:

Most models of these cars use an AAR 40-foot box car body, but prototype photos show they were an older, smaller style:

According to the Model Rairoader Forum,

The 400-series cars were - as you found - PS-1’s that NYSW purchased in the late 1940’s. In the early 60’s, the railroad sold all but two of them (401 and 402) to the Monon. To replace them, they purchased a group of 40’ boxcars from the Lehigh Valley (oddly, the replacement cars were built in 1926, which made them significantly older than the cars they replaced - I don’t get that decision). Those cars were numbered in the 500-series and many of them were repainted into the green Susie-Q scheme.

Although the boxcar body style on the model is fairly close to the car in the photo, there are differences in the side sill, but it's a better choice than the usual AAR 40-foot car. The Walthers model gets the green color and the Susie-Q figure right, but the style of lettering for the Susquehanna road name differs from the photo.

The Susie-Q lettering would have come after my one trip to Butler. According to Wikipedia, Ford closeds its Edgewater Assembly Plant in 1955, which cost the NYS&W one of their primary sources of traffic. 1961, real-estate developer and millionaire Irving Maidman purchased the Ford plant for use as a rental warehouse, and he eventually purchased an Alcoa plant for the same purpose.

In October 1962, Maidman purchased the NYS&W to ensure their freight operations in Edgewater remained active, and he began arranging for the railroad to lease some property in Edgewater for backup storage. I've seen elsewhere that the Susie-Q paint scheme was the result of a Maidman-sponsored employee contest. However, traffic on the Edgewater Branch continued to decline, and the Susquehanna declared bankruptcy in 1976. In 1980, the NYS&W was sold to the Delaware Otsego Corporation, which began ther road's revival.

Walthers Proto Penn Central GP9

I'm a big Penn Central fan; I commuted on it to school from Washington to Springfield, MA during its first two years. I couldn't wait to get a Proto Phase III PC GP9.

I wouldn't have complained if they'd offered a PC GP9 in their Mainline range, where the only real difference would have been the lack of end grab irons, which as you can see in the photo are practically invisible on an all-black model.

The PRR had 270 GP9s, numbered 7000-7269. They all kept their numbers under PC. It appears that PRR/PC 7230-7269 were Phase III, with 48" diameter radiator fans, instead of 36" fans on earlier GP9s and GP7s. This final order also lacked PRR train phone antennas.

One difference between Walthers Proto and Walthers Mainline is that Proto has more features in the ESU decoders. The most visible change is that the number boards can be separately lit via function key 6:

In railroad rule books, the number boards are typically lit only on the control unit in the consist, but it looks like most prototype engineers forget to set this either on or off. Notice too that since the PRR GP9s kept their numbers going into PC, their numberboards retained the special PRR serif style, which Walthers reproduced.

The ESU sound decoder with the Proto version has the LokSound 5 prime mover delay at start feature. This means that when you throttle up, it takes the loco a fairly long time to begin to move, reproducing the prototype spool-up time. Setting CV 124=16 will turn this off; CV124=20 will put it back. As a longtime DC operator, I've never gotten used to features like this. I also set CVs 3 and 4, acceleration and deceleration momentum, to 0. These features are maybe more suited to large club-type layouts, but each to his own!

Lemonade Out Of Lemons

Fifty years ago, I used brake fluid to remove paint from plastic models. It was messy, and it sometimes dissolved the whole model, or at least twisted it out of shape. Eventually I switched to Easy Lift-Off, apparently still available from Testors, which worked a little better, but these days, I pretty much avoid painting whenever I can, especially because factory paint jobs are so much better. But here's an old Varney car that didn't quite make it out of the brake fluid:

Before I tossed the whole thing, I remembered I'd seen photos of hoppers whose backs had broken. This was common enough that railroads had elevated tracks in yards where the loads of bad-order hoppers like this could be dumped into cars in better condition and continue their journeys, so I decided to push on with this one. I even replaced the cast steps and grabs with brass ones.

I lettered the car with a Herald King Decal set. The big question was what color Westmoreland Coal carx were. I think the Herald King instructions said the car was red, and I probably used Floquil Zinc Chromate Primer for this one. However, manufacturers mostly did models in black, including Old and Weary Car Shops and Micro Trains. Bowser, though, did a model gon in red. Protutype photos seem to go both ways:

Playing Catch-up With ACI Labels

I finally realized I have to start playing catch-up with putting ACI labels on my equipment from the 1960s and 70s.

The Kartrak system with ACI color-coded labels was an unsuccessful program that lasted from 1968 to 1978, so it covered the period of the first big mergers, N&W, PC, ICG, BN, SCL, Chessie System, etc. It apparently failed for two reasons, fist, the ACI labels got dirty and unreadable, but more important, the program required labels on all cars, but it didn't require the railroads to install readers. So it never quite got going.

I think I stopped putting ACI labels on the cars that should have them when I ran out of the Micro Scale decal data sheets that carried them. For many years, they were the go-to source, but eventually Micro Scale became hard to deal with.

I looked at the current sources, and for now, the least expensive is from K4 Decals, whch I'm using for the current project.

Back when I was modeling in the 1960s and 1970s, it was hard to find photos that showed where specifically the ACI labels were mounted on a particuiar prototype car. These days, with internet sources like the Fallen Flags site, this is much easier.

In Praise Of Walthers Mainline

I recently picked up two Walthers Mainline SD60s that a retailer seems to have been anxious to clear out. I assume these were the least popular roadnames from the last run, and they let these sound-and-DCC locos go for roughly half price.

Between the paint and drives, I'll take just about any roadname, especially since for some decades, pretty much any roadname can turn up on any prototype railroad. The paint is even, opaque, and sharp. The sound is budget, reduced-function, but that's fine, especially for a trailing unit. The only CVs I need to tweak are CVs 3 and 4, acceleration-deceleration momentum. which I switch to 0, simply because I'm used to it as an old DC operator.

For some time, I've noticed that the Walthers quality assurance is head and shoulders above the competition. It's been some years since I had a loco with a missing part (a cab side window), and Walthers supplied a new one by return mail.

Track Cleaning Hack

The problem with track cleaning cars is that if the track is dirty enough to need cleaning, the loco pulling the car is going to have spotty performance on the dirty track. Sometimes I daydream about getting a radio controlled battery powered "dead rail" loco for this purpose, but it suddenly dawned on me that I could hook a 9 volt battery onto an ordinary HO diesel chassis and have pretty much the same result at far less cost and trouble.

I wound up ordering a 3-pack of what Amazon calls a DAIERTEK 9V Battery Holder with on-off switch at $6.99. I used an old Stewart/Kato F-unit chassis that had couplers mounted. I disconnected the ttrack leads from the trucks to the wire bus on the plastic mother board and soldered the leads from the battery holder to those same wire leads. I installed a 9 volt bettery, taped the holder to the chassis, turned the on-off switch ON, and it went whirring away.

I can turn the Stewart chassis back to a model loco simply by untaping the battery holder, unsoldering the battery leads, and reconnecting the track leads from the trucks, but I would probably add a DCC decoder if I did this. If the whole idea doesn't work out, that's what will happen.

My layout cleasrances are set up for "Ezceeds Plate C" auto parts cars and such, and the battery holder has no trouble with tunnels and bridges.

My main line is an oval in a sort of double folded figure eight, about 160 feet. At 9 volts, the Stewart chassis runs at a medium-slow speed, which avoids derailments. It takes several minutes to do a complete transit of the main line. A big advantage is that the layout has really too much hidden track, but this setup will clean in the tunnels. The hookup works on 2% grades on the main line.

The photo shows it coupled to an A-Line track cleaning pad mounted in an Athearn box car. I've also used it with a Bachmann track cleaning tank car. So far, it seems to need at leastr a dozen transits of the main line to get things in acceptable shape. Full testing is still under way.