Weathering - 1940s, 1950s

Steam locos are/were dirty animals.  Heck, my recent ride on the Durango and Silverton left me covered in soot after spending time in the "covered" gondola car.

 And first gen diesels weren't exactly clean beasts either.

1943 is not a good year to make generallizations from, as it was toughest year of WWII - there was even a question at that time if the Allies would win.  Every effort went strictly into supporting the war effort, and everything was on a make do basis.

After the war, many things got attention.  Take a look at the films shot in the 1950s; and things are A LOT cleaner.

gmcrail

 A number of folks have mentioned the shorpy.com photo site, and someone (sorry, can't remember who) posted a picture from there of the Bensenville, IL CNW yard, from 1943.  The first thing that smacked me between the eyes, was how absolutely grundgy everything was! Everything (and I do mean everything - even vegetation!) was coated with soot and dirt.  After perusing (and downloading) a bunch of the pictures there, I've come to the conclusion that those of us who model the transition era are totally inadequate when it comes to "weathering" our cars.  Heck, we can still see what colors the cars were originally! 

 Anyhow, it's something to think about...  Try clicking on the link above, explore the photos, and let us know what you think... 

Actually I have a number of books/photos showing much equipment in the 50's being very clean.

During WWII the railroads were under great presure to keep supplies moving, things did fall into disrepair and got very dirty. But after the war, the war profits were used for lots on defered maintenence and equipment upgrades. The early 50's was a time of much new equipment and good maintenence for the most part.

AND, there is a difference between dirt, which railroading has always been a dirty business, and deterioration - which has been rampant since the sixties, but was not so much so in the 50's or even before.

You are welcome to do as you like, but I will keep most of my weathering light for my modeled time of 1953.

Sheldon

While yard environs were indeed very dirty in appearance during the steam era, don't be misled into believing that most rolling stock was as well. Cars were repainted at very regular, relatively short, intervals and rarely looked even half as bad as the equipment that plies the rails today. And beware of period B&W photos, as the film's response to various colors and relative contrasts was often decidedly off and thus highly misleading.

What you did see were very dull, flat, finishes to most cars resulting from a rapid chalking of the paint. However, look at the cars' lettering and you'll typically find it bold and clear, right down to the smallest lettering. I have a couple of early WWII era color photos of yards showing many dozens of cars of all types, all relatively clean looking, even then.

The same was largely true of the road locomotives. During the first half of the last century both the railroads themselves, as well as an engine crews, normally took pride in the appearance of their motive power. Most were very well maintained and I've seen a couple of illustrations in books showing absolutely spotless steam engines with highly polished domes and brass appurtenances as late as the 1940's. It was only toward the very end of steam that locomotives were let go and became abused looking, rusty, hulks.

I certainly wouldn't argue that B&W photos can occasionally be found showing rolling wrecks and absolutely filthy locos and cars from that era, but that is not what the railroads' equipment typically looked like. Also, always keep in mind when examining old photos that many of the photographers who photographed railroad scenes before mid century were true artists and their images were designed to convey a mood, or feeling, rather than simply to document a scene. So...employ care in your model weathering, for as it is, too many of today's hobbyists are already over-weathering their pre-1950 equipment to the point of caricature.   

CNJ831

I suppose a fella could do a bit o' both?   If he wanted to depict a 1943 setting for a few weeks, or just an imaging session, he could haul out the 'overdone' items and give them their due.  Then, when he tired of that much more grungy look, he could jump forward to 1953 or something and substitute the much more subtly weathered rolling stock and engines.

It's a thought.

-Crandell

Nice photo, Cudaken, but just exactly what year does it date from? Being a color photo, odds are that its very near the end of the steam era (late 50's), when deferred maintenance of steam locos became the universal rule.

CNJ831

  Cannot give you any details CNJ, found it on the internet a few years ago when I was Big Boy nuts.

               Ken

CNJ831

Nice photo, Cudaken, but just exactly what year does it date from? Being a color photo, odds are that its very near the end of the steam era (late 50's), when deferred maintenance of steam locos became the universal rule.

CNJ831

Even at that I see mostly dirt, grime, spills, normal minor leaks, stains, etc. - I don't see much or any rust, deterioration, damage, peeling or rusted through paint, etc.

Seems like most of us agree and the evidence supports the view that from the 50's and back, things were kept in better shape than today.

Sheldon

I remember the 40's and 50's, my dad was an engineer for Santa Fe in yard service.  He wore bib overalls and my mother had a clean pair every day for him to wear to work that day.  He would come home at the end of his shift and look like a dirt bag.  Off came the overalls on the enclosed back porch and into the washing machine.  About wore mom out with the laundry.

On the other hand, I went to work with him a few times during those years, and I still remember dad with a handful of cotton waste wiping everything down on the mikado he had for a switch engine at Enid OK and making everything as clean as possible.  He did not allow anyone to smoke or chew and spit in "his cab".  When the diesels came and the steam went away, he switched to kakie (sp) pants and a work shirt, but still got pretty dirty.  The same housekeeping took place on the diesel.  It was during those days that I got to "run" my first diesel down the mainline heading to a grain elevator to pull loads.  What a thrill.  After that, I got several chances at the throttle as Enid was on a branch line and officials were scarce except for the agent who knew dad well and I was able to "run" the engine, but never with cars coupled on.

While in college in mid and late 50's I worked summers as an extra board car clerk, meaning I spent a lot of time in the yards walking tracks and recording numbers among other duties.  The cars were rather dull as CNJ mentioned, but they still looked better than some I see today.  No graffetti except for a few chalk drawings or marks.  After graduating from seminary I moved to Kansas to take a church, and ended up also working at the GOB in Topeka to supplement income.  That led to many trips down to the shops to see what was going on, that was a dirty place, and after Santa Fe sent me to IBM school, it led to a second career in computer programming and systems.

Bob

As long as we are on the subject, it might be useful to inform today's hobbyists how really inaccurate much of yesteryear's photographic record can be with regards to its being the basis for "accurately" weathering models.

Early 20th century B&W films were very deficient in red sensitivity and even when supposedly panchromatic film was introduced, it still had color shift/sensitivity problems. Then, too, many photo hobbyists did their own developing and printing, resulting in all sorts of "artsy", or accidental, distortions. The contrast shift due to the film's various bias in sensitivity, as well as the subject's lighting angles, often conspired to create all manner of distortions in the surface appearance of freight cars and locos.

Color print film for public use started appearing in the very late 1930's, but here too all the colors were a bit inaccurate and since most color film was being commercially processed, the photographer-hobbyist lost much of the control over the final printed image. Under exposure was very common, as was excessive contrast. Even after color transparency film became widely available in the early 1950's, color rendition, although better than with print film, was still often questionable. Cudaken's posted image clearly suffers from vignetting and under exposure, both of which could enhance the prominence of the locomotive's dirt and grime. Incidentally, photographs of U.S. RR facilities and equipment was pretty much prohibited during WWII (sorta like today, huh?), so actual WWII era RR photos are quite rare.

Further, as I pointed out upstream, many railroad photographers of the period were not documentarians as much as they were artists and they purposely skewed the appearance of their photos to tell a story, or create a mood (this is an especially big problem with some Depression Era WPA photographers' cityscape work). And don't neglect the fact that many motive power and rolling stock photos were prompted by an unusual/out-of-the-ordinary appearance of that particular car, or loco. Often it was the highly deteriorated, neglected, appearance as compared with other run-of-the-mill equipment that made the car/loco especially photogenic.

And finally not to be overlooked is the influence of a few widely recognized model railroaders of today who model the 1930's-1950's in a personal style that is dominated by excessive over-weathering and has influenced many other hobbyists to actually believe those models reflect the real state of affairs during that period. The 1930's, in particular, in spite of the Great Depression, was not a period when all commercial and residential structures somehow suddenly aged by half a century, lost most of their paint and roofing and became falling down wrecks. Similarly, all the vehicles weren't rolling rust buckets either.

All food for thought.

CNJ831

I can´t really reflect on how the US had it in the 30´s or 40´s, but I know for a fact that even if the depression came during the 30´s, there had been a war only one and a half decade earlier. The state of things weren´t all that "happy" as we have had in the period after WW2.

My family has been documenting the life around us for the last 90 years, and looking at the photos from the 30´s and 40´s there was a general state of "disrepair" all over. The only buildings that looks new was the ones that actually was just that!

Sure enough there wasn´t as much rust back then as there was later, but that must be because the lead paints used then was better than the newer stuff .

Another thing to ponder about, you can´t really judge how "dirty" the RR related buildings were by remembering how nice the suburb where you lived looked. Even today there is a major difference between industrial areas Vs. residential. Add to that a large amount of soot and other contaminants, and you have a totally different situation.

Sorry that I meandered off a bit....

An hour spent on rr-fallenflags.org would be instructive.  The photos are dated, and their subjects should be able to tell a story of sorts.  As John says, there were some serious photogs, mostly amateurs, whose hobby was photographing trains, perhaps collecting is a better term, and that means in imagery.  You'll see all kinds of states of cleanliness and age in those images.

What we don't know is when a given engine was last cleaned, shopped, or when it was first erected.  It stands to reason that an older engine, perhaps on its last assignment, would not be expecially well kept.  At the same time, an older engine newly sent out of shops should look pretty good.

But I would think hardworking drag engines, with the huge throughputs of both coal/oil and water over even a month, and with sanding, would look pretty grungy in short order.

-Crandell

Ignore Shorpy as a source; 90% of their photos are just lifts off of the Library of Congress website. In this context, look through EVERY color photo in the Farn Services Bureau photo collection:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsachtml/fsowhome.html

Next, head over to the Charles Cushman color photo collection at the Indiana University website:

http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cushman/index.jsp

Anyone who claims to model the "transition era" (actually, the late STEAM era of 1936-1949) really needs to STUDY these photographs. ALL OF THEM. For example:

The key point of interest in all of these photos is the relatively large level of grime. Modelers don't weather their steam-era equipment enough! I don't mean cartoonlike and generally inaccurate weathering like John Pryke or George Sellios, but realistic weathering as seen in these photos and thousands of others.

Yes, yards were in general dirtier than the rest of the railroad. BUT...the entire ROW should be (in general) dirtier than its surroundings to at least 100 feet to either side of the tracks. There are Pennsy photos in several of Don Ball's books that show areas away from yards where a house SEEMS clean from three sides, but is 100% black on the trackside walls.

Yes, there certainly are clean things in each photo, and in life in general. BUT...look through every photo of Chicago in the Cushman archive, most of which have nothing to do with railroads. Guess what? The United States ran on coal heat and vehicles spewing gas & diesel fumes the likes of which we haven't seen since the EPA started banning things left and right in the 1970s. Things that wouldn't usually get washed (brick buildings, line poles, roads, etc) were generally far more filthy than any of us have seen in decades, and we tend to forget that fact.

Things started getting cleaner after 1960. Steam was dead and the coal industry in general was dying. While there are still some places in the east where you can find coal-burning furnaces, they've been wiped out in the rest of the country due to better electrical grids and cheap LPG. In the first half of the 20th Century almost EVERY factory had its own coal power plant (as did schools, hospitals, etc). That all died once natural gas lines were installed. No more coal soot belching every 1000 yards means things started to get cleaner. Different paints on freight cars (which generally did NOT get repainted after steam died) meant that soot didn't stick as well.

So the original poster's idea is generally right: thiings were a LOT dirtier before about 1960 or so. Coal soot is the reason.

And as an aside, freight cars in the steam era were generally repainted every 7 to 10 years, and with the exception of reefers, were NEVER washed. So yes, you should have a mix of new cars, slightly dirty, dirty, and absolutely filthy cars, all in about equal numbers.

 There must have been some interesting weather patterns back then. Take a car pulled behind the loco Cudaken posted after a few months of drought and have it rain. The black streaks would of course look like the last post.

I didn't know they had color film back in '43 Real good shot, that's for sure

 Not only did they have color film, they had color movies.  The wizard of oz was made in 39

I knew about the Wizard of Oz movie being in color, but I thought color film was restricted to movie sets at the time

orsonroy

 

Yes, there certainly are clean things in each photo, and in life in general. BUT...look through every photo of Chicago in the Cushman archive, most of which have nothing to do with railroads. Guess what? The United States ran on coal heat and vehicles spewing gas & diesel fumes the likes of which we haven't seen since the EPA started banning things left and right in the 1970s. Things that wouldn't usually get washed (brick buildings, line poles, roads, etc) were generally far more filthy than any of us have seen in decades, and we tend to forget that fact.

Things started getting cleaner after 1960. Steam was dead and the coal industry in general was dying. While there are still some places in the east where you can find coal-burning furnaces, they've been wiped out in the rest of the country due to better electrical grids and cheap LPG. In the first half of the 20th Century almost EVERY factory had its own coal power plant (as did schools, hospitals, etc). That all died once natural gas lines were installed. No more coal soot belching every 1000 yards means things started to get cleaner. Different paints on freight cars (which generally did NOT get repainted after steam died) meant that soot didn't stick as well.

There always was something distinctly unusual about Chicago's appearance, undoubtedly from its being the center of U.S. rail activity, that set it apart from other cities. From WWI onwards it was undoubtedly the filthiest city in America up through the end of the steam age and I've seen photos of downtown, with buildings even well removed from the yards, where it appears that the fronts had literally been sprayed with soot (look at Al Capone's HQ, for instance)!

This definitely was not the situation in NYC, Albany, Boston, Hartford, or Washington D.C. during the same period; all locations that I was familiar with at the time. I grew up and travelled around the Northeast a good deal during the 1940's and 50's and can say with assurance that I never saw anything even vaguely similar to the photos I've seen subsequently of steam era Chicago. The fact that my father was an avid model railroader at the time resulted in my attention being called to all things railroading in those years, so I really was taking notice of conditions.

While the tops of freight cars certainly were discolored by soot from the locomotive over time, a lot of what looks to be dark grime on the sides of various cars is more the results of paint deterioration since you'll notice that the car lettering, even on the coal hoppers, is usually not darkened to any great degree. Certainly, you don't see much in the way of totally obscured heralds, road names, car numbers, etc. on the period cars the way you do on so many cars today and these features would be the first to show fading from heavy weathering. Similarly, although steel cars of certain designs did have rust problems even back then, they were nothing like the rolling wrecks we see hobbyists modeling today's roads depicting with their models.

All that said, I would continue to advise caution in the weathering of steam era equipment and their surroundings.

CNJ831 

I have a few photographs from around here taken during the 1940's/50's that showed a lot of white houses with coloured shutters and such. The downtowns here were actually a lot cleaner than some would imagine.

I guess it would depend on the area--I can see some heavily coal based areas being a little more 'grubbier' but all in all no where near the disaster areas some have pasted the scenarios

Accually, now that I look at these photos that have been on the links posted, that has sort of helped me out quite a lot. I have been planning on building a model railroad during WWII, but I had no clue as to how weathered everything was. I guess I'll plan to shoot for 1942-1943 or so.

the North East Rail Modeler

I knew about the Wizard of Oz movie being in color, but I thought color film was restricted to movie sets at the time

Here's a link to pics of that era:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/72157603671370361/

 I'm glad to see so many responses.  I want to assure everybody, that I wasn't trying to denigrate anybody's weathering efforts; just pointing out some possible ways of looking at the subject.  Heck, I'm just as guilty as anyone of under-weathering, and of having green weeds next to the roundhouse , and everything just too darned clean. 

And just for the doubters (CNJ831?) the photos I was referring to were in color, by a photographer named Jack Delano, for the U.S.War Information Office.  And not only was there color photography in WWII, there was color photography in WWI, as well.  Check some of the ones in Shorpy's LOC collection of photos of that conflict.  In WWII, quite a bit of the combat movies and stills were in color.  BTW, I didn't go to the Library of Congress because I ddidn't want to download 20- to 200MB files.

I know that things were quite a bit cleaner in the 50s, particularly the latter half of that decade,but still, anywhere steam was active there was soot, coal dust (or the oily soot of oil-fired locos, including diesels), in addition to the normal grime of railroading.

Anyway, happy weathering, and I hope I've given folks something to think about...

Here's some additional situations worth taking into serious consideration in regard to this discussion, although they tend to relate more to structures and the environment than railroad equipment's appearance during the 1940's and 50's.

Beginning around the turn of the last century, a multitude of cities large and small began instituting smoke abatement laws which drastically limited, or in some cases prohibited (as in NYC's case), the issurance of smoke and soot from steam locomotives within city limits. This was increasingly the case on the east coast and probably the larger cities on the west coast as well as time progressed. I'm not familiar with abatement practices in the mid west, but from the appearance of Chicago in period photos, I suspect they had no such laws in place. Was Kansas City perhaps in the same boat?

As a result of abatement laws, eastern urban areas became increasingly cleaner post WWI, whatever soot having been deposited from earlier RR operations having washed away over time. In addition, many railroads also became increasingly conscious of the clean-burning operation of their locomotives all along their routes in the first decades of the 20th century. 

Thus, one really needs to investigate the practices of the particular railroad being modeled and its actual impact on its surroundings before choosing the degree of weathering to apply to their models to represent the 1940's-50's, rather than simply adopting a blanket weathering approach to equipment and infrastructure.

CNJ831

CNJ831

There always was something distinctly unusual about Chicago's appearance...that set it apart from other cities. From WWI onwards it was undoubtedly the filthiest city in America...

This definitely was not the situation in NYC, Albany, Boston, Hartford, or Washington D.C. during the same period; all locations that I was familiar with at the time. I...can say with assurance that I never saw anything even vaguely similar to the photos I've seen subsequently of steam era Chicago.

Hmm...looks like you're right. Looking through the Cushman photos clearly shows that NYC was overall cleaner than Chicago. While I wouldn't call what I'm seeing in NYC "clean" I wouldn't call it grubby either.

Chicago DID have a smoke abatement program, which is why the IC electrified their commuter lines south so quickly, and why they dieselized their passenger trains into the city largely before 1950. But it doesn't seem to have been enforced; the B&O and GTW at least were running steam into the city daily into 1959.

I grew up in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. I've never wanted to model that period, simply because everything WAS so filthy. I think growing up in a specific region might indeed skew your outlook towards modeling!

However...don't think that the rest of the country was cleaner than Chicago. Altoona might well be the dirtiest place on Earth in the steam era, and it's modeled more often than Chicago. Just about every rust belt city was grubby, from Buffalo to Erie to Toledo. Places like LA and Dallas would be far cleaner, since those cities relied on electrical power more than coal power.

While the tops of freight cars certainly were discolored by soot from the locomotive over time, a lot of what looks to be dark grime on the sides of various cars is more the results of paint deterioration since you'll notice that the car lettering, even on the coal hoppers, is usually not darkened to any great degree. Certainly, you don't see much in the way of totally obscured heralds, road names, car numbers, etc. on the period cars the way you do on so many cars today and these features would be the first to show fading from heavy weathering. Similarly, although steel cars of certain designs did have rust problems even back then, they were nothing like the rolling wrecks we see hobbyists modeling today's roads depicting with their models.

In general, all true. Most weathering on steam era cars comes from the combination of paint chalking, soot accumulation, and road spray. Virtually nothing should have peeling paint or rust. Wood cars usually got darker, since as the paint deteriorated the wood would get water-logged. Peeling paint on wood cars was still almost unheard of.

All that said, I would continue to advise caution in the weathering of steam era equipment and their surroundings.

Or as I always advocate, model from period photographs as much as possible! Don't rely on "modeling from the models", or on memory, especially if you want things to look right!

orsonroy

CNJ831

There always was something distinctly unusual about Chicago's appearance...that set it apart from other cities. From WWI onwards it was undoubtedly the filthiest city in America...

This definitely was not the situation in NYC, Albany, Boston, Hartford, or Washington D.C. during the same period; all locations that I was familiar with at the time. I...can say with assurance that I never saw anything even vaguely similar to the photos I've seen subsequently of steam era Chicago.

Hmm...looks like you're right. Looking through the Cushman photos clearly shows that NYC was overall cleaner than Chicago. While I wouldn't call what I'm seeing in NYC "clean" I wouldn't call it grubby either.

All that said, I would continue to advise caution in the weathering of steam era equipment and their surroundings.

Or as I always advocate, model from period photographs as much as possible! Don't rely on "modeling from the models", or on memory, especially if you want things to look right!

Yes, indeed. And let me point out yet another factor that weighed heavy on the difference in appearance between various areas of the country during the steam era and which can mislead the modeler if not considered. In the northeast and mid Atlantic states, anthracite coal was widely used in both the firing of locomotives and for home heating. This "clean burning" form of coal created only a small amount of soot when burning. Areas that saw its use would show decidedly less evidence of soot deposits.

Bituminous coal, on the other hand, was favored in the mid and far west because of local availability. It has high production of soot and other undesirable byproducts liberated during its burning. The fact that it was widely used by midwestern railroads at least in part is responsible for the appearance of the environs of Chicago.

The situation is dramatically illustrated in both many railroad PR and Hollywood movies of the era. I've watched a great many films involving railroads over the years and found the following nearly always true. Freight trains from the eastcoast are seen pulling relatively clean rolling stock and many eastern (particularly from NY and New England roads) locomotives are observed producing mainly white smoke and often even little of that. Contrast that with what is commonly seen in the west: locomotives spewing out vast clouds of inky black smoke trailing over miles of terrain. I appreciate that for the purposes of drama, Hollywood sometimes had this done on purpose, but that wouldn't be true of the PR films.

I fully agree that photos can often be the ultimate source of reference for weathering, but they must pertain to the specific railroad, or at least the geographic region, you happen to be modeling. At the same time, one must also have some appreciation of what shortcomings the films employed (particularly B&W ones) may have been susceptible to, as well as the circumstances contributing the the scene's appearance. 

CNJ831   

 The time of year has a lot to do with how grimy and dirty things get. Planes, trains and automobiles, especially those used in industry get just disgusting through the winter the months. On one of my favorite sites, the dates of photos are usually displayed, and those steamers look a lot shinier in the spring and summer shots.

There is a train wash I often see in action in Vancouver. The VIA Rail cars are a real mess in the winter months and take an extra blast from a high pressure hoses to get them clean. In the summer it's a quick run through and they're clean.

                                                                  Brent