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

[tpatrick]

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.

[leighant]

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.

[leighant]

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.)

[vsmith]

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.

[Anonymous]

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

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

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 where two cars going opposite directions pulled out to pass. As a kid I saw the results of enough of these accidents on our way to Atlantic City to really scare me.

Concrete and metal bridges, outside of towns and cities, had almost no clearance between the driving lane and the bridge. Someone hanging thier arm straight out the window could easily break it. And there were no guard rails preventing you from aiming your car directly into the steel or concrete.

I have some reasonably accurate 1950's Pennslyvania state roads on my layout. Many younger visitors point out some obvious safety problems like I have stated above and tell me that I need to correct them. I simply reply that the roads are accurate for the time being modeled, and that all of the safety devices build into our modern roads were discovered to be needed the hard way.

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

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

[Jetrock]

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.

[orsonroy]

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).

[Anonymous]

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.

[CBQ_Guy]

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!

[Anonymous]

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...

[Anonymous]

From a child of the 50's:

UHF TV didn't come along until the 60's, for all practical purposes. The outdoor antennas were generally yagi type, with a number of parallel elements of decreasing length on a 4-5' center bar, or a beam/dipole-type that had one side looking like a X and the other side straight, usually on a 36" +/- to 5' long spreader bar. Got mounted on roofs and strapped to chimneys. Apartment houses and buildings would sometimes become veritable forests of TV antennas. And they all need to point the same direction (usually the spreader bar points at the station). Out in the country, there were few if any, and those that did exist were usually on tall towers.

Gasoline--don't forget Sinclair ("dinosaur") and Gulf, the various Standard Oil derivatives--it was broken up and ESSO was not necessarily the name on the sign--in the SW it was Humble, for example.

I remember home-owned drive-ins with curb service vastly outnumbering any chains you can think of.

A&P everywhere until Safeway sued under Sherman, then Safeways everywhere (I could make a comment on hypocrisy here, but I won't). Dime stores: Kresge, Mott's, Woolworth, M.E. Moses. And in virtually every small town at least in the SW, a Western Auto affiliate store.

And if you're doing TX and probably a few other states as well, the bank was locally owned with no branches (illegal). And nothing but beer joints in wet counties in TX--liquor by the drink was illegal.

Pizza was a non-entity.

Detached 1-car garages.

Local soft drink signs. Lots of RC/Pepsi/Nehi/Dr. Pepper signs in the SW.

And lots of wires and company-owned private phone booths along the tracks, usually at every siding and sometimes in between. Radio was just beginning to get accepted on the RR.

Hope this helps.

[fec153]

Twinkle,twinkle
one eyed car,
how we
wonder
where you are.
Burma Shave. From Miami to New York and beyond.
Flip

[fec153]

Gas stations - Pure Oil [supplied gas at Daytona and other race tracks].
Sunoco- octane went from-190 to 240 and a super high of 260. You
chose what grade you wanted by turning a dial.

Who else remembers that?
Flip

[lupo]

Thanks for the tons of info guys! [tup]
great links AlvieCo and Chutton01 !

QUOTE: twhite:
TV antennas got very popular in the very late '50's

what kind of antennas were these ? , I remember we had two different kinds on our roof when I was younger: big H like things - VHF I recall - and smaller garden rake style UHF antennas.
on apartment buildings did they have some kind of central antenna system, was it an antenna forrest on the roofs or were the indoor type antennas more in use ?

these VHF things would be easy to create soldering some wires and create lots of detail to the layout rooftops and skyline

[Anonymous]

In smaller towns in rural areas local merchants often operated the town's Sears (or Montgomery Ward) catalog store. You went into the store, said "I want one of these" from the catalog and they called it in and it was there to be picked up in a day or two. Most of them were just a regular small town store front with a Sears or Wards sign out front(or in the window). I grew up near St. Louis in the 50s and remember some of the gas stations were: Conoco (different logo than today), Phillips 66(different logo than today-the "66" was actually crooked), Shell, Texaco, Cities Service and a few lesser known ones. Most of them were locally owned, but sold the big oil company's gas. Ofter the sign had the oil company logo and "Jim's Conoco" or something like than on it. The further away from the city you got the more likely you were to be able to eat an an "A&W Root Beer Stand" as they were called. I never saw one in the city or in the closer in suburbs. We never heard of pizza till the very late 50s even though Dean Martin had a song in the early 50s with the words "When the moon hits your eye like a big uh pizza pie, thats amore." We thought he sang "like a big uh piece a pie". When we did hear about pizza it was called "pizza pie". I don't remember any taco places. In fact, I remember our forth grade teacher telling us about her trip to Mexico and explaining that tortillias were sort of like Fritos. None us us had ever eaten a tortilla. We had ONE McDonald's that I knew of in the very late 50s and the sign read "over 1 million served". On dates we would go to Steak 'n Shake so we could eat in the car. Some of the "car hops" were on roller skates. The only flashy paint schemes on freight cars I can remember was the Missouri Pacific box cars in the roads passenger colors (and darn few of them). The car dealers were less likely to carry multiple lines than today. The Ford dealer sold Fords, but the Mercury dealers' signs all said "Lincoln-Mercury". You bought your Plymouth from a place where the sign read "Desoto-Plymouth", in fact "your Desoto-Plymouth Dealer" sponsored Groucho Marx in a quiz show called "You Bet Your Life". Along about 1957 we began to see Volkswagon Beetles and an occasional English Ford or Fiat. There was also the Renault Dauphine. Renault was pronounced "ree NALT" in those days, NOT "ree NO" as their advertising stressed in the decades to follow. If you model that radio station as mentioned above, remember than, generally speaking, call letters east of the Mississippi start with W, west of the Mississippi they start with K. There were exceptions, but only the older, long established stations (KDKA Pittsburgh, WIL St. Louis, WDAF Kansas City, etc. small town stations usually fell into the W/K east/west division. A sign WMRR would be WAY OUT OF PLACE on a layout depicting Colorado or the Southwest, for example. This is an interesting thread. It has pulled up a lot of things I'd hadn't thought about for a while. Incidentally, Radio Shack was around long before the personal computer. Charles Tandy purchased the small Boston based chain sometime in the late 60s and turned it into Fort Worth based Allied/Radio Shack and then finally just Radio Shack. I worked for them in the mid 70s when they introduced the TRS-80, the first Radio Shack computer. IBM brought out the PC in 1981 (according to the December 20, 2004 issue of US News & World Report). Radio Shack used to be where we all went to get ALL those DPDT center off toggle switches for our layouts before DCC, and where the more electronically inclined bought all those transistors, resistors, capacitors and such for those electronic construction projects that appeared in Model Railroader in the 70s.

Here's hopping you ALL had a very MERRY CHRISTMAS and found some time to spend in the train room over the holiday.

[ericsp]

QUOTE: Originally posted by DSchmitt

Chains I remember

Sears Roebuck and Company
J.C. Penney
F.W. Woolworth
Western Auto

Gas sations:

Shell
Texaco
Beacon
Signal

Drive ins:

A&W Root Beer founded in Lodi CA, franchised in the 1920's with stores in Central CA, UT, and TX

Dairy Queen, founded in Illinois 1938, had 2600 stores by 1955, I know they were big in west Texas in the late 1960's, prpbably sooner.

Many chains then as now were regional, bnot national.

Was Beacon ever larger than a regional chain?

[DSchmitt]

Chains I remember

Sears Roebuck and Company
J.C. Penney
F.W. Woolworth
Western Auto

Gas sations:

Shell
Texaco
Beacon
Signal

Drive ins:

A&W Root Beer founded in Lodi CA, franchised in the 1920's with stores in Central CA, UT, and TX

Dairy Queen, founded in Illinois 1938, had 2600 stores by 1955, I know they were big in west Texas in the late 1960's, prpbably sooner.

Many chains then as now were regional, bnot national.

[chutton01]

Here's some very good pictures of the commercial district of a small town in Kentucky (Hazard, about 5000 people now) in the era you speak of:
http://hazardkentucky.com/1950_60.htm (look on the main page http://hazardkentucky.com to get pictures from other eras)

Also note that by 1950 Hazard had progressed to streetlights encased in globes on arms cantilevered from their own (unshared with other utilities) metal poles.
Hazard seems advanced and prosperous for a 1950s small town, more or less at the level of an upscale Long Island suburb of the era.

And best of all, when you go to the Hazard from Home Lumber page (http://hazardkentucky.com/new4/town.jpg) you find...Hazard had rail service [:)] !

[ndbprr]

One of the biggest things is mailboxes amd postal vehicles. They were khaki green as well as the uniforms for the workers. Also lots of payphone booths, no interstates, main streest were narrower. Check pictures of trains from the era.

[Anonymous]

Check out the RPI railroad clubs page, you'll find ALOT of information.

http://railroad.union.rpi.edu/

Alvie.

[cacole]

The types of roads would depend on what part of the country you're modeling. In my home town in the '50s, the city streets were brick, concrete, asphalt, dirt, or gob (coal strip mine waste), depending on what part of town you were in. This was a rural town of 3,500 population in Southern Illinois.

Buildings were a brick, two-story county courthouse in the center of the town square, surrounded by brick and wooden buildings, mainly two story, containing a Woolworth's 5 and 10 cent store, Hirsch's clothing, two movie theatres, the post office, barber shops, mom and pop restaurants, an independent hardware dealer, a blacksmith, insurance agency, two drug stores, two banks, doctor's offices, a volunteer fire department, two grocery stores, a ladies' wear, farm implements dealer, Ford dealership, GMC dealership, and other stores. The upper stories on nearly all of these buildings were apartments or storage space that had to be reached from the back alleyway via rickety wooden stairs.

Streetlights, if they existed at all, were bare high-wattage (200?) bulbs dangling under a metal reflector on the end of an arm sticking out from a wooden pole that also supported all of the electrical and telephone wires.

[Eriediamond]

I agree with all the above, but might add that those burmashave signs were all over the country and that barns were often seen with advertiseing such as " chew mailpouch ". Also might add that most small town shops were two and even three story wood or brick structures where the owners lived above there store. A lot of rural paved roads had no center sripes at all except at curves or intersections and towns. Railroad crossings often had hand cranked gates with a "watchmans" shanty. I remember one small town near where I lived had a four track mainline crossing with those hand crank gates and they hand red kerosene lanterns hanging on them and with the high volume of rail traffic that came through, that watchman earned his pay. I grew up on a dairy farm and our town consisted of about five stores, a feed mill, a railroad depot (mainly freight) and a small park with a two story gazebo. On Saturday nights a band played on the second story and there was enough room for a few couples to dance below. We pretty much went there after milking was finish and took a picnic supper and ate under the trees there. That was basicly our entertanment on Saturday nights. Of coarse us boys were more interested in the trains that came through more then the band. Nough reminising.

[twhite]

The cars started to get gaudy in the late '50's, but no imports. Lots of Chevy's, Plymouths, Mercs, and maybe a DeSoto or two. Convertables were really IN, especially with the younger crowd. In my area (rural mountain California), lots of pickups. Fords, Dodges and Chevy's. Neighborhood movie theaters, TV hadn't really taken over until 1959. Believe it or not, Soda Fountains. In drug stores. Mom and Pop stores, except for Wards, Sears & Roebuck, Western Auto and Red & White grocery stores. MacDonald's hadn't caught on yet (thank God!) but drive-ins with burgers that tasted as good as they smelled were all over the place, and yes, in some of them, the waitresses roller-skated out to the cars. Parks were cool, especially with some kind of historical statue, preferably on a horse. Park benches where you could neck, but only after dark. Skinny-dipping in a secluded area of the local river was cool, but only if you were an 8-10 year old boy, otherwise it was a scandal. High schools generally looked like two and three-story brick fortresses meant to keep you in all day, not let you out. Auto dealers had showrooms, they didn't park the good stuff out in an exposed lot. Churches were prominent and well attended. Almost every town had a central air raid shelter where you could go (usually the basement of the court-house) in case the Russians launched an Atomic Bomb. TV antennas got very popular in the very late '50's. Ranch-style homes started to come into vogue, especially if they had car-ports instead of garages. Oh, and yes--during the Christmas season, every department store worth its name had either Lionel or American Flyer displays in their windows. Electric trains were BIG--that's one of the ways that Dad and Son communicated, and believe me, having been a survivor of the '50's, that's how Dad and I started communicating. It lasted a lifetime.
Hope this helps.
Tom

[jhoff310]

not being a child of the 50's I cannot offer much advice. I did some research on my town thru newspaper articles and lots of pictures. a few things I can tell you
1.) Mini-skirts werent invented yet, keep that in mind when it comes to the ladies on your layout.
2.) most small 50's era town which had stoplights were mounted from the wires above, not the modern poles we have today.
3.) brick or asphalt roads were the things brick roads were from the 30's and 40's but depending on your towns financial situation,
4.) a 2 car garage wasnt very common
5.) swimming pools were few and far between
6.) a city water tower is almost a must, nothing fancy lifelikes blinking water tower will work perfect.
and last but not least
7.) most small towns had REA or a team track
thats my 2 cents, no i"m broke
Merry Christmas to all
jeff

[jrbernier]

Stephan,

I model the Milwaukee Road in the late 50's(SW Wisconsin). Some of my scenes have some early 60's, and some of my scenes have stuff that was gone in the early 50's - I just try to 'get the feel'. Here are some pointers:

o - Freight cars - look for 40' cars with a lot of 'box car red' paint jobs. Flashy paint schemes just started to arrive, but were not the standard. The 'flashy' schemes were basically box car red with 'slogans' or large color logo's at that time.

o - Paved roads usually has white stripes on the centerline(depends on locale), and grade crossing gates were white with black diagonal stripes. The red stripes came later. Also a lot of traffic signs were 'yellow'.....

o - Structures - most homes were 'white', and a lot of small town business structures were brick construction with lot's on sign's attached to the structure or painted on the walls of the building. The DPM and Walther Cornerstone line are very nice. Liberal use of 50's era signs(Microscale for example) are great for making that DPM building look different than the other guys....

o - I also have a streach of road scheduled to get a string of 'Burma Shave' signs(local upper midwest thing). Look at local maps and pick up on local county/township/state names. I have a Sinsinawa Yard, a Pecatonica river, Badger Oil, Wisconsin Power & Light, and a Tri-State Feed & Milling company on my layout. Most of these names were picked up from 'tourist' information of the area. Some folks have looked at my towns and swear they have 'been there' and seen the place. The fact is that none of the towns on my layout are models of any particular Milwaukee Road town! I have just mixed/matched familiar scenes that are typical of small SW Wisconsin towns.

I hope this gives you some ideas to work with.

Jim Bernier