San Juan Capistrano (The Model)

We model railroaders often tend to design phantasy layouts and cramp the available space with too many tracks and industries. OK, real estate is expensive and we don't want to waste it uselessly. Sometimes also we realize that what we designed and finally built doesn't work or in modelrailroad terms, cannot be operated realistically.

The "real" railroads spent millions to design their trackwork so that it may be operated and worked effectively. Not every industry along the tracks needed its own spur. Sometimes two or three shared one track. Turnouts are expensive and a hazardous spot on the mainline that could cause accidents or derailments. So their useage was well planned.

That's also my approach, and because I followed a real prototype there was no question about not using the original track layouts as far as possible.

Unfortunately most of the track is gone nowadays so I had to rely on published plans from the era I am modeling. Another great help are the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. These show all the buildings of a given date with the dimensions and designations for that particular town. Also the different streets are shown and of course the railroad tracks. For many buildings only a few more or less useable photos are available. But with the measurements of the footprints, they give us the two other dimensions we need to model these structures. The height is also easy to find out using know references like door and window heights or simply people. We don't argue about some scale inches here.

My map was dated 1928/29 and to my astonishment it did not totally correspond with later track layouts I have seen in related publications. This concerned the packing house in particular. My photos showed a much wider structure and it also had two loading spurs. The mainline was also double track because of the siding that was later added.

That's the point when I started the research part of it. Contacting the Historical Society of San Juan Capistrano made many more photos available than those already published. Slowly but steadily I collected the missing pieces of the puzzle.

Using the dimensions on the map and with a little modelers licence I've cut out the foundation for the depot and the platform.

I already had built the depot a couple of years before almost like it appeared in the early days. Unfortunately in the era I'm modeling, the depot bell tower and parts of the arches and roof were almost totally overgrown with ivy and weeds. So I decided to build another depot to fit my modeled era. I designed the foundation with a recess so that I may swap the depots if I want to move forward in time. The weed overgrown depot will be easier to build because the most difficult part - the bell tower - will only be a chunk of balsa wood.

Above is the track layout. I had to shorten the siding because of the curve around the peninsula. The loading tracks at the packing house are also a bit shorter than on the prototype.