Cathead

With respect, this is a somewhat combative and unhelpful response. Please read the link Chris provided, as this community gets a lot of questions just like yours, unfortunately from people who are convinced they have something of great value just because it's old and/or has a family history. The folks here are extremely knowledgeable, and if they tell you something at odds with your hopes, it might be well to keep an open mind. Of course we don't know what you're dealing with when you haven't provided any photos or clear information about your specific model. The link you posted is to what is, sadly, a laughably inaccurate toy-like "model" that bears the same resemblance to a real, scale model ship as a child's toy does to a scale model aircraft. Such items can be quite attractive and can have significant personal appeal/value if they have a family history, but they are no more "scale models" than a Black Forest nutcracker bought from a tourist shop is an accurate scale representation of an 18th century German hunter or a valuable work of art. I'm going to assume you mean halyards, the lines used to raise and lower sails? These are different from the braces, used to control the angle of the yards (spars) from which the sails are hung, and other rigging. The Etsy links you shared show models that have wildly simplified rigging that bears little resemblance to anything a real square-rigged ship would have had, essentially the equivalent of an armor model with a dowel poking out of the turret labelled "boomstick". The Etsy model appears to have a primitive form of braces (run from the tip of the yards), whereas halyards would primarily run parallel to the mast. You can absolutely restore this model to look nice, and give your friend some piece of mind that a model associated with fond memories of her granddad can be displayed happily. What you can't do is turn it into a "scale" model in any meaningful way. If those Etsy photos are comparable to what you have, I'd suggest using those as a guide to restore the basic rigging to something similar, using whatever model rope source you like. Honestly, thread from a craft store would be just as effective and more budget-friendly. Rather than trying to do it to a non-existent scale, I suggest measuring the existing rigging or other parts, then simply purchasing the closest size you can find. The goal should be to restore the model to its prior appearance, not to make it "accurate". If sizes in metric are throwing you off, there are various online calculators that can help you with that. Again, if you post photos, dimensions, and other specific information, and keep an open mind, people here will be very happy to guide you with suggestions on how best to repair/restore your model.

This actually has a connection to Rocheport. Readers will good memories may recall that the huge warehouse behind the grain elevator was a massive hay barn used for feeding livestock being shipped on the Katy.

To add to what Ken said (thanks!), some model railroads will operate with two-person crews per train, to better simulate the engine crew / conductor dynamic. One person actually operates the locomotive, the other handles the paperwork and is in charge. This has several advantages: it lets more people take part if you have a lot of interested operators, it's more realistic in terms of recreating the teamwork necessary to actually operate a train, and it divides up the work as one operator juggling a throttle and paperwork and timetable and uncoupling and turnout operation and everything can actually be too much for one person (just like on the real thing). The whole blocking question is fun because it's a good example of how different model railroaders approach the hobby. In some cases people intentionally change things to make the work "harder" because, as a hobby, it's more interesting that way. So an unblocked train arriving in Rocheport would be an annoyance on the real thing, whereas on the model layout it's potentially a perk if the operator enjoys switching puzzles. Track plans are another example. In real-life Rocheport, as elsewhere on the Katy in this era, almost all sidings were double-ended (a turnout at each end) to make switching easier. But I took out the east-end turnout on my layout to make that a long one-ended siding, because that's more interesting to operate from a model perspective. If both ends had turnouts the work in Rocheport would be over too fast! It also saved some space that I wanted for more scenery.

I agree, the paint really begins to transform the look toward something finished. Nicely done.

Rik, great questions. Just to clarify, the waybills I'm using here aren't exactly what a real railroad used, they're simplified and adapted to a model railroad context. And while I designed this exact version, it's heavily drawing on a system developed long ago for model railroading by very smart people. What these model waybills do is allow a modeler to simulate the way a real railroad generated paperwork to direct how business was generated and moved over the railroad, whether or not "waybill" was used. And every railroad did things their own way. There are model railroaders who really strive for accuracy and duplicate the exact paperwork forms their prototypes used. I'm not quite at that level! But doing it this way gives you a more realistic feel than "let's put that car over there today". That being said, you are correct that good people were very important in this system! My understanding is that in this era, there would be a station agent at each depot whose general job was to deal with all the railroad's business, from generating business (e.g. "selling" transportation services to local businesses) to handling paperwork and orders to selling passenger tickets. Obviously with some staff in larger towns. By the 1900 era of this layout, the Katy had telegraph wires run along its route, so that facilitated communication. I honestly don't know how it worked pre-telegraph, other than slowly! In the layout-contemporary photo below, you can see a telegraph pole and wires on the river bank side of the tracks. Most railroads were organized into "divisions" covering a certain distance (often roughly 100 miles in this era), and each division had its own central office, railroad crews, maintenance crews, etc. My understanding, though I'm not an expert in this, is that local station agents reported up to divisional offices, which handled the central paperwork to generate traffic on the railroad. So if I'm correct, the Rocheport station agent would submit reports and requests for shipments (or empty cars) up to the division office (in Franklin), where that information would be collated with all the other comparable info coming from all the other stops in the division. Basically the division office would develop a daily sense of all the traffic needed and being generated on their division, decided what they could handle on their own (e.g. are there empty cars within the division they can draw on) and then communicate with higher authority to coordinate additional traffic to and from the division. That's why there's a yard associated with the division office in Franklin, because that's where cars are picked up and dropped off from farther locations to be sorted and then delivered locally (or collected into blocks of outbound cars). Think of the division and its yard as a regional postal service center that sorts packages for local delivery or outward shipment, and station agents and their depots as local small-town post offices. Especially in the pre-truck era. Beyond that my knowledge fades and I can only logically assume that there's a central office for the whole railroad that helps coordinate shipments, billing, etc. There are some other model railroaders in this thread and they may be able to correct or confirm what I've said here. My knowledge has been primarily gained in a model railroad context, which tends to emphasize on-the-ground operations and not necessarily the full hierarchy of how that information is handled. In other words, model railroaders tend to focus on the role of engineers and conductors actually operating the trains, who are given a set of paperwork orders telling them what to do, which is what my waybills are. In the same way that model shipbuilders tend to focus on the construction and daily operations of a given ship, but less on the infrastructure and logistics it took to maintain a dockyard or coordinate naval movements throughout an entire service Those aspects might well be interesting, but they're not essential to the model itself. In the same way, a waybill system like mine is essential to recreating reasonably realistic railroad movements in a local context, but aren't necessarily built on a complete reconstruction of the railroad's business structure. It's just understood that the business orders came from somewhere and our job is to enact those orders on a day-to-day basis on the ground. Lastly, there are all sorts of levels of complexity in how model railroaders implement operations. What I'm doing here is a sort of middle ground. At the simplest level, some people eschew paperwork altogether and just use colored stickers or pins on the cars to make movements solely a simple visual puzzle, or they don't care for switching much at all and just run trains as a railfan. At the other end, there are computer programs that let you generate and track car movements layout wide, more like what a central office would do, and print out all sorts of customized instructions just like a central office presumably would. And again there are folks who duplicate all the real paperwork a real railroad used, including all sorts of extra details I'm not even beginning to address here. Just like in model shipbuilding, there are lots of rabbit holes to go down or lots of ways to keep things simple, as preference dictates. Hope that long brain dump helped, and I hope other readers will correct anything I've mis-stated.

OK, last week I promised a different explanation of how that operating session worked, so here's a graphical approach. We start with the Rocheport track diagram. There's one siding (1) with five places for freight cars to be set out for loading or unloading. [1] is a team track used for unloading anything from coal to wagons to lumber. [2] serves the grain elevator. [3] is the depot's freight house. [4] and [5] serve the stockyard. How do we know where to set out cars? Here are two examples of waybills. There's one per freight car, and they slide into a pocket on the car card so that you can only see the top half (we'll get to the bottom half later). The first one tells us we have a car headed to Rocheport, on consignment to a wagon dealer named W.W. Scobbee (a real Rocheport dealer at the time). See that "1-1" after the receiver's name? That tells us the car needs to be delivered to Rocheport's siding (1), spot [1], as shown on the diagram above. That's because this dealer doesn't have his own trackside warehouse, just receives individual shipments now and then. So this needs to go to the team track, where this fellow can pick up his new wagon. The second one tells us that this car has shipments for two different general merchandise dealers (again, real Rocheport businesses), and this one goes to spot [3] at the depot, which handles crated items like these (hand tools, canned groceries, clothes, whatever). Both cards also tell us that the cars came from St. Louis' Baden Yard, brought to nearby Franklin yard by a through freight, where they were sorted onto the local freight that brought them to Rocheport for final delivery. So what happens when it's time to pick up these cars? Between operating sessions, we flip the waybills over in their car card pockets. Notice how the first ones had a big 1 in the upper right corner? That tells us this waybill brings the car onto the layout to its destination. When we flip these over, we get a 2, which tells us that now we're in the second part of this car's movement, sending it back off-layout to some other destination. For example, if we'd loaded an empty boxcar with grain at the elevator, it might be destined for a mill in Chicago or St. Louis. In the cards above, both cars delivered a product on their first run, so they're now empty (MTY) and are being sent back. The merchandise boxcar at the depot goes back to an MK&T freight house in St. Louis, and the empty flatcar goes back to a yard in St. Louis until needed for some other job. In both cases, the local freight takes these back to nearby Franklin yard, where an eastbound through freight will pick them up and take them to St. Louis. So each waybill creates a realistic set of shipping/movement directions for each car on the layout, lasting for two operating sessions. Now let's summarize how this worked in practice. Thinking back to the photo essay in an earlier post, here's how we started. The diagram below shows each car with its number and location or destination. Grey cars are being picked up, white ones are arriving on the local freight currently sitting on the main line. So 65-2 is car #65 currently in spot [2], while 25-2 is car #25 that needs to be placed at spot [2]. 74-T and 49-T are through cars going to a different town; here they're just in the way! Notice that the arriving cars are all out of order; sometimes the Franklin Yard operator should deal with that, but today it's our problem. So the first order of business is to re-sort these cars into the proper order for delivery. Right now they're in order 3,1,5,4,2 but we need to end up with 1,2,3,4,5 on the siding. Below, we've taken the caboose and the two through cars and stuck them up on the passing siding as out of the way as we can get them, since we don't need them here. Then our locomotive does various sorting to get these in delivery order on the passing siding. Notice something odd? Why are they in order 4,5,1,2,3? Well, that's another fun operating quirk. Local railroad rules (e.g. mine) say you can't pull past the tunnel when switching here. So there's only room for the locomotive to pull three cars at a time past that left-hand switch just to the right of the bridge. So we placed the 4,5 cars first, so we can pull them past the switch, shove them into the far end of the siding first, then place 1,2,3 behind them. Just another part of the puzzle that makes operating interesting. So now all we have to do is pull all the departing (grey) cars from the siding, in two pulses because of the length limit, and stick them on the main line. Then we're free to deliver 4,5 and then 1,2,3 into the siding. Then we just stick 74, 49, and the caboose back on the end of our outbound cars, and our train is ready to depart for the next town. I hope that made sense. Please ask questions if not. This is a fairly simplistic version of operations; it can be made far more complex if desired. For example, a real railroad would do everything it could to avoid carrying empty cars. So instead of sending empty cars all the way back to St. Louis, it would be looking for a chance to send them somewhere closer to be re-loaded with something else. There are ways to simulate this more complex approach and I might implement those later, but for now this simple approach still makes for interesting railroading. The beauty of this approach is that it's highly flexible and customizable. I can create as many waybills as I want, setting up different car movements for different reasons, and keep swapping them out. I could have a given car need to stay in Rocheport for several days, getting in the way! Not all sites have to have a car picked up or dropped off every day. And I could even swap out one waybill for another between sessions. And all this is for just one town; if the layout expands, the same situation happens in other places, and once you add a larger yard like Franklin, a lot more sorting happens when you're actually dealing with all cars passing over the railroad, not just ones for a little dinky town like this. I realize this may seem esoteric to non-railroad-buffs. But think of it as a combination of historical re-enactment and mental/logic puzzle. Not only do you get to step back in time and experience live railroading in a given era, but you get a really fun mental challenge if you're the puzzle-solving type. My wife, who's a mild railfan, actually really enjoys these little operating sessions because she's a data scientist who gets easily drawn into logical puzzle solving. The railroad experience is just a bonus. Thanks for reading (or skimming?) all that. Soonish I'll have more actual modeling to show, as I'm working on various buildings.

As it turns out, I've worked as an editor for many years and have written freelance for various outlets, so writing this wasn't overly burdensome! It's still a good feeling to contribute to the historical record.

Fun news! I'm a member of the Katy Railroad Historical Society, which publishes a quarterly newsletter covering the railroad's history and various modeling projects related to it. The September 2025 issue publishes an article I wrote about the Peerless modeling project and its connection to the railroad. The newsletter is print-only, but they graciously sent me a PDF copy of the article with permission to distribute to people I know who aren't KRHS members (specifically including MSW members). If you're interested in reading the article, send me a private message through MSW with your email address, and I'll send you the PDF. Here's a screenshot of the first page to whet your appetite. Also cross-posting this on my build log for the Peerless. To send a private message on MSW, click a user's name to go to their profile, then look for the "message" button to the right of their username on the banner of that profile page.

Fun news! I'm a member of the Katy Railroad Historical Society, which publishes a quarterly newsletter covering the railroad's history and various modeling projects related to it. The September 2025 issue publishes an article I wrote about the Peerless modeling project and its connection to the railroad. The newsletter is print-only, but they graciously sent me a PDF copy of the article with permission to distribute to people I know who aren't KRHS members (specifically including MSW members). If you're interested in reading the article, send me a private message through MSW with your email address, and I'll send you the PDF. Here's a screenshot of the first page to whet your appetite. Also cross-posting this on my build log for the MK&T model railroad layout. To send a private message on MSW, click a user's name to go to their profile, then look for the "message" button to the right of their username on the banner of that profile page.

I dunno, man, ol' George seems unimpressed. Maybe you should hold him up so he can get a better look. Seriously, that's awesome. As Paul said, the color really jumped out as perfect to me. And it provides just the right touch of diversity in the overall consistent color palette.

Glorious work!

Keith, thanks and you're welcome! Rik, I think I might draw up a conceptual diagram of the operating session described above, to help people see in map view how things got moved around. Hopefully o over the weekend. It definitely is a very new way of thinking if you're not in this world and I want to at least convey the intellectual challenge and stimulation it creates.

OK, let's get to work. Our locomotive is going to start by sorting all the inbound cars into the right order for shoving into this siding. In some cases this pre-sorting might have been done in the yard to make the road crew's life easier, but that didn't seem to happen today, so they're all jumbled up (more busy work in the real world, more fun work for us). Below, we're using the near end of the siding as an extra place to stash a car while we sort things out. Keeping an eye on our MK&T timetable, we know we have to clear the main line for an express passenger train soon. So everything gets shoved out of the way while this passes through. One change I made from the real Rocheport is to designate the track nearest the depot as the passing siding, and have the main line be the track away from the depot (on the real thing the main line was in front of the depot). The actual reason for this is complicated and has to do with how best to arrange turnouts in this condensed scene, but there is real-world precedent for having a depot on a passing track. In my case, I can argue it makes sense because only slower locals stop at Rocheport so this lets faster expresses barrel right through on the outside track. Once all the inbound cars were sorted, we pulled all the outbound cars and started spotting inbound cars. Here the locomotive is shoving two empty stock cars toward the stockyards. Cars 74 and 49 in the foreground are going to a different town than Rocheport, so will just be left out of the way with the caboose until we're done. And another angle on that move, shoving the stock cars into the siding. And the final placement. With those cars shoved into the far end of the siding, we can place the other three cars at the western end. Here the locomotive is shoving in a boxcar of small freight for the depot, an empty boxcar for the grain elevator, and a flatcar with a new wagon for one of the local implement dealers. You may recall from an earlier post that all the businesses listed on my waybills are real ones found in the railroad's business directory, adding to the sense of realism. With all the inbound cars spotted, it's time to reassemble our train. Five outbound cars and two more to take to another town before returning west to Franklin. Let's grab that caboose and those two cars and stick them back on the end of our newly pulled five cars. Tacking the caboose and two final cars onto the rest. Our train is reassembled, but we can't leave yet, as there's a local passenger train due. We were smart enough to reassemble our train on the main this time, so the local can pull into the passing siding in front of the depot. Another view of this meet, with the short local at the depot and the longer freight ready to depart eastbound. Our freight heads east along the river bluffs... and our passenger local heads west toward Franklin. And that's what a simple one-town operating session looks like. The intellectual puzzle of sorting and spotting cars is quite fun, and it can be kept fresh time after time by simply altering the waybills for each card. Maybe next time there's a boxcar of apples to ship out instead of a wagon-loaded flatcar arriving. Maybe there aren't any livestock shipments. Maybe a boxcar has to stay at the elevator, meaning we have to move it out of the way, do our work, then put it back. So many iterations even in a small town. As the layout expands, operations get even more complex. As towns are added, trains have more places to actually go, and more work to do in those places. It gets more practical to run passenger and freight trains through, actually going places instead of just moving back and forth on a glorified diorama. Add in the larger yard at Franklin and suddenly you have a whole separate job dealing with all the long-distance freights as they stop to drop off and pick up local-destination cars. And so on. Long-term the full layout I have planned will keep 4-6 people happily busy for several hours. As it is, Mrs. Cathead and I (or any other friend) can run a fun little operating session in half an hour or so, a quick break from life to travel back in time to 1900, when steam whistles still echoed off the bluffs here. I hope you followed along on all that, and that it gave you a sense of what makes model railroading distinct from many other hobbies. Feel free to ask further questions, whether you're a model railroader with specific curiosity about something esoteric, or someone who wonders something more general about all this. Thanks so much for reading! There's still a lot of scenery and building to do, but this project is now at the actively fun stage.

OK, so things have progressed enough that over the last month or so I've run a few test operating sessions in Rocheport. I put a lot of thought into designing the track plan and the operating scheme for this layout, and the early results are that it's paid off as things are really working as I want them to. I could go really deep into the weeds of all sorts of planning details but that's not of primary interest to most of you right now. What I'm going to do here is an illustrated walk-through of a single local freight coming into Rocheport, doing all the switching necessary, and then heading on. This is the basic concept of an operating session, bringing an actual train into town and doing real railroad work in a way that's reasonably similar to how a real railroad would do it. I can't post video so you'll have to make do with the images below, which I took in sequence while Mrs. Cathead and I ran this session together. You'll have to imagine the sound-equipped locomotives as they huff and puff and whistle their way through the work. Also, keep in mind that scenery is nowhere near done and I have a lot of buildings left to complete, so town looks rather emptier than it should. Leading off, an eastbound seven-car local freight arrives through through the tunnel from the yard at Franklin, where its cars were previously dropped off by through freights that don't bother stopping at dinky little towns like Rocheport: Already in town are five cars waiting to be picked up: an empty gondola that had delivered coal to a local dealer, a boxcar loaded with grain from the elevator, a boxcar behind the depot that both dropped off and picked up small shipments (the UPS truck of the 1900s), and two stock cars loaded with livestock from local farms and ready to be sent to processors in St. Louis: Our locomotive starts to break down its train and sort cars for delivery. It's easy to just pick up all the outbound cars and take them back to the yard, but how do we know where each inbound car goes? The answer in this scheme is the car card and waybill system, very common in model railroading. What's presented here is a rough version I mocked up for testing purposes; I'll make better ones later when I'm satisfied. The pink slips are car cards, each of which represents a physical car on the layout. The waybills are little printed slips of paper that slide into a pocket on the car card, with information on where the car originated, what it's carrying, and where it needs to go. Back in Franklin, the yard engine would have switched all these cars onto the same track based on their final destination printed on these cards, and here in Rocheport, other printed lines tell us which cars are destined for Rocheport (vs other towns down the line) and which exact destination they go to. I also drew up a railroad schematic for Rocheport, which shows operators where each track is, what its official name/number is, where different car destinations are, and other relevant geographic features. Using the waybills and this map, you can figure out where any car is or where it needs to go. The numbers in the corners are the actual railroad mileposts. If you go back a few photos, you'll see this hanging on the fascia where it's easy for operators to consult. There's a little shelf hung from the fascia right in the center of town, where operators can sort and read the car cards and waybills as they do their work. This "desk" is a key featuring in making operations functional. Here you can see how it's laid out. Right now each track just has a cheap label, in front of which the car cards are stacked based on which track the cars are on. Soon those will be converted into little sorting boxes that will better hold the cards separate. With that explanation out of the way, we'll follow our freight as it switches this surprisingly complex little town. But I'll do that in the next post.

OK, this is going to be a long post (or maybe series of posts). It's finally time to talk about what makes this project something other than just a big scenic diorama: active railroad operations. The trick here is to make this interest for the model railroad folks, and intelligible to the non-railroad folks, without boring or overwhelming either population. Here goes. A core idea in model railroading is not just that you're creating a realistic static scene or model, but in addition, setting up a stage on which actual railroad operations can be conducted. In other words, you're not just recreating a look or an object, but recreating a full set of actions and operations that bring the feel of railroading back to life. There are decades of writing, theory, discussion, practice, debate, and experience in this realm and I'm not going to conduct a seminar here. But I do want to try and express how this idea and goal plays out in the design and implementation of this Rocheport module, and by extent to the rest of the planned layout if it expands. First, a reminder that Rocheport was a real place along the 1900-era MK&T. I'm reposting this image from earlier in the log, showing the route of the mainline. Coming from the west, it passes through the line's only tunnel, crosses the Moniteau Creek bridge, runs through town, encounters the depot and grain elevator toward the east end of town, then curves out of town to the east along some major bluffs hard up against the big river. What we're doing is recreating a version of how the MK&T might have operated its trains through and in this town. A reminder that the railroad's primary yard in this region was 10 miles west at Franklin, and a series of smaller towns with minor industries/customers stretched east from here along the river. And here's a contemporary view from the east side of town, showing the dual-track passing siding in front of the depot, and the single spur track behind the depot that serves all the town's possible freight customers, from the grain elevator to the depot itself to the stockyards to any other customer that might want a carload of something delivered or picked up (such as an apple shipper). MK&T traffic through town in this era would have consisted of (1) three passengers trains each way (some stopping, others expresses that didn't stop), (2) a certain number of through freights between St. Louis and points west and south (these also wouldn't have stopped), (3) livestock trains hauling local cattle and hogs to slaughterhouses in St. Louis, and (4) a local freight operating out of the yard in Franklin (10 miles west) whose job it is to switch small towns along the line like Rocheport. In a larger layout, I'd be focusing on recreating all this traffic when it really has somewhere to go (and the Franklin yard to interact with). Right now, with just Rocheport, the focus is on the single local freight arriving in town to pick up and drop off cars, then proceed on its way, while staying out of the way of any other passenger trains or through freights that might be scheduled to pass through while it's here. Yeah, that's long enough, this is going to be multiple posts. This one sets the stage, and in the next one I'll try and show what actually operating the town looks like.