Back in March, 2020, when all the COVID lockdowns began and train shows and RPM meets were all cancelled for the year, my friend Ron Christiansen built a private e-mail list of about 50 guys to talk trains.  He called it Ron’s Train Club.  Ron usually picked a subject and we talked about it for a few days, and then moved on to whatever Ron wanted to talk about next.  Ron also began hosting a weekly “Ron’s Train Club” Zoom call.  Anyway the new list took off, and it is still very active with hundreds of e-mails exchanged weekly.

One of the more prolific posters on Ron’s Train Club is Dave Nelson, a lifelong railfan and model railroader.  Dave sends photo essays to the group every week or two.  His e-mails usually include about 20 photos, lots of history, and some interesting stories.  They are terrific and I’ve saved quite a few of them.

The old tradition of “branding” the tanks at a bulk oil depot is not dead.  Put a tiger in your tank!

Thanks Dave, for putting this post together and allowing me to use it on the RPM blog!  – John G

The Crunden Martin Manufacturing Company is a large, multi-warehouse complex on the corner of Gratiot Street at 1st and 2nd Streets near downtown St. Louis that still stands like the Acropolis along the Mississippi River.

Crunden Martin forms the core of Chateau’s Landing, an industrial and restaurant district just south of the famous Gateway Arch.  Originally known as the Crunden-Martin Woodenware Company, the company moved to Chateau’s Landing in 1904.  The company made a huge variety of wood and wicker products; everything from mops to chairs to kitchen ware to buckets and a whole lot more, and expanded rapidly through the World War I years. 

The complex consists of six buildings and a seventh building connected by a covered bridge two stories over 2nd Street.  The first building–Building No. 1–was  commissioned in 1904, with the last building–Building No. 7–completed in 1920.  The complex was built with generous access to the nearby Iron Mountain Railroad yard, a Missouri Pacific predecessor. 

In the 1930s the company expanded to build “metal-ware” and larger items to include refrigerators, and built a large amount of military equipment during World War II. 

The images above and below are from Google Earth, and show the multitude of large buildings that made up Crunden Martin.  The building at the back, closest to the St. Mary Church and School, was damaged by fire a few years ago.  You can make out the collapsed roof.

The company was rail-served for its entire corporate existence.  Missouri Pacific had several sidings along the river and a curved track that extended between several of the buildings, and the Manufacturer’s Railway reached the opposite side of the buildings from street track on 2nd Street.

Below.  A Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, circa 1960s.  North is up; the river is on the right.

Above.  Looking north, next to the buildings, industrial tracks wound through the multiple spans leading along the waterfront and across the massive bridge across the Mississippi River.  In the heyday of the railroads, even more tracks and warehouses were located in this area.  Below is another view of Building No. 1, at right, along the river, with the remnants of the rail docks and doors visible in front.

Prosperity continued into the 1950s and 60s.  The company filed for bankruptcy in 1990 and the buildings have been closed ever since, except for the occasional lease for storage.  All seven buildings have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2004. 

Below is an aerial view from 1956.  Note the warehouses and team tracks surrounding the buildings on all sides.  Also the curved siding that went through the buildings can be seen.

Crunden Martin provides an ideal prototype location for consigning your model freight cars.  Inbound loads of lumber in box cars, gondolas or flat cars would be appropriate, along with inbound loads of lightweight steel sheet, machinery, packing materials, and other items.  Outbound loads of finished wooden goods of nearly every type in plain, uninsulated box cars would be standard.  Outbound loads of refrigerators and smaller metal stamped goods would also be prototypical accurate.  I have not determined if the buildings had their own power plant.  A power plant on site would provide additional opportunities for providing coal or perhaps oil.

More photos of the architecture are below.  Immediately below are six photos of the Gratiot Street side of the buildings.

This is the only photo I took of the Cedar Street side.  There was no rail service on this side of the complex but there are still many interesting doors, loading docks, smokestacks, fire escapes and fixtures to attract your attention.

Next time you’re in St. Louis and are crossing the Poplar Street Bridge on I-44/55/64/70, keep a sharp eye out for Crunden Martin.  – John G

I’m brewing up two new posts–one on scenery and one on the new coupler pockets recently released by Smokey Valley and Resin Car Works.

Meanwhile I’m excited to write about a factory building that’s still standing in St. Louis–the Benjamin Moore paint factory and warehouse on 2nd and Lafayette.  I ran across this building a few years ago and last year when I was back for St. Louis RPM I was able to photograph it all around in good light.

Here is a trackside view of the factory building, looking south down 2nd Street.

The factory has been around since the 1930s and was built adjacent to the original Monsanto chemical plant.  The original Monsanto plant sprawled across many city blocks and was a fascinating facility, and was served my multiple tracks from the nearby Missouri Pacific yard.  Benjamin Moore was served by a single siding off the Manufacturer’s Railway, which ran down the middle of second street as seen above.

Above.  Another view down 2nd Street, showing the  turnout off the Manufacturer’s Railway.  Below is a Google Earth view of the plant, showing how it consumes much of the city block.  The Monsanto plant was behind this building and to the right.

Above.  Another Google Earth view, showing the factory at top center.  The vacant lots full of trucks and school busses at center and lower center mark the location of the former Monsanto plant.  It was huge.  And below, here is a view from 1955:

According to a Sanborn map from the 1930s, the area to the right in the photo above–where you can see the large tanks and several tank cars–is part of the Monsanto lab and not part of Benjamin Moore.  The area at the far right is the large Missouri Pacific yard south of the city along the riverfront.

Below, here are close-up photos of all four freight doors.  I love the different vents, doors, windows, and fixtures along the freight dock side of the building.

The windows and doors below look quite clean and modern.  The building is occupied now by a wholesale office furniture company called RC Distributing.

The last photo above should give a little perspective.  See the Gateway Arch?  Below is a photo of the side of the building along Lafayette Avenue.

And finally, some interesting photos of the turnout off the Manufacturer’s Railway (below):

Above.  The turnout was thrown by lifting the door.  Below, note the three drain covers–two of which are centered between the track.

This is another good industry for modeling, and also for consigning cars to.  Box cars and perhaps tank cars could be routed to and from this plant.  The Sanborn map (not shown) also indicates the building had a steam power plant.  Perhaps the plant received coal by hopper or gondola as well.

I am a small-layout fanatic and am always planning small and micro-layouts in my head.  It’s a curse.  The other day I went to a doctor appointment in town and spent 20 minutes planning a switching layout on the coffee table in the waiting room.   As I write this I’m looking at my dining room table…thinking that if I used Code 55 15-inch radius on one end I could get a two-sided switching layout on this thing and…

I like the idea of small layouts that can support an operations session of about 30-45 minutes, such as the “RPM Layouts” developed by Clark Propst and Barry Karlberg which were shown and operated at St. Louis RPM.  Small layouts aren’t a new idea but what Clark and Barry are doing is novel; they built small, mobile, completely-prototypical layouts with sound and DCC and brought them to RPM meets for others to operate.  What follows here–eventually, after the discussion of the Woodward and Tiernan plant–is an example of a great candidate for a small layout featuring one of St. Louis’s largest manufacturers.

Above.  Barry Karlberg, left, brought his Wye layout to St. Louis RPM in 2017.  The great Charlie Duckworth is seated at right.  Both guys are retired professional railroaders.  Below are a few views of Clark Propst’s Allied Mills layout, which he brought to St. Louis in 2015.

A Little History of Woodward & Tiernan

The Woodward & Tiernan Printing Company building is located at 1519 Tower Grove Avenue in Forest Park just west of downtown St. Louis.  Consttuction on the building began in 1921 in a large vacant area in the south side’s Mill Creek Valley adjacent to the Missouri Pacific Railroad.   Construction was completed in 1926. The building was advertised as one of St. Louis’s most technologically-advanced manufacturing centers and was designed using the “daylight factory” design, which was a type of industrial architecture that grew to prominence in the U.S. in the 1920s.

Above.  An old Woodward and Tiernan newspaper ad, prior to construction of the plant in Tower Grove.

The Daylight Factory design was a revolutionary design primarily using concrete for construction.  The Daylight Factory design was also called “slow burning” design or the “mill design”.  The style consisted of large masonry buildings with concrete floors supported by massive interior concrete piers, with large windows around most of the building to provide light and cooling in the summer. Concrete floors were essential to the design because they are easier to clean as opposed to wood floors, which were commonly used in factories up to that time. Wood floors soaked up spilled chemicals and solvents and over time caught fire rapidly.  The large, thick, well-supported concrete floors of the Daylight Factory design did not burn or fail in a fire, and usually contained fires to a single room or floor, allowing more time for workers to escape and damage to building to be restricted.  The use of concrete allowed more spacious interiors and stronger support for large side-mounted and roof-mounted windows. In some cases the sides of the buildings used reinforced concrete members with brick outlines to allow easy fitting of windows and doors.

Above , a 2005 view of the plant.  At some point recently it was painted white, then unfortunately “tagged”.  Nevertheless this is a great example of the Daylight Factory design–all concrete construction with lots of windows.  The former MoPac, now UP, mainline is seen adjacent to the building.  Also note there are no loading doors trackside.  Rail service to the building was provided at the rear of the building on an elevated track.

The Woodward and Tiernan building is a perfect example of the Daylight design.  It is a massive three-story reinforced concrete building with large windows on all sides, a tiered roof with windows, and a brick façade front. It is 522 feet long and has an interior of 238,000 square foot interior.

Woodward & Tiernan was one of the leading printers in the United States for decades, printing maps, books, and just about anything that could be printed, and continued operations into the late 1950s at this site.

Railroad Service

Last month while I was visiting for St. Louis RPM I took the time to photograph around the huge Woodward building and some other adjacent factories. Woodward and Tiernan is strategically located adjacent next to the former Tower Grove Junction, where Missouri Pacific’s Oak Hill branch diverged from the main line west of St. Louis Union Station. The Oak Hill branch was a busy, heavily industrialized, double-track cut-off that allowed trains to and from the south to reach yards in center city adjacent to St. Louis Union Station. The Oak Hill line crossed the double-track Frisco mainline here, right beside the Woodward and Tiernan factory. In the steam days there was a single-story tower here that governed MP traffic across the busy Frisco. Joe Collias took a lot of photos here in the 1940s.

Below.  A view of the plant from the online Barriger National Railroad Library archives.  This view is from the back of a train heading away from Tower Grove Junction on MoPac’s Oak Hill line.  The massive Woodward and Tiernan building is prominent.  The Frisco main line tracks can be seen, along with the single-story interlocking tower (hidden behind the signal at left).

Below.  Here is another view from the Barriger National Railroad Library archives.  This shows the side of the Woodward and Tiernan plant, this time from the MoPac east-west main line.  The view is toward downtown St. Louis and St. Louis Union Station.  The complex of tracks by the overpass are the turnouts leading to the Oak Hill line.  St. Louis’s iconic Tower Grove Station, which served MoPac and Frisco, is just beyond the bridge.

A delivery track diverged from the MoPac main line to reach the back side of the Woodward plant.  Along the short route to the factory the tracks branched off to serve an additional three or four smaller customers. I’ll talk about these other customers in a later post when I do some more research.

Here are some modern aerial views of the plant and the surrounding area.

Above.  Here is a complete view of the plant today.  The MoPac (now UP) main track is at the bottom of the photo, with east (toward Union Station) at right.  The front of the building is on Tower Grove Avenue, which is at the far right over the photo crossing MoPac on an overhead bridge.  Rail service was provided at the back of the building at left.  Below is a view of the front of he building on Tower Grove Avenue.

Below.  A view of the rear of the building.  The plant no longer uses railroad service and is now the property on a small industrial contractor.  Note the smokestack which has been mostly demolished.  Coal was delivered in the small bay between the two buildings next to the smokestack, and you can just see that track on the bottom left of the photo just above the treeline.  A second track into the building entered just to the left of the truck at bottom.

Below.  A view from ground level, showing the ancient MoPac tracks going onto the Woodward and Tiernan property.  The track at left curves toward the powerhouse.  The track at right entered the building to the left of the truck trailers.

Above.  A view from a trade magazine showing the tracks entering the plant.  This is the bottom floor view only.  Note that the coal track does not enter the building, but the track for shipping and receiving does.  It’s hard to know how many cars could be delivered inside the plant, but considering scale I would say perhaps as many as four 40-foot box cars.

The Prototype Modeler

Inbound shipments would be consigned to Woodward and Tiernan, St. Louis, on the MoPac.  Inbound shipments would include carload lots of paper, boxes, material for building boxes such as lumber, packing material, ink, coal, solvents, machinery and other items.  In most cases inbound shipments would be delivered in box cars.  The occasional refrigerator car could be used during off-peak seasons if box cars are were not available.  I do not see a delivery track for tank cars so I would conclude that chemicals and solvents were delivered in barrels in box cars.

Outbound shipments could be consigned to anywhere, most likely to cities or large towns.  Products would be limited almost entirely to finished products, including books.  I speculate that outbound shipments were usually no more than a single carload, or in some cases LCL.

I’ve been playing around with a small layout idea focusing on the Woodward and Tiernan plant for some time, which would include some of the small factories on the siding into the factory.  I’ll publish that as soon as I can get a little more information.  I think this would make a neat, small switching layout that could be done well in about eight feet by 14-15 inches, with an add-on staging track.

More to follow soon! – John

Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, was a major industrial, ship-building, manufacturing and transportation center into the mid-1960s. The best known manufacturers in Camden were Campbell’s Soup and RCA Victrola, both of which had large factories downtown served by PRR.

When I lived in southern New Jersey in the late 1990s I often drove by an abandoned factory near Camden that was just north of US 30, near the corner of 16th Street, 17th Street and Mickle Ave. US 30 is now known as Admiral Wilson Boulevard. I finally stopped and photographed it in 2016 and thought you might enjoy the information.

This is the first of what will be a long series on US industries that fellow modelers can use for freight car/lading origin and destination.

This interesting building, located at 1764 Mickle Street in Camden, was the home of the Keystone Leather Company. The Keystone Leather Company was a large employer in Camden, manufacturing fine leather goods. This plant in particular manufactured “kid” leather, which was soft leather normally used to make gloves and other fine materials. The plant was built in the 1920s. It was located a block south of Pavonia Yard, which was PRR’s major classification facility in Camden. Maps and aerial imagery indicate the tracks that served the plant originated at Pavonia.

Above.  A postcard view of the factory in it’s heyday.  Below.  This is a view of almost the entire side of the structure that faces north along Mickle Street.

Below is an excerpt from a Sanborn map from about 1930.  Admiral Wilson Boulevard is now built between the creek and the Keystone Leather Co., running northwest-southeast.

Below.  This employee entrance was on Mickle Street.  See the Keystone symbol on top of the doorway?

Another entrance on the corner of Mickle and 16th Street. Perhaps this was a customer entrance.

Many factories across the US such as this one were fire traps. Many of them had wood floors, which over time became saturated with spilled chemicals, or flammable or toxic materials. A spark or a small fire could become an out-of-control inferno in seconds, or cause an explosion.  A fire could race through the building so fast that workers could not get out. Similar buildings in Camden burned down in spectacular fires.

From a modelers perspective this is a fascinating building. The building still retains much of its former glory despite the dirt and graffiti.

These freight doors are on the long side of the building along Mickle Street.  Love those cobblestone roads.

Railroad track routed into the building (below) was a common practice in pre-1940 industrial structures so cars could be loaded or unloaded in any weather. A second track ran south along 16th Street and split, with one siding running behind the plant.  Neither track is shown on the accompanying Sanborn image.

The photo below shows tons of detail that modelers are interested in.  This shot shows both employee entrances, the freight doors on the left, and the railroad entrance.  Note the windows with the swing-open vents, the power lines, the cobblestone streets–this is what attracted me to the building.

Around on the 16th Street side of the building was a track that ran into the lot south of the structure.  I’m sure it also served the factory.

One last view (below) of what I consider the back of the plant.  This is the side along Stevens Street, adjacent to Admiral Wilson Boulevard.

An industry such as this would receive cleaned leather or perhaps hides, along with chemicals, packaging material, machinery, and other items needed for processing and leather products. Outbound shipments would be almost entirely finished leather goods.  This would be an excellent point-of-origin or destination for our freight cars across the US, routed via PRR-Camden.

If you have photos or more information on the Keystone Leather Company I’d be pleased to hear from you.  Much of the information here came from a most interesting site: http://www.dvrbs.com/. This site has great information on Camden’s people, businesses, industries, and history. There are some neat aerial images of Camden buried in the site too—they’re worth a look if you’re into PRR’s South Jersey facilities.

To compliment the conversation on the Standard oil terminal at Ackley, Iowa, here are photos of other “oil jobbers” I have run across in the Midwest.  No frills here–these are just photos that you might find useful or interesting.

The three photos below were taken in 2012 at Villa Grove, Illinois across the street from the former C&EI roundhouse, which was still standing at that time.  I took a few detail shots here because the piping to and from the tanks was still painted red, white, blue and green to denote the different types of fuel carried.

The photos below were taken near the former Monon-Milwaukee Road junction in Bedford, Indiana in 2009.  I apologize for the horrible second photo–it looks like I took a photo of the parking lot.  At least it shows–somewhat–the building and the rack of fuel tanks beside it.  This is almost directly across the track from the beautiful Milwaukee Road passenger station.

While I was in Bedford, I photographed another oil jobber near the one pictured above.  This one did not have any tanks (perhaps they were removed earlier) but it had this cool sign that was still legible.  I remember back in the 1970s when scientists thought oil was created from compressed dinosaurs over millions of years.  Even then as a young grade school student, I thought that concept was ridiculous.  Nevertheless, the concept did give us some cool signage.

The three photos below were taken in 2008 in Seymour, Indiana at the location where the east-west Milwaukee Road (which has been abandoned and removed) crossed the north-south PRR Indianapolis – Louisville main line.  The track in the foreground is the former PRR line.  This is about a mile or two north of the crossing over the B&O line.

It looks like this was a Standard Oil terminal.  The building has a familiar Standard Oil look to it.  Note the different sizes and types of tanks.  This facility is clean and well kept and was probably still in use; also note that all the pipe lines were painted white.

The two photos below were taken at Litchfield, Illinois in 2005 on the former Wabash.  I wish I would’ve taken some more detail photos.  Barely discernible in the photo below is a tank car unloading stand, just in front of the building at the fence.  This is a neat, clean facility.  I am not sure if the facility in the second photo was rail served but it is another neat facility and definitely still in use.

The two photos below were taken at Trenton, Illinois in 2004 on the former B&O St. Louis line.  In both photos the pole lines on the far left mark the location of the main track.  Here we have a simple facility: several tanks and a building.  Pipes are routed underground.  There is no indication the facility was ever rail-served, but I’m certain it was at some point due to it’s proximity to the main track.  CSX, by the way, has cut this line as a main track and trains no longer operate here.

The facility shown below was photographed in Casey, Illinois in 2010 on the former PRR St. Louis line, now a CSX route.  The lighting is poor but you can make out multiple sizes of tanks and lots of piping.  Also hidden in the poor lighting at left is a high unloading pipe of some kind, perhaps for trucks or farm equipment.  It is an interesting addition since there is another complete fuel stand at the right (shown in better detail below).

In the photo below of the Casey facility, you can clearly see the different colors of piping that carried the different grades of fuels.  Note the low outlets in the foreground.  These could’ve been used for loading trucks, or unloading railroad tank cars.

The photo above is a great view of the facility, with multiple tanks and pipes going everywhere.  The fuel stand at right was for loading trucks and probably farming vehicles as well, since Casey is in the middle of Illinois corn country.  The photo below shows the stand in a little greater detail.

Finally, below, is this structure that accompanies the tank farm.  It certainly does have that Standard Oil look to it!

One thing I noticed about all the facilities pictures is there is not a lot of clutter strewn about.   These are all old facilities, and some of them are no longer in use.  But there is not a lot of clutter around even at the facilities that appear abandoned.  Some are overgrown with weeds but there is still not junk everywhere.  It’s a good reminder to keep our modeled facilities picked up and organized.