An Accident at the blacksmith shop behind the Port Costa Roundhouse in 1954

An accident has been reported at the blacksmith shop behind the Port Costa Roundhouse.  No further details are available about the nature of the accident.  A local ambulance and the California Highway Patrol Car have responded. 

I was having some fun and put the new Oxford 1948 Dodge pickup truck I had just received yesterday on the. All the vehicles are Oxford products. The weird pattern of shadow from the outside daylight and desk lamp make it sort of look like the San Francisco bay fog has come up Carquinez to Port Costa and obscures Benicia and the Solano hills looking north across the waters.  Just an excuse for not having created a background. 

Judging from the age of the 1954 CHP Patrol car this would have been at least sometime in 1954 and the new (to me) Dodge truck is about 5-6 years old.  I clipped off the metal cast truck bed side rails and have put on one coat of matt varnish to tone town the factory paint gloss. As most of my Port Costa scene is focused on 1950-52 for the railroad equipment the Pontiac CHP cruiser is a small bit of a time warp but Oxford didn't make an earlier version.  I do allow for a time period extension so I can include the model of the SP Budd RDC car which was purchased in 1954 and used initially on Oakland-Sacramento passenger services.  

This shipment of Oxford HO scale vehicles from the UK included 2 red and 2 green 1948 Dodge pickup trucks. Unfortunately at this point in time the SP was only purchasing Chevy pickup trucks. The only appropriate model would be an Busch 1950 Chevy pickup but those are now collectors items and go in the minimum $25-30 dollar range. I understand the majority sold were in a hot rod version appropriate for the 1960's on.  

The other new to me vehicle is a 1942 Chrysler Town and Country woodie station wagon in South Sea Blue. I'm not sure I like the car top luggage rack but at least it is empty. Oxford likes to put these luggage racks on its models of 1940-50's US 4 door sedans. I wonder how many of these were made and sold for model year 1942 in 1941 before Pearl Harbor and the start of World War 2 for the US. Still it's a neat highly detailed model appropriate for the 1950's if weathered and showing a bit of wear.  It would have to have been bought second hand by someone working for the SP at Port Costa.  

I have subsequently found that about 900 of the woodie(woody) station wagons were built before production was halted in January 1942.  20 are known to currently survive.  Google or look up https://www.conceptcarz.com/profile/6403,10072/1942-chrysler-windsor-town-and-country. 

The white pipes above the roundhouse in the upper left of the picture are part of an effort to duplicate the steam supply lines to the roundhouse garden tracks using ordinary Evergreen and Plastruct styrene plastic shapes.   Not doing anything further on that until I recover from the injury described in the previous blog post. The blacksmith shop with it's high cupola for ventilation over the smithy's hearth is an early 2023 addition to the scene and is a final structure model not a stand-in.