I am not lost and gone forever, just not having the personal bandwidth to keep a constantly updated blog. My ongoing medical issues have taken a lot of my personal time.

I have slowly continued my "lightening" update to the little Port Costa layout. The original plan was to re-align and re-ballast  the trackage west of the turntable and expand the use of 2 mm foam as the basic ground cover on almost all flat and almost flat surfaces except in the fiddle yard which is not a prototypic part of Port Costa trackage. It does however "represent" flat yard or siding trackage for freight car storage that existed "around the bend" curve of the Carquinez Strait towards the strait side location known as Eckley. Eckley, like 19th century main part of Port Costa was built on piles on the strait side of the SP tracks. 

The scope of the project has expanded as I have decided to split the structure and scenic model of the station and buildings behind the station for easier work on parts. 

The speeder sheds, Port Costa Station building and freight house are now on the main layout as separate mini scenic modules and the area behind and above the retaining wall including the large section house, water treatment building, and telegraph maintenance and maintainer's quarters cabin are on a new scenic base. 

The house track in front of the freight house, approach to the turntable, and the garden tracks have now been ballasted using ivory colored sanded grout. Rails have been painted a rust acrylic originally from 

This is a work in progress photo of the area:

 

The structures are still stand-ins built with illustration board. I have started work on the proper model version of the section house. I have been re-evaluating all of the sources I have about the prototype.  The outline of the existing section house is included in the scale drawing of the proposed new station building dating from 1930 that I obtained from the California Railroad Museum (CSRM). I have not found many photos of the section house itself in the 1950's but have pieced together the window locations and other features that appear behind photos of the station and other buildings.   I magnify the my copy of the original photo and then cut and save the part showing parts the section house and save them to the section house structure prototype folder. 

I also have some excellent photos of the section house and old freight house from 1905. These were sent to me by Steven Lane along with the rest of his collection of Port Costa photos.  The other sources for my Little Port Costa are photos of Port Costa from the Contra Costa County Historical Society (CCCHS) and photos purchased from the late Bob Morris. The source of timetables is the Espee.groups.io forum files section. I was mentored and provided with a lot of material initially by the late Ron Pies when I started this project in 2019. 

Another part of this rebuild is the yard area between the station and the mainline tracks platforms. Port Costa did not generate a whole lot of passenger traffic by the 1950's. The old town built of wood structures on piles west of the ferry slips had burned down in several fires prior to 1930. Only the homes, hotel, post office and the large concrete warehouse located in Bull Valley remained.   My guess is that most of the passenger traffic were SP employees working at the roundhouse and steam engine maintenance buildings behind the roundhouse.  They would likely have passes to ride between Martinez and Richmond. 

I have analyzed the April 1951 Western Division Employees Timetable and built a spreadsheet showing the passenger traffic eastbound and westbound on weekdays (which I model) through Port Costa on the double track mainline. 

Revised version due shortly

NOTE the above schedule is being revised with corrections)

The rows with a light blue background are passenger trains that could stop on the two open macadam platforms on a weekday basis. The At Port Costa time column is estimated for all except the late night #26 eastbound unnamed passenger train which has a scheduled stop (Train 26 in 1951 would run beyond Sacramento over the Sierras ito Reno/Sparks. The westbound would have been Passenger #25 from Reno/Sparks. This shows in the Sacramento Division timetables as arriving in Sacramento at 5:00 AM but is not appear in the Martinez Subdivision timetable continuing on to Oakland.) 

The Port Costa Time Estimated or Scheduled Column shows all named trains and Sacramento Oakland service trains did not have a scheduled time. I took the Martinez-Crockett scheduled time and split it to come up with an estimated time the train would come through Port Costa.The line is has no grades as it runs alongside the Carquinez strait.  

Distances used to estimate. The actual distances between the stations is:   

2.1 miles Crockett-Port Costa

3.6 miles  Port Costa-Martinez

Total 5.7 miles  Crockett-Martinez

The Ticket Required notation from the timetable indicates that at the passenger wanting to detrain or board a train at Port Costa must have a ticket to Port Costa or a ticket from Port Costa by the time the train stops at either Crockett or Martinez. The Engineer and Conductor would then be issued a train order to stop at Port Costa.  

A Flag Stop would only be allowed for the EB 24x Statesman and the EB 24x El Dorado.

All is the above is background to building the walkway and track foot crossings from the Port Costa station across 5 yard tracks to the mainline eastbound and westbound platforms. 

The walkway is shown in this drawing I obtained from the CSRM of the 1946 Proposed Water Tank Changes. 

This drawing is actually the closest I have of an official SP track plan for Port Costa for the 1950-1955 time period I am setting my layout. As the layout has limited space before curving to the left at the west end into staging, I am modeling the platforms as extending equally to the left and right from the footpath.

This 1950 photo looking east in the Port Costa yard area also shows the walkway detail.

This is the current state of the layout area modeling the walkway:

There is one track behind the short 4 car Sacramento-Oakland train westbound train at the platform at back pulled by a PA1 returning to service on long distance trains out of Oakland. I lack any SP Pacifics for these trains in regular service in the early 1950's. The dark roofed all day lunch and 2 coaches are GGD early releases with lot of problems and I have not relettered for the 1946 SOUTHERN PACIFIC instead of SOUTHERN PACIFIC LINES. Upgrading these is another project.  The baggage is a highly modified MDC "Harriman" baggage closely approximating a 60-B-10 that I did back in 2018. 

The background in the above photo is my train room wall masquerading as the Carquinez Strait in a dense fog...

that's all for now folks.