I came into possesion of an interesting kit today. It is made by Athearn and is a closed side tanker car for Pickles.
I am stumped. I can build it, and run it. But What in world do I “Do” with this car in a operation scheme? I believe it is used in food products or as a assist in the final product. (Heinz 57?) But that is all I know.
Any ideas?
I have a Heinz 57 refrigirated boxcar and a pickle tanks car as well. i too do not know what to do with this cars in a operating sesions either.
ShaunCN
Get a pickle factory for your layout.
I have one of these car as well. It’s older than me, 35 & in need of some repair.
Gordon
[:)]Or make pickle memorial park…and have it as a display[:)]
Ok, I did some search and found this:
http://www.geocities.com/welovepickles/ This site is the creator and credit cited for the information given here on this post. Intention is a brief overview of Pickles.
In 1659, Dutch farmers in New York grew cucumbers in what is now Brooklyn. These cukes were
sold to dealers who cured them in barrels and sold them from market stalls on Washington, Canal
and Fulton Streets. As it turns out, these pickle purveyors started the nation’s commercial pickle
industry.
CUCUMBER - medium size, 30
WINE VINEGAR 500 ml
REGULAR VINEGAR 500ml
SUGAR (WHITE) 100 gr
SALT 1/2 cup
JAR 500 ml, 8 of them
1 Wash and cut the cucumbers lengthwise (1.5 cm).
2 Cover the cucumbers with ice water and let stand overnight.
3 Drain and pack upright in clean jars (with a new seal lid).
4 Combine the vinegar and sugar with 2 cups of water in a pot, boil for 3 minutes, then add the
salt.
5 Pour over the cucumbers, leaving 1/2 centimetre head space.
6 Close the jars and process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes.
Now this is a recipie I will not bother to convert to truck or railroad size loads. I cannot add that high…
A pickle Factory will require Loads of…
Cucumber, Bread, Butter, Garlic, Gherkins etc (Produce or Grocery) Reefer and Boxcars
Wine Vinegar or Vinegar in Tank Cars.
Sugar in processed form from a refinery or Food Warehouse etc (Box cars and/or Covered Hoppers)
Loads of Kitchen supplies and Glass Pots and kettles etc with Stainless Steel or Aluminum from a tool and die works.
Some form of fuel… Coal, oil, kerosene, propane, wood etc etc etc in appropriate cars whatever you feel approprate.
Finally I suppose I can use the Heinz 57 car to ship the final product of a Pickle Factory to a Cannery.
Smiling here.
The tank car was used to transport vinegar. Notice the tank is made of slat wood rather than metal which would taint the vinegar? As to the reefer; Heinz had “57 varieties” of delicatessen products so its no stretch to imagine preserved meats or the materials for sausages.
Such cars were rolling advertisements for the companies, hence the name “billboard cars”. They were quite common up until WWII. I’m sure trainspotters loved them.
Have a look at the Walters website for others from several eras.
If the car is appropriate to your era weather it a bit and run it. Its sure to get attention in a consist or sitting on a siding.
Good Luck and have fun
Randy
lol it gets attention anyway. Weathered or not.
Happy New Years all
I seem to recall that Athearn makes two pickle cars – one open, one closed. I just noticed the new products for Feb 4 shows a new custom painted version of the Athearn pickle car. So I did a little research. By the way the November 1956 Model Railroader page 46 had an Eric Stevens “Dollar Car” project showing two slightly different pickle cars. The thing about pickle brine, like vinegar, is that it is well suited to being shipped in wood rather than steel. That is why we get pickles and vinegar in glass or plastic, not in cans. When Athearn first released those cars the prototypes were still running, as were wooden vinegar tank cars by the way.
Anyway …
The January 1955 Model Railroader page 40 has an article by Paul Larsen of a pickle works in Palmyra Wisconsin. It is a low shed like building with a number of small wooden tanks, one idea would be to use N scale water tanks in HO. It looks to me like a wood circle was inside the tank that would rise or fall with the brine level. This is probably because the process creates gas (just as we do when we eat a cucumber!!). I remember a neighbor who made his own pickles and one time he tightened the crock too much and it exploded. The article said the pickles were trucked in. Paul Larsen was one of the best modelers of the 1950s and most of us would be happy to match his level of detail.
The January 1954 Model Railroader page 90 had a great article by Boyce Martin about trackside industries – this article is so good it should be reprinted. Anyone wanting good small industries should see this article. One of the industries is a canning plant taht would also be a logical place for the pickle car. If you have any access to older MRs, look for this issue and this article.
Hope this helps.
Dave Nelson
The Athearn pickle car is a prototype car. It was used to haul pickling brine (not vinegar) from it’s processing plant to a canning facility. Pickle factories were pretty rare, so it’s probably better to have this car show up as through traffic on a regular, weekly route.
Vinegar cars look different from a pickle car. AHM makes a model of one in HO and N (Sunshine also has a absolutely correct - and labor intensive - resin kit). Basically, it’s a big wooden barrel on wheels. here’s one preserved at the Green Bay RR Museum.
Wood was used on these cars because of what they carried. Vinegar and brine are extremely corrosive, and would eat through a steel tank car, so wood barrel cars were used for this type of service until the 1960s. The vinegar cars were more common, since vinegar is also used in some meat processing (sausages, especially).
Thank you for the insightful information… Now I gotta research Vinegar cars for the packers. =)
See “A factory for those pickle cars,” by Dennis v. Blunt, in the February 1961MODEL RAILROADER, page 29. (CALL 800-533-6644 or e-mail customerservice@kalmbach.com to order photocopies of articles from out-of-print back issues.) It showed how to build a pickle works that stored cucumbers from the fields in wooden vats and loaded them into pickle cars for shipment to the processing plant. There was more on this kind of operation in “Pickle works,” by Paul Larson, in the January 1955 MR, page 40.
So long,
Andy