Has anyone ever made a gondola load of offal (the internal organs and other waste from butchered animals)? How did you do it? What materials did you use?
I’ve cut up a bunch of rubbery, plastic bait worms to represent the solid parts and I’m looking for a way to represent the soupy glop that sloshed around inside the gon and sometimes over the sides.
Thanks for your help,
Jeff
P.S. This is not an April Fool’s prank, I really want to know, really, honestly.
April fool to you also. (He said right after he erased a two-paragraph serious reply! [:$])
I wish you hadn’t erased the 2-paragraph serious reply because I’m serious. I have a meat-packing plant offline and I interchange with the servicing railroad. I think an offal load would be an unusual load coming out of the plant.
Hope you’ll reconsider your serious reply.
Jeff
Use gummy worms… then you can freak out visitors when you reach in a grab a handful and pop it in your mouth…
John
My brother-in-law was an engineer on the Saint Louis Terminal Railroad (TRRA) in the 1950’s-60’s, and related his experiences having to move open gondolas full of offal from a packing house in East Saint Louis across Eads Bridge to a rendering plant in Saint Louis. In order to be realistic, you need thousands of flies and maggots swarming and swimming around in the load.
His lunch bucket was untouched when he had to make this trip, and his clothes had to be washed as soon as he got home to get the smell out.
Didn’t they use covered hoppers since they would send them to a processing plant for the manufacture of pet food?
OK Jeff. During the brief period of years I worked in a slaughterhouse (summer job for college) offal would never have been treated that way. It’s a serious violation of USDA regulations, and local health laws. Rather, the offal from the kill line was dumped into giant steam retorts. There it was boiled down into a sludge that was then piped off into tank cars.
Excess fat from the meat processing lines was treated in a similar way. Though the two items were kept strictly segregated, as the fat could be used for making cooking oil. Tank cars used for transporting the offal were marked “INEDIBLE” to differentiate them from the cars used to load edible byproducts.
I have seen an article or two on open gondola loads of this wonderful product. (Good thing flys and maggots are too small to show up in scale.) I would suggest using sculptamold to represent the soft parts, it can be sort of lumpy. Push your other pieces in while it is still wet.
Hope you are not planning “smell-o-vision” for your layout.
Have fun,
Richard
You might also consider coating the whole thing with gloss medium or gloss gel to simulate the slime.
Three threads dealing with the subject of this thread:
Has anybody had the guts to photograph a carload of offal?
Where I live there is a company that goes to grocery stores and animal shelters and picks up the outdated meat or animals that are killed at the animal shelters and this “meat” is loaded up and then processed into dog food. I am telling you, you do not want to get close to that truck! Unless you are ready to loose your lunch.So when you read the stuff on the dog food bags and it states that they use real meat they are not lying. Its just not grade A steak as they tend to lead one to believe.This is not an april fools joke.Wish it was.
Inedible animal fat rendering plant, near the Fort Worth Stockyard, photographed from “Tarantula” tourist train, 1994.
[(-D]
Thanks everyone for contributing to this thread. Using Sculptamold sounds interesting, but isn’t that a plaster product? I’d be concerned about breaking it as I put it in the car and take it out. Maybe that’s not a problem, I’ve never used Sculptamold before.
I like the idea of coating with a gloss medium to enhance the sheen of the load.
To Stebbycentral - when did you work for the meat packer? I’m modeling 1958 and there have been many letters and forum postings telling horror stories of offal in open gons. Maybe the regulations got tougher by the time you started working.
Has anyone modeled offal? Still looking for more ideas.
Jeff
Allow me to disagree. When I was younger, let’s say the late 1960s and early 1970s, two local industries in Oak Creek WI on the Chicago & North Western received what the crew called “gut cars.” Open gondolas of vile smelling stuff. One was a glue factory (Peter Cooper) and it got open gons of the hooves and bones from the various slaughter houses in the Milwaukee area. These were short hauls, and I assume not interchanged. I think they crudely chopped the feet off the animals so there was plenty of “meat” to smell awful on a hot summer day. These were not skeleton clean bones but bits of animal where the bone was more work than it was worth to exact.
The other industry was Hynite and they were a fertilizer/chicken feed/mysterious factory. They got true guts from the local slaughter houses but also what were called “fleshings” from the many tanneries on-line in the Milwaukee area (remember that at the time of which i speak, Wisconsin had more cows than people and retired dairy cows were of no use to the farmer. There were tanneries, glue factories, and pet food companies that received loads for example. As trhe old saying goes, “everything but the moo” got used.)
Anyway these gut cars were open gons. On a July day the gasses would get to, um, gassing, and sometimes there were volcanic eruptions off the sides of the cars. Crews also talk about riding an open car of guts to the factory and a sudden stop by the engineer woul
I just noticed the kid next door playing with some silly putty which was pinkish with some red spots and streaks and somewhat shiney… looked a lot like offal to me and it would be easy to form it into the gons. I have no suggestions for duplicating the stench- that stuff (offal not silly putty) will tear up your nose.
I just noticed the kid next door playing with some silly putty which was pinkish with some red spots and streaks and somewhat shiney… looked a lot like offal to me and it would be easy to form it into the gons. I have no suggestions for duplicating the stench- that stuff (offal not silly putty) will tear up your nose.
Ok here you go, I’ll give it my worst shot and see how close I get to a load of offal. There are like half pints of some thing in plastic jars (less then $3.00) called "Raindeer poo, Naughty or Nice’’ slime at the local Wal-mart in the Holiday section. Raindeer poo is brown, I picked Naughty or Nice (contains a chunk of coal or gold) it’s a mixture of red and white slime. It does not stick to your fingers. I poured it in a gondola then mixed pencil shavings, with the pencils outer coatings of red, white, yellow and greens, real gut’s colors. It looks like the shavings slowly sink to the bottom of the slime so I added more shavings. I think I may need to add alot more solids. RULE NUMBER 1: YOU MUST USE A ONE PIECE GONDOLA BODY, NO OPEN SEAMS LIKE END DOORS OR FLOORS. The slim slides though the cracks.[B)] I do not know yet what will happen when I try to unload the car. It may need a MT gondola twin. DO NOT HUMP THIS LOADED CAR. See it shimmer see it jiggle as it rolls down the track. JaCo I’ll send you pictures by email, you can upload here if you want to and can.Maybe some day this forum will let a person upload by not using some other picture storage host.
Reindeer poo, now that’s a novel idea. Kinda limited time-frame, too, likely only available around Christmas. I wonder how long it remains gooey. I’ll have to check my Walmart for Reindeer Poo. Thanks Bob, Jeff
They can’t sell it all, wait to after the Holiday, it will be 1/2 price. I have to unload this gon. it’s oozing out of the very tiny end doors cracks and sliding down over the outside wheels of the trucks. Ok, I just tipped the gon. up on end and prodded the guts out in to a cup, a little residual stayed in the bottom till I washed it out with hot water with the sink sprayer.