I have several questions about these type of milk tank cars.
When did they first appear and how long were they in use?
The pictures I have of them don’t seem to show any ice receptacle, so am I right in assuming that these were mechanically cooled?
Why would these have been used instead of the more common ice cooled reefer style car?
Lastly, is there a moderately priced model of these cars offered. I could find only one entry in the Walthers catalog and that had a list price of $41, quite a bit more than I have paid for any freight car.
John, the Borden’s “butter dish” milk cars first went into service around 1936, and there were about 40 of them in service. Each car contained two 6,000 gallon glass-lined tanks, and were not cooled, as the milk loaded into them was pre-cooled. Also, they usually travelled in passenger trains.
There’s an article in the April 2002 issue of RMC on scratchbuilding one of these cars from a block of wood and an Accurail wood boxcar. The build looks pretty straightforward, and the resulting model looks good. Included with the article are protoype and model photos, plus drawings and a bill of materials.
There’s also more info in the March 1986 issue of RMC, on these and other milk cars, with drawings and prototype photos. According to the accompanying text, the last milk train ran in August of 1972, although it wasn’t necessarily Borden’s cars.
Borden did use the cars, after their milk service ended, for moving other chemicals, and at least one of them was used to transport Elmer’s Glue, in bulk, to their packaging plants. In milk service, the reporting marks were BFIX, while in chemical service, BCDX was used.
All info included here is from the two RMC articles.
These cars had glass lined tanks inside them, and were used to haul raw milk from pickup sites (generally station stops in rural areas) to nearby big cities where the milk was processed into commercial milk, cream, ice cream, butter and other products. I forget the exact time, but I think with milk you have something like 24 hours to get the raw milk to the processing plant before it started to turn, so as long as it was handled in fast trains like passenger trains or express milk trains (which ran at similar speeds to passenger trains) it really wasn’t necessary to keep the milk cool with ice or mechanical refrigeration…although as Wayne noted in his response, the milk certainly could be pre-cooled if time permitted and facilities were in place. I would assume this would only be needed in instances where the milk travelled far enough that there was a chance of it going bad before reaching the dairy plant.