I think my layout is going vegetarian. Put me right off my supper that did.
Jon
Thats ok Jon, you really didn’t want that big thick juicy T-Bone anyway, did you[:D][:D][:D]
Mmmmmmmmmm, ‘T’ Bone. (in style of Homer Simpson)
Jon
hey great thread, ,very informative.
What the T-bone or the sick stuff[:D][:D][:D]
As to the age of hide cars, back in the 1960s a spur near my house had two tanneries on it. One got hides in ordinary steel 40 foot boxcars, but the other got all of its hides in wooden outside braced boxcars. I distinctly remember a built date of 1919 on one such car, and I remember my friend and I being excited to see car which had definitely been pulled by steam. This would have been in the mid 1960s so that car was close to 50 years old.
Both cars were labled “For Hide Service Only.”
Dave Nelson
In general, hide cars were ones that were held together by force of habit. One load of that stuff and they weren’t good for anything else. The cars I remember were of wooden construction.
work safe
Once spiked HO rail on wooden matchstick ties soaked in creosote. The basement smelled like a real railroad track for months afterwards. Just think what a few pieces of raw fish etc could do to enhance the realism of a modelled stockyard or meat processing plant![V][xx(] (just kidding! there ARE limits to realistic modelling. Maybe pine scent emanating from a mountain forest would be more practical and pleasant)
As they say in the rendering plant…“That ain’t stink boy, that’s the smell of money”. Smell is a valid thing to model, you just need to adjust it so it only smells 1/87 as bad(in HO). One last thing about meat plants. Never put a bird in the area. They avoid the area for some reason. I heard it’s because of the death smell or the fat and blood in the air. I know not why, just that it’s so.
The odor of a working tannery is so distinctive … I cannot think of any product you can buy that smells like that – maybe take an old shoe and soak in it vinegar and cat urine for a month?
Even harder to model than the smell would be the cloud of flies that was always around a hide car. And the “gut cars” – bits of flesh, bone, untanned hide, etc that was set out for the local glue works and fertilizer plant – it was like a black cloud of flies, and a smell worse than any outhouse.
Dave Nelson
Had a freind drop by who was a real railroad dispacher. He said they did ship hides in steel box cars and they would then be steam cleaned and put back in regular service. FRED
Well. several railroads (Boston and Albany comes to mind) ran firains. A late, sorely missed, friend told a story of being on a B&A local one summer night in an open window coach when they stopped beside a firain in Springfield. Said it opened his sinuses for about six months. Don’t know whether it was a true or not since fish rode in refrigerator cars, but it sure was a good bar yarn.
work safe
In Gloversville NY, the FJ&G RR (same name as my moniker) shipped hides in box cars to be tanned at the many mills. I can still recall the smell (actually a nice leather smell).
Today, the FJ&G is gone as are most of the tanning mills (I believe they went to the Philippines and some other countries). What little there is is hauled by truck.
(BTW, the name Gloversville comes from the many gloves produced there. Used to be called “Stump City” after the trees cut down to make tannin, a chemical used in tanning.
There is a tourist train operation in Fort Worth called “Tarantula” that runs to the Fort Worth stockyards. I rode the train several years back between the stockyards and a station on the southwest of downtown (not the route to Garland) and the train went past a byproducts rendering plant. It had a rail spur I believe, apparently shipped some kind of processed byproduct out by rail tankcars. I snapped some pictures from the train which I may be able to find. You can email me a request via trains.com if you are interested.