I recently found out that a big industry in the area my planned layout will showcase was sugar beet growing and processing. Apparently, unit trains of sugar beets were brought into the processing mills. The few photos I have found of such operations don’t show the cars very well as the focus was the locomotive. However, the cars appear to be some kind of high side composite gondola or open hopper. The cars appear the same whether the date of the photo was in the 1940’s or the 1970’s. Does anyone know what these cars were and if there are any models currently available?
“Beet Racks” as we on the SP called them, were outside braced gondolas with extensions on the sides. This page has excellent information and a host of photos that will be of some help, I am sure:
http://www.pwrr.org/prototype/sugarbeet/index.html
The cars ran basically unmodified for almost 50 years, on SP and afterwards as sold to private owners. Orange Empire Railroad Museum has one on display. Some manufacturers in HO actually made these beet racks and many can still be found on auction sites and in some larger hobby stores.
Those are probably GS gondolas with drop-bottom hatches, some composite, some all-metal. Check out Red Caboose for models.
Mark
Western railroads typically used drop-bottom gons with or without wood side extentions for sugar beets, and many roads (until the 1970s) removed the extensions to release the gons for other service after the beet campaign was over. Cross-hoppers aka the all-steel hoppers or composite-side hoppers used for coal, were uncommon in western sugar-beet service until very late in the game because western roads did not purchase cross-hoppers in significant quantities until the 1960s because their coal traffic was highly seasonal until the 1960s – hoppers would have sat around six months of the years with nothing to do.
Western roads with sugar-beet service included SP, Santa Fe, UP, D&RGW, CB&Q, C&S, GN, Milwaukee Road, and NP. I can’t recall if WP had any significant sugar-beet service.
RWM
Thanks guys!
As usual, the amount of information available on this forum is amazing. Thanks again for the tips on both the prototype and models.
It probably was not significant, but if I remember correctly, there was a sugar refinery at Clarksburg, CA on the Sacramento Northern (WP subsidiary).
Volume 3 of Jeff Wilson’s series of books, Industries Along the Tracks, has an excellent chapter on sugar beets, with photos of the cars on various railroads and info about the process which is surprisingly complex. One thing Wilson did not really get into much is the fact that the annual sugar beet rush not only brought out a strange variety of cars to haul them, but on some roads (such as the CB&Q) accounted for steam being pulled from dead lines for one last hurrah, and in some cases steam was used into the 1960s.
Dave Nelson