Last week, I purchased a book entitled “Illustrated History of The Railroads” from a used bookstore. In it, there’s a black and white photograph of of a train being pulled by an old SP 2-6-0. Behind it are ordinary-looking tank cars. There is a large banner that goes across three of the tank cars and reads, “LARGEST TRAINLOAD OF WINES in HISTORY CHATEAU MARTIN WINERY in CALIFORNIA to N.Y.C.” The caption for the picture simply reads, “The Southern Pacific Railroad makes its bid for the bulk wine traffic from California to the eastern states.” Nothing else is mentioned in the book. This is the first I’ve ever heard of something like this. I would think that the wineries would bottle their wine first (or else just send out barrels of it) and then ship it in boxcars. But tank cars? I would imagine (at least I hope) that those tank cars weren’t used for transporting anything else. Can anyone add any more information to this. Was it common to transport wine or other alcoholic beverages in this manner? I do know that in Europe they had wine wagons, like this one, that were basically wine barrels on flatcars. I’ve never heard about anything like this in North America, though.
Wine and other alcoholic beverages are still shipped in tankcars, though there is not a lot of that happening. I will occasionaly see some GATX tankcars around here that are assigned to wine service. I would say that for most commodities that tankcars carry they are customized for that commodity and are cleaned before being reassigned.
Most wine is bottled before shipping. Especially the higher end wines. Exposure to air will change the wine( during transfer, amount left in tank when filled). I would imagine only jug wine is shipped in tank cars.
Coors still ships wort in dedicated CORX glass lined tank cars from Golden to it’s soon to be closed brewery back east. (Coors Molson merger economic move)…
Most of Uncle John Santa Fe’s kids still remember when Uncle John’s navy “lost” a tankcar full of Seagrams over the side of the barge between Richmond and San Francisco in the 1970’s…It never completely sank and it took a while to locate the bouyant flanged- wheel submarine in the bay, the tides took it for a ride.
Never in the world would I have thought to transport wine or the like in tankers, I always just assumed that it would have been moved after being bottled. I have seen some of those cars sitting down in Golden and figured that they were Coors’, but figured that they were for bringing in raw materials for their ceramics factory there. Just shows what happens when you assume, but hey at least I did learn something today.
Living in wine country our local library mentioned that only the cheap so called table wines are shipped by tank cars. Many California wineries ship tank cars of wine to New York and other states where they are bottled under local or so called house labels or in some cases private labels.
I was “broken in” by a Guy named Al Watkins. Al had a club foot that kept him out of WWII. So he started out on the North Shore during the war years.
He told me a story, well actually Al told me a lot of stories. Seems they used to ship wine out of California in wooden casks loaded in wooden floor boxcars. Al said some wine loads were interchanged to/from the North Shore at Rondout. Shameless railroad men would take a brace and bit and drill up through the car floor and into the casks.
Same type of thing happened on the ICG. One day a TTX flat loaded with tank containers of imported Mexican Tequilla showed up at the IMX ramp. The containers had no receiver. I called the shipper for instructions - and got none. We parked the flat and I told the shipper he was on the hook for storage charges.
Days passed. One of the containers was leaking. Now this was not the Tequilla you may drink. ( I personally do not touch the stuff. ) It was concentrated Tequilla (150 proof?) that was intented to be diluted before sale.
Then a representative of the shipper showed up. I took him out to look at the car. Again, some absolutely shameless railroad workers had purchased some plastic cups and had placed them on the car near the leak. I wonder to this day what they mixed it with. I think they finally sold the Tequilla concentrate to a distillery near Plainfield, IL.
From what I remember, the wines of Northern California are of higher quality than the wines of Southern California. ( I do drink wine.) The Northern CA wines were shipped in bottles, the Southern CA wines rode in tank cars.
I live in and around the wine country of North Carolina. That’s right, we went from tobacco to wine. According to some friends of mine in that business, they get a better profit margin as well. From what I can see in this thread is that the use of a tank car for the hauling of wine sure does give a new meaning to Jug Wine. [swg]
Some years back, one of the rail magazines ran a photo that showed some tank cars at the Gallo winery is central California.
Meanwhile, we rode the Napa Valley Wine Train last month. While you can buy an HO-scale wine tank car in the store, there were no “life size” wine tank cars along the route, and I did not see any tank cars in the yard at Napa. Along the route, BV still had a siding in place but it was out-of-service. Louis Martin also had an abandoned siding.
As an oenophile I can say only a philistine would drink wine that is shipped in a tank car. Subjecting the wine to that large scale sloshing, the air exposure transfering the wine, and (unless the tank is glass line) the reaction of the wine to the sides of the tank would make it unfit for transporting self respecting vinegar.
Wow! Thanks for the information, everyone! I had no idea that this kind of thing was done and I certainly didn’t imagine that it would still be done today.
Greyhounds, I’ve heard of simmilar stories occurring here, too. Back in the day when they used to use wooden boxcars and reefers, people (in these stories it was bootleggers, not railroad men) would chissel through the bottom and get the booze to run out.
I hear that. Give me a nice wine made by a micro brewery out in the country surrounded by vines and country side. It costs more but why spend money on something that tastes like feet?
Most wine tank cars of the past two generations have been multi-compartment cars, probably to keep the sloshing to a minimum. In the 1950s, those tank cars with five or six domes on top were generally in wine service.
I’m sure these tank cars are lined (and insulated, too), but not with glass.
