You guys will laugh, but I’m asking anyway, because someone will know. I’ve been considering buying a tank car or two and thinking what kind of industry I might want in my little town at the end of the branch. Something fun, I was thinking. Then I saw that Walthers offers (and many manufacturers have offered throughout the years) a tank car emblazoned with the Baker’s Chocolate logo and its famed femme, Jean-Étienne Liotard’s La Belle Chocolatière. So taken was I with the idea of spotting this car at some factory on my branch line that I started doing research. In the back of my mind I was wondering, how on earth can any one factory use that much liquid chocolate at one time? And as I read about what products Baker offered, I started thinking, maybe these cars didn’t haul liquid chocolate, maybe they hauled formaldehyde and gasoline and kaolin like the Gulf and Sinclair and other cars. Maybe this car was just an advertising opportunity.
That got me wondering how tank cars are used in general. When did a factory get spotted tank cars bearing the name of their product and when did they get spotted cars bearing the logo of the railroad serving them? Was it a function of the size of the factory (or the company that owned it)? What if it was a small, one-off factory? Or did tank cars just get moved around will-i nill-i so that you’d spot the Baker’s Chocolate car at a cheese factory while picking up their empty GATX car or a Conoco car?
I realize this is a bonehead question with too many subquestions, but if anyone cares to throw a few clues my way I’d be appreciative.
I can’t give you a prototypical answer but I will mention that I have that baker’s chocolate tanker car on my layout.
It makes deliveries to the small bakery / cafe that is located in the little town that I have on the layout. It would absolutely make no sense at all in the real world but it makes me smile when I run it so that’s why I have it.
You might say I was taking an unconscionable liberty.
I would have a candy bar manufacturer that made that product. You could also have PFE reefers bringing in coconut from the Pacific. Also peanuts from the south, in boxcars or reefers. There would also be tankers carrying molasses. Products shipped out would require refrigeration so, more reefers or, insulated boxcars.
Ha! I love this. Great minds think alike; I have the Walthers Cornerstone book store (Robert’s Used Books, though I will name it differently), and I plan to have a spur leading to the back of it so that a weekly boxcar can bring in impossible loads of books to be sold.
@the Bear, thanks for this link (wouldn’t you know it – the one time I DON’T do a search to see if the topic is already threaded, and it’s about the Baker’s tank car). So I see from the previous thread that the conclusion was that Baker’s shipped liquid chocolate all over the U.S. Good enough for me. As I noted above, I’m not picky about inventory control, so this car could be spotted at any chocolatier or cafe or candy factory in my town.
Bummer that all the links to photos, book covers and articles in that thread are already dead links after just four years.
Gidday Matt, yeah, it’s annoying when searching the interweb and thinking that you’re on to a good thing, only to find the links are “dead”!!
I did some more digging only to find that the New Haven Railroad Historical & Technical Association “Shoreliner” magazine, Volume 18 Issue 4, that Paul referred to, is no longer available through the Association.
That said, depending on how “deep” you want to dig, it could be available by other means.
Sometimes being a “Good Enough Modeller” is indeed, good enough!!
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Just an FYI. Railroads didn’t own tank cars. The shipper or recieving company would own the cars for their own products. The railroads would just move and maintain them under contract. Tank cars had and still have special rules for use and movement. You wouldn’t want a tank hauling gasoline and the next load be canola oil. Any type of thick liquid would need an outer jacket for steam heat to help unload. Molasses and crude oil shipments come to mind. I once saw a documentary on gelletin manufacturing. Cattle bones were brought in by open top hoppers, rendered down by acid brought in by tank cars and shipped out by another tank car and in powder form in bags on pallets in box car. That’s four different cars just for one product.
They would be moved and maintained just like any other car. Movement was under a waybill and charged at tariff rates during the period of the cars in question. Running repairs would be done by the railroad, heavy repairs would be the responsibility of the owner/lessor and done at their shops or a contract shop, just like any other private car.
HAZMAT tank cars have special rules for movement. A non hazmat tank car is just another car. You can put a tank car of chocolate next to any car you like, there are NO restrictions on its placement. There are NO restrictions on placing hazmat next to food products.
I’ve wondered about this. The offerings by Märklin, MTH, Walthers, Athearn, and American Flyer all seem slightly different. Judging from the only two photos of the car I’ve seen (on the Henderson and Kelly book covers) Märklin has the correct car length (shorter) and truck placement (their outer ends are beyond the ends of the tank), MTH has the correct dome, which is hardly any dome at all, and Walthers looks both too long AND incorrectly domed.
Maybe all of these models were prototype at one time or another, since I guess the Baker’s cars were in production for many years. I’m modelling the mid-to-late 1950s, and I don’t really have a way of knowing what “type” of tank car would have been in use then.
I’ll probably go for the Walthers model. No way I want to fiddle with replacing the couplers on the
I wonder whether the ‘honey’ tankcar would be the right size or level of detail. Then we might see if Walthers or someone would provide decals, or have the artwork photographed off a car, corrected in something like Photoshop, and used to produce decals.
Probably far too ‘niche’ for almost anyone… but if you wanted something special, if only has to be set up once to be ready to make more…
Molten chocolate syrup. Hot for flowing out of the little valves easily. That’s my fantasy railroad’s back story and I’m sticking to it…
I could see standard corn syrup being delivered to a bakery very frequently. And, that a bakery or candy sweets company could advertise on the tank car.
In Anderson/Lapel Indiana, there is a Nestle Chocolate factory. Not a liquid, but the powdered drink mix. Lots of sugar comes in covered hoppers. Sweets need sugar.
I never saw the name NESTLE on the side of the covered hoppers though. Modern times are so boring!
Edit: As has been mentioned, a bakery would be a big user of vegetable oil.
Help a fella out. What is a honey tanker? It’s not like a honeybucket, I hope.
Before dehusman’s comment, I thought maybe it was an un- or lightly decorated car. If so, a month or so ago I saw a post by Kevin (See You 190) about a reliable Decal Guy he uses. But if I went to that trouble I’d want to know what tank car type would have been available in the 1950s, or more to the point, which types were NOT yet available.
We had a discussion a while back about one of those ‘beer can’ tank cars lettered for a honey company. That, and not super-suckers or thunder mugs, is what I was attempting to reference.
Tank cars are specialized, and even “general service” designs aren’t “general service” the way a boxcar is general service; since a) 99% of tanks are leased by and controlled by shippers and b) different commodities may require different design features or tank sizes and c) even commodities that can use the same design require the car to be fully cleaned out before switching commodities.
There are rules against that. (Third party advertising lettering that isn’t the car owner/leseee/assignee.) Imagine you’re PepsiCo loading your product into a car supplied by the railroad with Coca Cola advertising all over it.
The car will be lettered Baker’s Chocolate because it’s leased and used by Baker’s Chocolate.
If the company owns or leases cars and puts their name on it.
Almost never (in the case of tank cars), since railroads generally didn’t own tank cars, except for their own company service, like diesel fuel, work train water cars, etc. Most tanks would be owned or (more commonly) leased by the shipper.
A vast majority of the tank cars you see out there are owned by one of several major leasing companies (UTLX, GATX, etc.).
[quote user=“crossthedog”]
Or did tank cars just get moved around will-i nill-i s
I found the slide of Baker’s Chocolate GATX 31058 that I made in Feb. 1971 in the Penn Central Island Avenue yard on the northwest side of Pittsburgh, Pa.
The car in the book “Railroad Freight Car Slogans & Heralds” by John Kelly shows GATX 31057, the same type of car in 1961. They were both built in 3/54 and appear to be identical except for some lettering updates.
Although the caption in the book says that the cars carried bulk corn syrup and liquid sweetener both cars are clearly stenciled “chocolate only”