The cars were used to haul away spent grain from the Miler brewery to be used as animal feeds and fillers. Randy
Heinz baked beans reefer, using printed car sides from 1970-something NMRA Bulletin. Everything scratchbuilt except car sides and trucks/couplers. Closest to a complete scratchbuilt car I've ever done.
Notice the 'Miller' logo. These were Beer Cars. After the production of beer the left over grains were sent to feed producers. Mostly for farm animals I think
Another blast from the past. We totally need to do this style of tour again. https://www.trainboard.com/highball/index.php?threads/tbx-3401-trainboard-lease-car.48233/
I had a great idea for that TB gon. Had no way to get a good pic and the "mystery load" grew too fast. It was a praying mantis that eventually grew to 12 1/4" !!! He was much smaller when the gon was making the rounds, but really BIG for N scale !!! What ever happened with that car ???
I like having "different" cars so that I can avoid that shibboleth among model railroaders called (cue up echo chamber and thunder) "SSSSSOMMMMMEONNNNE ELLLLLLLLSE'S LLAYYYYYYOUTTTTTT". If you have unique motive power or rolling stock, it sets your pike apart from others. I have a few "different" pieces of rolling stock. I will start with two "drover" cabooses made from Father Nature shells. Father Nature had many different shells for things that were not available in N scale. They were quite crude and required much clean-up work, You did have to be careful as well, since his castings were brittle. I ruined two shells b efore I managed to finish these two. I have few more, so I am guessing that I can do better next time, but, these did serve to help me learn to work on his shells. I use the drover cabooses as passenger cars on the freight trains. Behind Number 80 is a cut down C-C RDC-3 put onto a Kato RDC-4 chassis. The RDC-4 had no air conditioner. If I use a "backstory" that it was rebuilt from a wreck, you can explain the roof mounted air conditioner. The black lines are the downspouts for the condensation.
These are boom tenders made into work cabooses. The only things that I did to them was to add archbar trucks and endrailings. The B-mann did require the addition of an end platform. Unique cabooses set apart your railroad from others.
This started out as a Tichy boom tender also. It was inspired by the narrow gauge Susquehanna and Eaglesmere RR's supply caboose used at CW Sones' Kettle Creek operation. It was used to transport supplies to various lumber camps in the woods. Sorry about poor photo quality. I've got a lot to learn about model photograpy. The numbers are DC block boundaries.
The details on that one are great: piled up junk, rusted archbar trucks and very important, the headlight on the caboose. Many logging lines and some short lines did not have runaround tracks at the end of the line. The result of this was that the engine had to push the train for one direction. If the train ran at night, the brakeman needed to see when it was in "push" mode. Some industrial hacks used to stay coupled to the plant switcher. For this reason, a light was also necessary. Many who model logging and short lines do miss the opportunity to add this unique detail to a short line/logging road/industrial caboose.