Model Railroading > Wine Tanks

A few of weeks ago I saw that hoghead said he had a thing for 6 dome wine cars.  I'm posting these for you Ed, and all the other tank car Wine-Os out there.
As for those who are not familiar with wine tanks, you may think wine was only shipped in the little 6,000 gal - 6 dome cars.  Actually in the hay-day of wine shipments on rails, the 6 dome'ers were only one of many designs from single, two, some odd looking three domes with a larger middle dome, and so forth. A couple of things the wine cars had in common were they were generally small, again in the 6,000 gal range and they were painted silver to help reflect the sun’s heat.   [Later the silver would fade to look more like light gray]. 

OK, I'm into wine as a railroad commodity, so much so, I have acquired a number of cars and scratch'ed a few.  I model in HO and the only 2 commercially 6 dome cars I have seen were done in brass by Precision Scale and are going in the $300.00 range, ouch!   And Thomas Industries did a rough model years ago and they occasionally come up on The Bay’.  [AHM did a 6 dome car lettered for wine service, but other than the 6 domes, at more like 12,000 gal, it is way out of scale for a real wine car].  Both the Precision and the Thomas cars were versions of the un-jacketed dome cars which have very small domes. I wanted a jacketed version, so I scratched a couple. 
 
As noted, in addition to the 6 dome cars, wine was shipped in other design cars so my fleet also includes a couple of cars that Intermountain did.  At 8,000 gal they are a little large but no so much that I can’t live with them.  
 
Pat
 

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So where the wine cars needed?  I built OLD MISSION WINERY.  Old Mission’s vineyard doesn’t produce enough squeezings for their bottling so they need to import to fill their casks.

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Pretty cool, Pat! I love your jacketed car!

What I would love to model is one of those ubiquitous (in 1950's California, anyway) three dome cars with a large center dome and two small ones. Tony Thompson has several photos on his various bog entries.

In the meantime, here is what I'm going to do with my Precision 6-Domer (note: I found an undecorated version at a train show for $130 - how could I turn it down?). Protocraft Decals (fittingly in Vineburg, CA) produces a set for a silver car for my namesake Gibson Winery. I'm going to scan and Photoshlock their set into lettering for the black car that you see below (photo pirated from an Evan Werkema TO post). My late Uncle Clarence Gibson would be proud.

Protocraft decals are great, and come in both HO and O. They also produce HO sets for Chateau Martin 1944 AAR boxcar, a four dome Gibson Wine car and a GATX tank leased to Gibson Wine.

Thanks for your post!

EO



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/16 21:02 by hogheaded.

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Lots of photos of, and information about, Chateau Martin wine cars can be found here: http://coastdaylight.com/chatmart/cmwx_roster_1.html

Jim Lancaster

The shell of the Gibson Wine building in Covington KY still remains, but without this sign.  The backside of the building backed up against KC (Kentucky Central) Junction, where the C&O Main to Huntington KY, and the L&N main to Atlanta split apart about 1.5 miles south of Cincinnati OH.

The back of the building was prominent in many railroad photos taken at that location.

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pjim Wrote:
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> Lots of photos of, and information about, Chateau
> Martin wine cars can be found here:
> http://coastdaylight.com/chatmart/cmwx_roster_1.ht
> ml

Wow Jim, the site has greatly expanded its info since I last visited it - thanks!

Gene Diemling has wine car info scattered around his Gene's P48 Blog, as does Tony Thompson on his modeling the SP blog.

penncentral74 Wrote:
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> The shell of the Gibson Wine building in Covington
> KY still remains, but without this sign.  The
> backside of the building backed up against KC
> (Kentucky Central) Junction, where the C&O Main to
> Huntington KY, and the L&N main to Atlanta split
> apart about 1.5 miles south of Cincinnati OH.
>
> The back of the building was prominent in many
> railroad photos taken at that location.

Now this is a building worth modeling! Rather than build a branchline of my freelance railroad to Kentucky, I'm thinking of transporting the structure to California. I'll have to hunt down more photos. I love freelancing! You can steal the best of everything with impunity.

EO
Not affiliated with Gibson Wines... sadly