Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Yet Another Stock Car

The gray pans are the watering pan which are now turned in the empty position. Filled with a tank located within the car, they would need to be rotated 90 degrees to function.
My stock car fleet continues to grow. This car, the Street's Western Stable Car Line, is not a well-known line but, after the turn of the century, ended up owning the two other major lines, CCCC and Hicks. This prototype of this particular car was on display at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and the drawings and specifications for the car were published in a book describing all of the transportation exhibits. The drawings were also published in Engineering magazine in August 1893.
      My model is built entirely of styrene with trucks I obtained from a seller on Shapeways. They do a very good job of matching the Street's trucks shown in the drawings. The colors for the car were taken right from the specifications. This just points out that even stock cars could be colorful in the 1890s period.
     This car has watering pans for the cattle which rotated in the prototype car. I had these produced by Shapeways from a drawing I made and they fit right in. I even have enough left to do the Hicks car I want. The stock car door is a little different. It is of the Alsop and Fisher patent and is made in two parts. The lower part is hinged at the bottom and opens downward to form a ramp for the animals. The upper part then slides open to let them out.
     For some reason, photos of these cars are hard to find. I found two, both in a freight yard and at a distance from the camera so details were not discernable. The lettering was based on woodcuts found in the Official Railway Equipment Register.
   

3 comments:

  1. I believe there is a photo of one of these cars in service in Burlington Bulletin #25, Stock Cars and Livestock Traffic. On page 113 there is a photo taken in 1915 in Iowa of a train and the first car behind the engine looks very much like your model. The caption says it's a CB&Q SM-2 but it's not, as the SM-2's had four panels each side of a centered door rather than three left/five right.

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