Caribou Southern

Hang on, this post is all over the place.  That is to say, the road is winding, with turns aplenty.  

Periodically I search eBay for a particular car; a card side refrigerator car that fits into a series of custom printed road names.  These often turn up in lots of old cars needing refurbishment, the sort of treasures you'd find buried in the junk box at a train show.  During one of these scans I stumbled across two cars that caught my fancy.  The first was indeed a reefer and appears to be hand painted:

It should go without saying, but I can't find anything about this car's origins either.

The second I almost didn't buy:

I had no connection to this car apart from my interest in collecting and preserving lost and forgotten private road names.  That is, until I began cataloguing John Allen's rolling stock.  While there has been plenty of interest in the private roads that appeared on the famous Gorre & Daphetid Railroad, no comprehensive list has been made of the plain ordinary rolling stock; the cars based on actual prototypes.  I set to this task when I was sick and couch-bound for a week.

During my research I dug back through the archives of the G&D discussion group.  There on a partial list of cars that appeared on the G&D was an entry for a gondola - a Caribou Southern gondola, number 55.  Hey...I know that name from somewhere.  About the same time a new set of slide images from the G&D was posted on the group and there it was, the CS gondola, on the RIP track near the Great Divide engine house.

From a photo by Jerry Drake.  Click here for the original.

Okay!  Now we're getting somewhere.  But let's take a step back...what about this Caribou Southern?  Whose road was it?  Where was it located?  How did John Allen come to have one on his railroad?  The Model Railroader archive has NO mention of it, though there's another fascinating Caribou-named model railroad with a car ferry that moved on a track in actual water.  Google turns up nothing.  It seemed to be a dead end.

Well, let's just say the road doesn't go much further but I can now answer two of those questions.  During a totally unrelated search as I rifled through my collection of model railroad passes I found this:

Yup.  There 'tis.  Ken Vere, Supt.  Vancouver, B.C.  And Google did turn up a little on Ken, with a mention in the Pacific Great Eastern newsletter from the 90s.  PGE?  Oh, you know, that Canadian road with the Caribou Head logo...

Questions Answered - Model Railroad Research

I really enjoy model railroad research.  Note I didn't say prototype research - that's a related discipline that often overlaps, but it isn't quite the same.  Sometimes you can't find any prototype information, or the book that might contain that nugget you seek isn't in your library or is too darn expensive.  That's when turning to the previous versions of the model might help.  It is also fun to look into the history of the hobby.

When I was in seminary I learned about researching textual variants in ancient fragments of scripture.  Usually you went with the oldest known text, whether it was a papyrus fragment or potsherd inscription.  But often you'd find a greater weight of evidence in say, vellum copies.  Though the papyrus may be older, it may not carry the same authority because there are so many copies of the variant text.  Which do you choose as the basis for translation?

So too with model railroad freight cars.  When a manufacturer, long out of business, produced a freezer* ages ago and advertised they used the car builders diagrams, then that's a pretty good source.  But when another manufacturer makes a copy and varies the details, like using a different color scheme or using a different roof type, and they produce thousands of them, which then get copied by other manufacturers, what do you do?  With no actual prototype data available, which source do you trust to build your version of that freezer?

It is possible the second manufacturer chose to change the model based on their available dies for casting parts rather than incur the cost of making new ones.  Maybe they changed the color scheme to make it less gaudy in the hopes it might sell better.  Or maybe they didn't have much prototype data either!

Re-kitted freezer ready to rebuild.

For the two Comet freezers I'm building as of the writing of this post, I needed to know more before I could add better details.  What type of underframe?  Likely fishbelly.  Ladders or grabs?  Ladders. Et Cetera.  For the MDT car I had good prototype photos thanks to Eric Hansmann and other like-minded researchers.  But the Baby Ruth car?  Only one colorized image - the cover of Hendrickson's Billboard Refrigerator Cars book.  Ends, sides, ladders, underframe all visible in that image.  But what about the roof?  The hatches?

Here's where the kit helps out.  My car came to me already built - thankfully not too damaged and assembled well enough - but the original would have contained hints for the roof on the card from which you punched out the sides and ends (and hatches).  Enter eBay.  A quick search of previously sold items turned up an image that helped.

Read the fine print.  Use magnification if necessary.

Right there on the carrier sheet it says, "NO ROOF RIBS    RED SIDE LADDERS".  This note was obviously missed by many modelers who decided to put ribs up there anyway, as evinced by other eBay searches for this car, even the one I'm rebuilding.  But no matter.  In this great hobby we all get to make creative choices that suit our fancy and build models to our heart's content.

*I use the term freezer instead of the more common reefer for a couple reasons - for a while in the early days of this hobby it was the term de rigueur, like saying pike instead of layout.  But in my current NorCal context "reefer" also has a meaning that I don't care to reference.  I know, most readers of this blog know the difference; I just prefer "freezer", in the same way some men like to wear vests.