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...

Tired Tropes or Tried and True?

Do you ever think about those tired hobby tropes?  You know the ones, "We've got to get kids interested in the hobby! (or it will wither and die)" or "A layout is never finished" (though if that were true custom layout builders might never get paid).  Recently I was perusing the 1941 Varney catalog, as one does*, and I came across this passage:

    "Did you ever stop to ask yourself why the small boy never had a chance to play with his electric trains on Christmas day?  I say it was because it took his "old man" just about that long to put it together, make it run, and get tired of it.  It is too easy."
    "At some risk of frightening a newcomer, I would like to say that, a MODEL RAILROAD is no pushover.  If it were, the children would have it, and it would fail to hold the adult interest."

SP drew it, never made it, but Varney did!

The bug will bite a kid from time to time and due to their disposition or an early start with some tools and paint they may turn into model builders sooner than later.  But I suspect they're the rare case, not the average person who may have a mild interest early on that lays dormant until much later when time and funds become available to pursue the hobby in earnest.  I'd say Varney was making a statement in direct contrast to those "toy train" manufacturers that so often depicted kids on the floor, grinning from ear to ear as their grinding metal beasts clanked around the Christmas tree and the family looked on, beaming with pride.

The passage in the catalog continues:

    "A model railroad has yet to be built and finished.  That is one of the nicest things about it.  It's never done.  Virtually every model railroader who starts a layout, tears it up and starts over again almost before he has the bugs out of his first loop of track.  There are thousands of model railroaders who have temporary 'layouts,' or systems which are in effect only test tracks for the equipment which is being modeled.  The real layout floats nebulously in his mind like a mirage in the desert, to be reached some day, somehow."

The first commemorative car offered by Varney in 1948.

Keep in mind these quotes are from a Varney catalog, a company that sells trains, not structures, scenery, track or anything else for your layout.**  They also extol the virtues of how well their equipment runs and complies with NMRA standards so of course it was in their interest to encourage modelers to build something on which to run these trains.  But I think the quote above is for those folks whose layout doesn't look like more than a test track on a table top.  Perhaps it is also aimed at the person who resists buying more equipment because they don't have room for it.  Keeping the dream of "some day, somehow" alive creates a convenient justification in the mind of the buyer.

I suppose I resemble that remark.  Currently I have a small model railroad by most standards.  But that doesn't stop me from buying more trains.  Some day, somehow I'll have that big space for long trains.***  But I'm also that weird kid that got bit early and never let college, girls, career, etc. get in the way of spending some time at a workbench with a model train or structure kit.  Maybe you are too.  These tropes exist for a reason and sometimes they're even true.

The other commemorative offering, Varney, 1948.

*This post was prompted by a recent purchase.  Varney is not a sponsor, (LOL), but I do appreciate their contributions to the hobby and think their early card-side equipment is really cool.

**Varney does recommend you build a layout, and they even offer the barest of suggestions on how to do it.  I did find it particularly interesting that while no track or transformer brands were mentioned, they did exclusively recommend Ideal structures!

***Back in the real world, I do have an actual plan to build a nice storage system that not only protects my investment in rolling stock but makes them easily available to put on and take off the railroad.  I have already shown in this post here that it is possible and even fun to simulate a larger railroad's operations on a small pike.