Brewery tank cars


Hawkesburytrain

Hawkesburytrain

Well-Known Member
Hi everyone,
First, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all

I'm building a brewery and would like to know what kind of tank cars were used for pressured beer.
The era is 1970's and the road name is CP.

Thanks
 
While I am not as familiar with Canadian RR's as US, other than Coors I don't know of any US breweries that still shipped beer in tank cars in 1970. Coors only ships to their own bottling plants in Tennessee or Virginia. However many breweries receive corn syrup in tank cars. All tank cars used for either incoming corn syrup or outgoing beer are low pressure tank cars, which here in the states I believe are known as DOT-111 cars. Beer weighs 8.3 lbs/gallon, so a car with a capacity of 24,000 gallons would be about the max for 1970...~100 tons. By comparison, corn syrup weighs 11.5 lbs/gallon so a car with 17,000 gallon capacity would be used.
Beer is best when consumed, not shipped on rails!!!!

Willie
 
Coors reporting mark is CORX. Atlas made some N scale models of MBR and FMC tanks, believe Canadian.
 
Thank you both

Willie, I saw tank cars going into the building and thought to myself it couldn't be oil, gas or propane, so it had to be some sort of concentrated liquid, but you're right, corn syrup is very logical. So for operation purposes, tank cars going in with corn syrup and a different tank car coming out with beer?
 
Hawkesburytrain said:
So for operation purposes, tank cars going in with corn syrup and a different tank car coming out with beer?
Click to expand...
That would be correct. To be prototypical, the smaller 40' ~17,000 gallon cars would be used for corn syrup, while larger 50' ~24,000 gallon cars would be used for beer.
Here are a couple of mine.
ADMX 19517.JPG
This one is for corn syrup and it is an Intermountain model
TILX 260482.JPG
This one from Walther's could be used for beer. It actually has a 25,000 gallon capacity, but most shippers leave a little headroom in tankers.
I don't know whether or not these two are still available, as I purchased both of them over 7 years ago.

Willie
 
Willie that is great help, many thanks

I'm trying to build a roster of cars needed for operation of a brewery and yes I did take as an example the Coors in Colorado (being so big). Here's what I have so far:

- Tank car - Full- Corn Syrup - Tank car - Empty
- Tank car - Empty - Tank car - Full - Concentrated beer
- Hopper - Full - Grain - Hopper - Empty
- Box car - Full - Equipment - Box car - Empty
- Box car - Empty - Box car - Full - Beer
- Refrigerated box car - Empty - Refrigerated box car - Full - Beer

Any other suggestions?
 
Lloyd - Equipment could also come on a flat car, but then the equipment would also have to be modeled. Additionally many breweries also have a track where they parked a large hopper or covered hopper for spent grain. It would be taken away and sold as animal feed. Smaller breweries here in Texas sometimes receive propane in 33,000 gallon high-pressure tankers to fuel the place. This is if they aren't near any other source of natural gas. Storage tanks would be needed.
Just a few ideas that you may or may not want to incorporate.

Willie
 
Don't know much about beer (even though Coors is up here in Golden, Colorado), but I'm wondering if a brewery would use sugar? If so, an interesting side-light might be sugar delivered from a sugar beet processing plant. In HO scale, I've use rice, dyed brown, loaded into open hopper cars from a farmer's truck. The hoppers are sent to the processing plant and come out as granulated sugar, say, in bags loaded into boxcars, and molasses loaded into low pressure tank cars. IIRC, Athearn made GW (Great Western) box and tank cars awhile back. Don't have enough room on my layout for a brewery, but whatever they use could be "interchanged" off-layout to a customer.
Happy New Year, folks!
 
Thanks Willie, you gave me the idea of building a small power plant to feed the brewery

Thanks trailrider, I'm running out of room for the brewery, even though the final size is about 108" x 94". Here's a look as I'm getting ready to finalize the plan and getting started on it.

View attachment 59842
 
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