Friends,

In October 1956 Speas Company operated 11 vinegar tank cars. SVMX 1 was an 8K gallon TM car, while the rest were 9K gallon TW cars numbered 121-130. The reporting address for these cars was a Speas Company office in Kansas City, Missouri.

Given that both cars in this photo have their car numbers obliterated, I would suggest they were awaiting scrapping. Note that the car closest to the camera has an additional horizontal brace on the right-hand tank which is missing from the left tank.

Wikipedia has a short page on Speas Company at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speas_Vinegar_Company . It is mostly about a factory building in Charlotte, North Carolina (now a brewery). I also found a photo of their KC plant at https://kchistory.org/islandora/object/kchistory%3A103787 . A search on "Speas Company" on that page turned up a whole bunch of other photos of the plant, but sadly no other tank car photos. A google image search found a photo of a Speas plant in Paris, Texas, but it requires a Facebook log-in and I'm not a member.

Yours Aye,

Garth Groff  🦆

On Fri, Jan 1, 2021 at 10:11 PM Bob Chaparro via groups.io <chiefbobbb=verizon.net@groups.io> wrote:

Photo: Speas Company Vinegar Tank Car

A photo from the Denver Public Library:

https://digital.denverlibrary.org/digital/collection/p15330coll22/id/67531/rec/70

Click on the double-headed arrow and then scroll to enlarge the image.

Not much information on the Speas Company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speas_Vinegar_Company

Bob Chaparro

Hemet, CA