A retired railroad friend has talked about them moving offal gondolas from Iowa packing plants. The smell in the summer was incredible he said with hordes of insects swarming the cars. The cars they h

As their old ads said for years, your dealer can get it from Walthers. BIll HIrt

Considering all other CB&Q cars built during this period were Mineral Red (some say Boxcar Red), I've always assumed that is their original paint and any repaints until 1958. Chinese Red painted cars

Most definitely. I'd buy at least a half dozen. Bill Hirt

Bentonite service. Bentonite is often referred to as drilling mud. The Q served several Bentonite mines in Wyoming. Bill Hirt

At least until a year or two ago, there was one in Brookfield MO (old CB&Q Division Point) near the ready mix plant there. Bill HIrt

Walthers has received some infrequent shipments the past year (I got some from them). They are still listed. I have them on backorder and some have arrival dates in the next month. So they appear to b

Wasn't these 2 kits based on the series of articles that Rail Model Journal published circa 1997 about oil distributors? I remember some of the articles had scale plans of oil distributor warehouses.

Allan, Thank you very much. Bill HIrt

I just had a friend call me and he has been given an Intermountain O Scale reefer kit to assemble. It is factory painted BREX. The kit has no instruction sheet(s). Does anyone have any of these reefer

Great Western Sugar built a sugar terminal facility in Western Springs IL in the late 1950s/early 1960s. This is on the CB&Q triple track mainline in the Chicago suburbs. The sugar shipped from this f

Looking at back at Eldon's original picture, it looks like the CB&Q crane is #204360 which was stationed at Galesburg. There is a picture of it (the reverse side in the late 1960s and repainted) in th

In Morning Sun's Rock Island Color Guide to Freight and Passenger Equipment by Steve Hile, there is a picture on page 34 of a Rock Island Outside Braced Wood Sheathed boxcar set off and burning in Cot

Microscale still has decal sets available in HO and N scale for Gulf and Flying A. Dave's Decals has sheets for companies Microscale no longer offers and a number of the regionals. <https://www.davart

On the Burlington, the main purpose of the enlarged Mather cars was to haul hogs from western Illinois to Tobin Packing in Rochester and Albany NY. These cars could hold up to 200 hogs, so they were p

The Jacksonville Sanborn maps updated through 1949 are available on the Library of Congress web site: Here is the link to Volume 1a: <https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01286_008/> Here is the link to Vo

St. Louis Keokuk & North Western. The "K" Line moniker was used by the CB&Q after it acquired the StLK&NW and is still used by BNSF today for the route from Burlington, Iowa, to St. Louis. The Burling

A friend is building the North Conway B&M depot based on a George Drury article in a 1988 Model Railroader. He painted the roof with a 50 year old bottle of Floquil PC Green (the classic square bottle

I wrote about this a few weeks ago. You can still get the real thing - Floquil Oxide Red - if that is the match you need. <http://www.narrowgaugemodeling.com/floquil-paint/> And yes, they are unopened

For those who still would like to use Floquil and Polly Scale, I found that Narrow Gauge Modeling Company sells unopened bottles. I recently purchased several bottles from them and they were in new un