ARMH Evans RBL’s for Miller Brewing

[Richard Spencer]

All,

I recently picked up a few aAtlas N scale Evans 53′ double plug door RBL boxcars. They are numbered for ARMH 786709. They also have lettering showing they are subleased for Miller Brewing Co. Does anyone know what, if any particular service they were assigned to? I know Miller had a big brewery in Fort Worth, but did they have any others directly served by the MP?

[peggyrothschild]

There weren’t a lot of online breweries on the MP. Lone Star’s plant in San Antonio comes to mind but it was switched by a electric railroad. AB plant in Houston but I don’t recall if it was served by the MP. Longview Texas had a brewery (Schlitz) I think as served by the MP. The boxcars out of Miller were for beer moves (I think mostly canned beer).

The empties coming back to the breweries were billed under a ‘5 for 1’ rule. Meaning the receiving beer distributor would take the loading pallets out of four loads and ship them back to the plant for free in the fifth car. The non-loads of pallets were in an agent’s pool as Miller didn’t want to pay for a customer pool but they liked too having a buffer of cars around.

I remember meeting with the Miller traffic manager (Johnny Myers) who was a rail fan and had written a book on the Texas Electric. He, our sales manager and I went down to the Miller cafeteria after a meeting and I remember being surprised that they served beer to the employees – even those on the dock driving fork lifts.

[Dennis Faircloth]

A lot of cars were assigned to pools managed by other railroads, for industries on that railroad. As an example, there were MP RBL’s in Southern’s pool for the Stroh’s brewery in Atlanta. I would imagine there were some MP cars in the pool for Miller’s facility in Milwaukee. MP cars would be in any pool for a Miller plant where MP participated in the routing of outbound traffic. I have dug around and not found any specific info on the assignments for ARMH RBL’s, but I continue to search.

As an aside – the AB brewery in Houston was served by MP. It was located on the Houston-North Shore route to Baytown, and served out of MK Yard.

[peggyrothschild]

Ted
I’m not surprised you haven’t found any information. Mopac customer and agent pools were retained in TCS and there was no reason to print out and save hardcopies of assignments. Cars before computerized pools assignments, (which drove the empty waybills back to the origin loading point) had customer or agent stenciling but these were painted out once the TCS pools were implemented to avoid any confusion. Your correct about the offline pools where MP shared in the roadhaul. They would participate in the foreign RR pools by assigning cars.

Charlie

[Richard Spencer]

Ted and Charlie,

Thank you for your information. I had never really considered that the MP having cars in pools for breweries that were off line. I did some searching online and found some information that indicated Coors had a pool of 62 foot PC&F RBL’s that had cars from BN, Santa Fe as well as MP. Do either of you know if the pools required identical cars or was it just sufficient for a car to be an RBL?

The reason why I ask is there are several models of 50′ RBL’s in N scale like the Atlas FGE car and the Wheels of Time PC&F car, which I could add to a multi road pool of cars.

[Dennis Faircloth]

Which specific types of cars in a brewery pool would be determined based upon interior cubic capacity. (Besides the requirement to be insulated.) Industries loading boxcars most often have specific loading patterns for palletized shipments and want to maximize the amount of product in a car, since it moves on a carload rate. I think you would be fairly prototypical in your pool by matching cars with similar interior capacity, without knowing specific cars assigned to the prototype pool.

[Richard Spencer]

Ted,

Thanks for the pointer on keeping cars in a pool of similar capacity. Wheels of Time just a announced 50′ exterior post flat roof RBL’s in N, so I think I will be able to use those in MP and SL-SF to round out a small fleet.

David

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