M. Neal Milk Company

I've begun the process of naming industries on my layout for fellow blogger-modelers, and the first is M. Neal Milk. As I will with everyone I think about doing this with, I ran the idea past Neal M., who didn't want his surname used on social media -- an entirely prudent and reasonable preference. As a result, M. Neal Milk is the new name for a previously unnamed JL Innovative Designs milk platform.

Along with the lettering, which came from a spare alphabet decal set, I added some additional milk cans and cases from the new Walthers 949-4136 set. I also need to find a delivery truck, which I'll add to the scene when I find one.

The Central Vermont milk car is actually a tank car, with internal tanks inside the wood sheathed body. The photos I've seen suggest that these were unloaded near major cities directly into tank trucks, which carried the milk to the distributors. If anyone ever brings out a milk tank truck, I'll also get one of those.

Milk traffic survived on some lines into the 1960s. A DVD I have of late Erie and early EL shows Erie milk cars on the head end of diesel passenger trains. A Lackawanna milk train ran from Sussex, NJ through Chatham very early in the morning up to the early 1960s when I was growing up in Chatham -- but this is the sort of thing nobody heard about at the time.

Recently I found a Binkley-Laconia Rutland milk car for a reasonable price on eBay. This was assembled, though the description made it clear that one of the couplers had gone south, and one of the trucks disintegrated in shipment. No problem, I just replaced both. The couplers were the original Kadee non-magnetic style from the 1950s with the straight actuating pins, which probably dates the whole car.

All the Rutland cars were can cars, not tank cars, so the cans on the milk platform would come from cars like these.