Vintage eBay Find

A fun sub-hobby I enjoy is occasionally finding vintage items that can be restored to operate compatibly with contemporary equipment. This usually involves replacing trucks and couplers, but it may also involve adding weight and sometimes cosmetic improvements. Not long ago I found a Chateau Martin wine car on eBay that I'm pretty sure is a Laconia kit from the 1950s.

This is exactly how I got it from the seller (it was pretty cheap). A prior owner had converted it to Kadees mounted with wood screws, so that's one thing I don't need to worry about, but the trucks will have to go, and the roof probably needs sanding sealer and new paint.

The prototype is a General American Pfaudler milk tank car (the tanks are internal within the wood carbody), the same thing as the much more recent Athearn car. Chateau Martin used it for wine. For some reason, as far as I can tell, Athearn never brought its model out in the Chateau Martin scheme. A web search shows Lionel brought one out in 3-rail O, AHM did an HO freight reefer in this scheme in the 1950s, and Roundhouse did a 50-foot HO express reefer in this scheme, but neither is as close to the prototype as this 60-year-old Laconia car.

Tony Thompson's blog has a post on this same Laconia car. He pretty much agrees it's an OK model as is, and nothing better has come along.

There's also a history of Chateau Martin and the wine cars at this site. They ran from 1940 to about 1974 in the basic magenta paint wirh several different lettering schemes. The traffic was between Waterford, CA and Bronx, NY, where they were unloaded at a Chateau Martin bottling plant, but they somehow seem to have appeared in freights all over the country.