Home Shops Split Rock Mining Ore Car

The Split Rock Mining Company, built by Thomas Gasior, is one of my all-time favorite layouts. It's very active on Facebook, and just the other day I got a notification that I'm a "top fan", I guess for the number of "likes" I've given it over the years. It has a web page here. Home Shops LLC does custom runs of rolling stock painted for well-known home layouts, and I got a Fox Valley/Scaletrains ore car painted and lettered for Split Rock Mining.

I got mine from Denver Model Trains. There isn't much "prototype" info on theae cars from either the Denver Model Trains site or the Split Rock Mining Facebook page, but from what I can gather, regular ore cara on Split Rock Mining are for on line service only. since they don't have data for interchange.

(I got this photo off Facebook, and I'm assuming it's by Mr Gasior.) So I'm assuming the Home Shops cars, since they have ACI labels, reporting marks, and data, are for interchange, since they'll be running on other layouts. This probably makes them likely to operate in "all rail" trains from the Minnesota ore fields to steel mills elsewhere in the country. As it happens, I relettered a few of the old AHM ore cars that have a B&LE prototype, but the C&NW bought a number of them for "all rail" ore service. They were variously patched and repainted and operated with other roads' ore cars. I decided to see what the Split Rock car would look like in a string with these.

Well, you can at least see that the B&LE cars are a larger prototype.