Cotton Seed Traffic

A month ago, I posted some photos of a building in Famoso, CA made from containers.

I didn't know what it was for, but I surmised it was meant to keep the dust down from a loading process. Trucks would drive in the breezeway, be loaded under cover and out of the wind, and drive out. Nobody could tell me what the material was. Then I posted this photo on a Facebook group of a car that was spotted near the building and asked if anyone knew what the white stuff was, which seems to be what was beng loaded.

It turns out the white stuff was identified by members of the group as cotton seed. I already knew cotton seed is used as a cattle feed additive in California, and that it's hauled in from cotton growing states in repurposed wood chip gons. The group told me it's unpleasant stuff, it blows and gets everywhere and does things like clog fuel lines. That would explain the need for the container structure to serve as a windbreak while loading trucks.

Here are some typical recycled wood chip gons in cotton seed service I've run across. The most common around here have MWCX reporting marks and are pretty clearly ex BN.

I run some wooc chip hoppers on my layout in wood chip service, but I have more than I need. I have a number of E&C Shops cars whose paint I like less than the Walthers cars I have. I decided to start a project of convering one of the E&C cars to a cotton seed MWCX car. The first step has been to paint it out of a bottle of old Floquil Jade Green before it goes bad.

The green on the MWCX cars seems to weather to something close to the jade green. I'll need to add paint patches, dings, rust patches, graffiti, modern data, and conspicuity stripes, but this is at least a start.