Hello folks and Happy Holidays!
I would like the following information if you can help me out. On this past Christmas day while killing time waiting for the the little lady to come back from an ambulance call. I came accoss 3 tank cars stored in the picturesque hamlet of Chalfont PA. They appear to be wine cars from the 30's and 40's.
A SBIX 1606 which was built in 2-48 and is lettered for Standard Brands Inc. and sits on PRR friction bearing trucks with roller bearing wheels and axles. It also has a wooden tank! For what ever product it hauled. Couldn't make out who made the car.
UTLX 3752 built in 9-36 and is an ACF car and had 3 domes!
And finally SHPX 6622, lettered Shipper Car Line Corp.
This car had 5 domes and can be seen from the road.
It is lettered leased to Bear Mt. Winery= which sounds like the people that brought you Thunderbird! It was built in 8-40 and is also an ACF car.
They appear to have been sitting there since the late 70's to the early 80's due to lube records etc.
My question is who do they belong too? Are they preserved? Are They all wine cars?
Any information on the cars would be helpful and all three would make a great modeling project due to the fact that no one I think makes a model of any of the three cars. If there is any interest I will put up pictures of the cars from multiangles. Best wishes and keep up the good fight on railroad preservation.

The wooden tank car is probably a vinegar car. Orange Empire Railway Museum was given on of these by Standard Brands 25 or so years ago.

OERM's car is SBIX 1651. We show our car as having been built by a FTCo. in 1928. The car has a horizontal wooden tank.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but there's someone in our preservation community who is a native of Chalfont....... maybe if we're lucky we'll hear from him/her. Suffice it to say that the appropriate places have known about these cars for quite some time; it's only the logistics of either moving out-of-compliance cars out of the sidings onto SEPTA or the like that keep them there.

Yes, we'd love to see pictures. Been hearing about these things for too long without seeing them. (^_^)

If these are the cars I'm thinking of, there is an effort under way to give them a good home. An unsuccessful attempt to contact the (nowhere to be found) owner was under way earlier this year, and once all the legal niceties have been satisfied, they'll be trucked to their new home.

JAC

I think that long ago (1980's) the reporting marks HOCX (Head On Collision Line) had a mailing address on that siding.

Hello All

If I'm not mistaken, this collection once contained a few other tank cars that already have made it into preservation. They may include the two dome tank car plinthed in front of the Steamtown Museum Store and a three dome car that went to RRMofPA.

Correct me if I'm wrong

Dave Crosby

I can confirm that one of the cars at RRMPA came from Chalfont - I worked on it as a restoration crew volunteer a few years ago.

The Chalfont cars are just one of the many things that can be seen (if only briefly) from Septa. Anyone in the Philadelphia area should invest in a pass and take a ride to see it all. it's fun.

Dave C,

Didn't Steamtown also get a tank car from the gravel business that was at the west end of the old Mulberrry Street bridge? There was a wooden boxcar and tank car there.

Of all the local relics we tried to get the park interested in, I thought the tank made it.

I got a message a few e-mail crashes back (long since gone) about other relics aling SEPTA including rumors of a milk car. I wonder if that was one of these tanks the writer was referring to?

Rob

Rob:

Did you see this photo of the IC milk car at IRM posted recently on the Fallen Flags site at gelwood.railfan.net?

Hello Rob

Actually they have the car to which you refer (a single dome with arch bar trucks) as well as the car from Chalfont. I'm assuming the box car, which can bee seen in photos dating as far back as the late 1950's, was lost when the whole gravel business was removed maybe 10 years ago.

Dave Crosby

The native of Chalfont Sandy refers to happens to be me. Those tank cars at Chalfont were owned by David York of Telford, Pa. When Mr. York got married in the late 1990s it appears he abandoned the cars on the property of Samuel Haines, Jr., who owns Hartzel's Mill where they are stored. In 1996 I was instrumental in arrianging for the donation of one of the cars to RRMPA and then-curator George Deeming contacted Steamtown, who accepted one of the other tank cars. York worked for the Tank Car Corporation of America in Oreland and would buy up antique tank cars in the 70s and lease out others under the ageis of TRM Industries (an acronymn that stood for "The Railroad Museum"). He owned at least a dozen modern tank cars for leasing, and a 40' steel boxcar that until recently was stored in Jim Thorpe, Pa. York also had a 1950s Southern Railway bay window caboose stored there but in 1994 it was moved to Nanticoke, Pa. He also owned a PRR P70 steel coach which was used on the Quakertown & Eastern main line excursions in the 60s. Hartzels was one of the proposed sites for the restoration of Royal Hudson No. 2839 but due to weight restrictions on a culvert on the Reading's Doylestown branch the engine was never moved there. Since these antique tank cars are abandoned property, interested parties who might wish to acquire these cars should contact Sam Haines, Jr. at Hartzels, Chalfont, Pa., and see if they might be acquired. I am surprised the nearby New Hope & Ivyland hasn't tried acquiring one or more of the cars since they are always seeking antique freight equipment for photo special trains.

K.R. Bell
Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania

Thanks for the reminder, the reporting mark TRMX is still in the Railway Equipment Register's index, but the detailed listing is gone. I'll try checking an older edition. I may have confused TRMX with HOCX.