Long-time readers of this blog, or those who may have heard a clinic I have given several times, may find that the title of the present post stirs a memory. That’s because those prior blog posts and clinics were entitled “Wine as an industrial commodity,” a topic I developed jointly with my late friend Richard Hendrickson. Here’s a link to that earlier post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/02/wine-as-industrial-commodity.html .
More recently, I took the railroad side of that topic and reorganized the material as an article for Model Railroad Hobbyist, the on-line magazine (see it at: www.mrhmag.com ). That article, entitled “Tank Cars and the Wine Business,” was in the May 2023 issue of MRH, and I posted some comments about it (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/05/my-column-in-may-2023-model-railroad.html ).
I suppose it’s natural to consider the ways in which beer can be viewed similarly, on the railroad side of the business, and how we can model some aspects of it, should we wish to do so. A few years ago, I wrote a post on this subject, giving the background of beer-making processes and materials (available at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/07/beer-as-industrial-commodity.html ).
In this present post, I want to visit some additional points, particularly relating to the the rail traffic that goes with beer. In doing so, I will overlap somewhat with that previous post.
By the late 20th century, a very few huge brewing companies dominated the beer business in the United States, and it’s perhaps difficult to realize that only as far back as 1949, there were still 440 breweries in the U.S., the great majority of them relatively small and serving rather local territories. This is an advantage if you model that sort of era, because you don’t have to think about modeling the mammoth processing plants that breweries became later, or vast fleets of rail traffic. Rail traffic certainly did vary by era.
At the same time, these smaller breweries were not like the craft brewing operations of the last two decades, which get almost everything by truck. Instead, they were old-fashioned operations of little or no sophistication, but with rail service. So let’s look at what the rail traffic to and from such breweries would be.
We begin with the raw materials from which beer is made. The primary material is grain, traditionally barley, but possibly also wheat, corn, rice and others. The starches in the seed grains we harvest are converted to sugars at the time the seed germinates, to feed the new plant. So the grain used in making beer has to be made to begin germination and the conversion of starches to sugars.
That process is called “malting” in the beer context, in which grains are dampened and warmed to begin germination, then heated to pause germination and dry the malt. The details of this process, especially the time and temperature of drying, can be varied over a wide range, and the starting grains also vary, producing a considerable variety of malts. This results in a wide range of beer colors and flavors (Briess Co. photo).
In my previous post about beer, I went into some detail on malting at the industrial level, including rail car transportation, so I won’t repeat that part (here’s the link again: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/07/beer-as-industrial-commodity.html).
Once malt is made and crushed or ground, it is treated with hot water to extract the sugars from the malt, and then the resulting liquid is brought to a boil and hops are added. Hops are a plant flower, and are dried before shipment. They contribute both flavor and resistance to spoilage to the beer (Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. photo).
Next yeast is added to the liquid, nowadays a carefully chosen yeast, though for centuries brewers relied on “wild” yeasts that were in the environment. The yeast happily consumes the sugars, and their life-process waste product is alcohol. Under suitable controls, the result is beer.
A modern “factory” brewery would receive the starting ingredients, grain and hops, in bulk, and do everything needed for brewing in house. To make lighter beers, there might be little or no barley alongside the rice or corn malt. But for modern modeling, the point is that only raw materials would be shipped in.
In contrast, a smaller brewery might well receive malt instead of grain. Malt was often shipped in 50- or 100-pound paper bags, so it could arrive in box cars. Hops also were likely bagged in that era, though they were sometimes handled in bulk — again, box cars most likely for bagged hops.
Once beer is made, it is shipped out. The hundreds of small breweries of, say, 1949 mostly served a local area, so they would not have shipped much if any beer by rail. But even a medium-size brewery might do so. One’s first thought would involve box cars, but beer cans or bottles are quite subject to damage in transit.
The introduction of load dividers for canned goods shipment was a huge step forward in reducing damage. For my 1953 era, this can include GAEX cars (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-gaex-box-cars.html ),or the WP “feather’ box cars (here’s my recent post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/04/western-pacifics-famous-feather-box-cars.html ). This is my GAEX model.
So even if you don’t wish to model a brewery directly, you can model the rail traffic needed for one, either the raw materials inputs or the shipping of finished product. On my layout, both are included.
Tony Thompson
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