An old school track cleaner car...as a prototype model in HOn3!

[Dave V]

Keeping the rails clean on my 12 x 14 foot HOn3 RGS layout can be a bit of a hassle.  The shear length of the mainline is much longer than anything I had to deal with in N scale...but then there are also tons of lineside details and tight spots (like under the tramhouse at Ophir) where my ham fists and a Bright Boy can do significant damage.

Aztec made an HOn3 track cleaner back in the day based on the Micro Trains C&S-style reefer but they're hard to find.  I had a lead on a pair but they were more than I was willing to pay.

Three of those C&S-style reefers were conveyed to the RGS via its receiver Victor A. Miller in a legal settlement between Miller and the C&S in 1938.  One was converted around 1940 to outfit car 2102 which still exists today, albeit unrecognizable (it was converted into an open-air coach for the Georgetown Loop RR).

This is what RGS 2102 looked like in service as an outfit car:

https://ngtrainpics.photoshelter.com/image/I00007tgNLCk7ij4

I've wanted to do a model of 2102 as an outfit car.  I happened to have an extra Micro Trains C&S reefer that I wasn't using (I have too many, LOL...cue the Colorado "reefer" jokes).  But these cars have cast metal frames and represent steel-underframe (no truss rods!) cars built for the C&S narrow gauge at the turn of the century, so they're perfect candidates for making a good old-fashioned Masonite slider track cleaner car.



I had some extra C&S-style boxcar doors curiously leftover from some Grandt Line stock car kits (I know, it was like finding a prize in my cereal box!).  I also had some work car windows from Tichy.  I cut a small slab of Masonite the width of the car and to fit between the trucks, beveled on the ends, and glued two nails matching holes I'd drilled in the metal underframe.  I slide the nails through the holes and then attached fishing weights to keep a constant pressure on the cleaning pad.  So, the Masonite pad (rough side down of course!) is free to slide up and down through the frame and is always in contact with the railhead while never pushing up on the car.



She looks fairly inconspicuous in consist:

[Dave V]

Here at Placerville we have a work train that actually does work...



After just three trips around the RGS main, the 2102 is already earning its keep:

[nkalanaga]

"a legal settlement between Miller and the C&S"

Did the RGS, through the D&RGW I assume, interchange cars with the C&S?  Or was this some type of non-operating disagreement?

[Dave V]

"a legal settlement between Miller and the C&S"

Did the RGS, through the D&RGW I assume, interchange cars with the C&S?  Or was this some type of non-operating disagreement?

So by the 1930s, no...there were no longer places where C&S and D&RGW narrow gauge trackage connected. 

In the late 1930s, the C&S was trying to abandon the old South Park lines (essentially everything narrow gauge but the Clear Creek line), but the ICC forced the C&S to put the line up for sale.  Miller--then receiver (and some would say savior) of the RGS--made a perfectly valid offer to buy and operate the South Park line...but the C&S apparently didn't follow through in good faith.  Miller sued the C&S and the C&S settled by giving him a bunch of boxcars, stock cars, and three reefers (one of which was the 2102).  The cars were all supposed to be in good repair before transfer to Miller but quite a few weren't (RGS reefer 2103, for example, was essentially scrapped on arrival at Ridgway as it was so bad).  Since Miller was the receiver of the RGS, he leased the cars to the RGS for use there at a tribial fee, thereby reducing the railroad's per diem load on leasing D&RGW cars.

Most of those cars (essentially all that saw service on the RGS, anyway) got RGS paint and reporting marks.  However, they all bore a cast metal ownership plate bearing Miller's name.  When Miller divorced his wife--the daughter of the judge that appointed Miller receivership of the RGS in the first place--he lost the RGS shortly thereafter.  However, the Miller cars stayed on the RGS.  Most of the boxcars were sent to Alaska in 1942 for the war effort along with a sizable chunk of Colorado's narrow gauge history.  A few survive in Alaska today, having been built for the C&S, repainted for the RGS, and ending up on the WP&YR.

Some of the boxcars and stock cars were cut down into flat cars.  Most of the stock cars, however, survived until the end when they were mostly scrapped en masse.  Only one example of a C&S stock car survives today, and it's at the museum and Golden...and it was a Miller car.  The 2101 reefer sat in its peeling yellow paint at Ridgway through the 1960s on a short segment of narrow gauge track that it apparently wasn't worth scrapping...there she sat with a caboose and Coach 0260 until all three were rescued.  Last I saw 2101 she was also in Golden, with C&S lettering on one side and RGS on the other.

[CBQ Fan]

I picked up a freight car with the same concept off of eBay. They modify a bunch of different types of freight cars. Mine is an outside braced boxcar from microtrains.

[John]

A few survive in Alaska today, having been built for the C&S, repainted for the RGS, and ending up on the WP&YR.

found this ..

http://www.whitepassfan.net/rolling-stock/freight-cars/reefer/index.html

and this .

http://www.whitepassfan.net/rolling-stock/freight-cars/box-car/700-800.html

[Dave V]

Rollin' south along the Dolores River out of Rico...  The 2102 is fairly inconspicuous in consist.