Modeling a vinegar works

[P-LineSoo]

This is quite an old topic, but anyone that may find it, as I did, in researching modeling their own vinegar works or "pickle factory" might benefit from this.

Depending on your scale, there have been a number of vinegar cars offered over the years.  They tend to resemble a tank car, but with a wooden tank with steel bands around it.  Vinegar is (or was) too corrosive to put in cars in the old days.

In N scale, ER Models offers a Richter Vinegar Works car which would seem to be based off of a prototype at the Mid Continent Railway Museum (though not on display currently) which was acquired in 1970 from the old Ripon Pickle operation in Redgranite, WI.

Waushara County, WI is in the heart of sand country.  You can't grow much there, or couldn't, anyway, back in the days before GPS Mapping and modern irrigation.  Cucumbers, strawberries, peppers and potatoes were about all that would grow in basically beach sand conditions, made worse by the acidity of prevalent white pine trees.   The communities of Wautoma, Redgranite and I think Wild Rose at one time had thriving pickle operations seasonally.  All were on the old C&NW "Pumpkin Line" that ran between Fond du Lac, WI and Marshfield, WI., Redgranite being on an old spur that used to serve the granite industry until the quarries closed up after filling with water in the early part of the 20th Century.  The Richter Vinegar car was abandoned, sans rails, for quite some time.

I would contact the Waushara County Historical Society (they're on Facebook) and ask for pictures and information about the 'Pickle Factories' of Wautoma and Redgranite.  I'm sure they have a bunch of info on the operations.

I can tell you from my memory of the runes of the pickle operations that they weren't very sophisticated and probably would be quite colorful for modelling.  The buildings were basically long sheds and inside I imagine they had sorting conveyors and workers would sort by hand.  Outside were big wooden vats where the cukes would ferment into pickles.  There probably had to be some sort of canning operation, which from my limited research thus far was all manual...ladies would pack the cukes in jars and fill with brine, etc.   From there, I suppose they went out in standard box cars or perhaps reefers, depending on the type of pickle.   Everything looked rather slapped together, to be honest, and it was only a seasonal operation, running from about mid-July to about November.   Then it was time for the Christmas Tree operations to start up, but that's another Sand Country industry of the past.

[BigDaddy]

Baltimore had a picturesque vinegar plant.  It was a distillery first.  It looks like one of doctorwayne's creations.  You could always smell the vinegar driving by.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/73850851@N03/sets/72157629922802791/

[jjdamnit]

Hello all,

Just to throw the proverbial spanner in the works...

Saurkraut is not made with vinegar. It is produced by salting the cut cabbage thus allowing it to ferment.

Hope this helps.

[doctorwayne]

Back in the late '50s/early '60s I purchased Athearn's pickle car, even though I had no place that it could logically be used.  I later downgraded it to a work-service water car, simply by painting the whole thing boxcar red.
Recently, I decided to upgrade it with wire grabirons and put it back into pickle service.  At the same time, I backdated it by converting it to a truss rod car, with K-type brakes and a vertical brakewheel staff, then gave it a new paint job...

While I don't have a pickle-aging station, I do have a canning plant, and the car can also be used in through trains, from an off-layout shipper to an off-layout consignee.

Wayne

[Atlantic and Hibernia]

Vinegar, aka acetic acid, was also an important industrial chemical. 

Check out:

https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~olsenk/ACETIC%20ACID.htm

 

Here in New Jersey, apples were grown for the production of an apple brandy widely known as  Jersey Lightning.  Over time it became less popular (it never completely died out), but industrial demand for acetic acid was growing. Of the estimated 29,000 barrels of New Jersey cider pressed in 1899, about 6000 went into vinegar production.

 

 

In the 1870's, chemists were developing methods for oxidizing alcohol for acetic acid production. However, the majority of producers used a much less sophisticated method - they opened the barrel of cider and let bacteria do the rest.

 

 

I have recently added a vinegar yard to my layout.  It simply consists of a locked shed were the apples ferment.

 

 

Have fun,

 

Kevin

Atlantic & Hibernia Railway

 

[cgedney]

I do have some perspective on this - my great, great grandfather started the M. A. Gedney Company in Minneapolis in 1880, and our family has worked there since.

As I understand it, the process was not very sophisticated, but fairly standard across the country. At that time the companies were very regional; there weren't any national pickle companies with the possible exception of the H. J. Heinz company.

A company would contract farmers to grow cucumbers, and set up what were known as "salting stations" throughout the region. These are what are frequently modeled as trackside industry elements, and as described previously are sheds with a dozen or so 800 bushel wooden tanks.

The farmers would deliver cucumbers to these sheds each day by truck to be sorted by size using a mechanical size grader. The farmer was paid a different amount for each size. The cucumbers would then go into a tank designated for that size, and when full the tank would be "capped" with wooden boards. Then the tank was filled with water over the tops of the caps and some salt was added. Naturally occuring acetobacter would then ferment the sugars in the cucumbers and create lactic acid, basically sterilizing the cucumbers and preventing any further spoilage.

At this point the cucumbers were preserved and ready to move, and the infamous pickle car would be brought in and loaded with either wheelbarrows or bucket elevators, if the facility was highly advanced. The rail car would then take the cucumbers to the main pickle factory, where they were either desalted and packed in glass jars with a vinegar brine, or stored in more outdoor tanks on the premises of the main factory. In this condition the pickles were also protected from freezing, alowing operations to continue in the winter.

We still use this method of preservation to a certain extent, but we no longer use pickle cars or salting stations. Reefer trucks now deliver cucumbers directly to the main factory, and most of the pickles are packed directly in glass (or even plastic), a method called "fresh pack". the salting tanks we use for "naturally cured" pickles in our current facility in Chaska, Minnesota are made out of fiberglass.

So, there are two different opportunities for modeling - the salting stations and the factory itself. Both would be on rail lines. The factory would also possibly have packaging materials, vinegar, salt, and sugar (for sweet gherkins) delivered by rail. Most outbound finished goods were delivered by truck.

[superbe]

Pictured is an old post card showing the National Fruit Products Co. way back when showing it's vinegar tanks . The company is still in operation. 

Below is an HO Nat'l Fruit Vinegar Car

Bob

 

 

[garya]

I found this picture of the Midland Vinegar Company.  The building seems fairly non-descript.  The rail cars are on the left, so it's hard to tell, but it may be easy to model a plant like this with a DPM building.

[garya]

I was looking for something today and found a kit I didn't even know I had, the Pola Vinegar Factory:

Very European, but maybe I can make it work...

[fmilhaupt]

At this time last year, David Leider published Pickle and Vinegar Makers of the Midwest: The History and Operations of Two Fascinating Industries. This 140-page book is the best single-book compilation of information out there on the pickle and vinegar industries in the Great Lakes region.

I just wrote up a lengthy review of it for the Pere Marquette Historical Society's newsletter, but the short version is that the book concentrates primarily on Illinois and Wisconsin, though it does provide useful information on businesses in Michigan and the Heinz operations in the Pittsburgh area. It covers the early history of the pickle and vinegar manufacturers in some detail, and has plenty to offer modelers in the way of photos (nearly 200) of buildings and rolling stock and fleet rosters.

It's available through several of the usual booksellers, or directly from the author.  He has a web site with ordering information, but I cannot locate it at the moment. I hesitate to provide direct ordering information here, lest I run afoul of the forum's advertising rules and etiquette.