Hi! I'm building a small switching layout based somewhere in the late 50s or early 60s. Being that I haul plastic pellets that come off hopper cars i got to wondering when the railroads started to haul plastic pellets. Or plastic in general. I deliver pellets to numerous small customers that I think would work for a very small space (im limited to a 7.5 foot by 1 foot shelf).
I don't know the following PS-2 3215 model to be prototypical. It was released by AHM in 1964 and was lettered BLT/NEW 5-63.
An industry in my hometown was an early user of plastic pellets to make the clear plastic bags that dry cleaners use - in that fact that company, Luetzow, started as a dry cleaner and eventually found the manufacture of plastic bags to be more lucrative! 1956 is when they started. They since branched out to many other kinds of plastic bags.
Fortunately Luetzow has posted some interesting historical photos and info on their website
Luetzow Industries LLP - Our History
http://luetzowind.com/aHistory.html
Note the photo with what the caption says is Luetzow was being congratulated for being Dow Chemical's first plastic resin rail car customer in Wisconsin. The DOWX rail car in the photo looks to me like an early Airslide car, so a date like 1956 would make sense. By the time I started to ride my bike to check on whether they had a car on their siding, so early 1960s (a siding which they shared with a bulk oil dealer, a lumber yard, two tanneries, and a gray iron foundry) they got their pellets in Center Flo hoppers, often El Rexene or Rexall as I recall but probably DOWX too Interestingly their unloading area was and is across the street from the factory shown in the website photos. So in theory you could model the customer even if there was no space for the structure
One time I noticed that there had been a little spillage of load. the plastic pellets were translucent, not transparent, and were about the size and shape of aspirin.
The bottom photo that shows the plant as it looks today was taken evidently from the top of a center flo hopper parked on their siding - you can see the running board in the edge of the picture! Or maybe it was a drone. They are now the only customer on that siding and the siding has been shortened. But they are still rail served.
I am sure if you Googled enough you'd find other info about plastic manufacturers that were early customers of rail-delivered plasic pellets but since I intend to model this Luetzow factory on my HO layout needless to say it is wonderful to have these old photos that confirm and amplify what my recollections from 60+ years ago are and were!
Dave Nelson
Note that plastic pellets are shipped in cars with pneumatic hopper outlets. (Pneumatic outlets look like a pipe end sticking out sideways with a cap/cover. A hose would be attached to this outlet and the product sucked out of the car with a vaccuum system.)
The Naugatuck Plastics paint scheme could be real, but the model doesn't have the pneumatic style outlets, which would have been a different option (on the real car) but model companies didn't capture these detail variations back then.
Chris van der Heide
My Algoma Central Railway Modeling Blog
Con-Cor 2008 model, 2600 cu.ft. AirSlide, BLT/NEW 8-60
GACX 43920-43959 3660 cu.ft., according to "A History of the General American Airslide and Other Covered Hopper Cars" by Eric A. Neubauer 1989
Bakelite is also plastic, right?
Before covered hoppers, plastic pellets would have been shipped in bins in boxcars. That could date back before WW1, since Bakelite was invented back in 1907-1909.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
dknelsonLuetzow Industries LLP - Our History http://luetzowind.com/aHistory.html Note the photo with what the caption says is Luetzow was being congratulated for being Dow Chemical's first plastic resin rail car customer in Wisconsin.
If you want to kearn more about operations at Freeport, TX where the car came from, you can read the Winter 2022 issue of the Missouri Pacific Historical Society "Eagle". There is a story by Nathan Griffin, a trainman who worked in Freeport and there are ZTS maps of the whole Freeport area. Freeport, TX was the station with the highest originating revenue on the entire Missouri Pacific RR.
While I never worked there, I had to talk to the managers there frequently and about half the people I worked with from the MP worked there at one time or another.
VINYLPLASTIC?
Page 286 of the Car Builders' Cyclopedia 1957
GACX 42115-42129 3660 cu.ft. 1954? Bakelite, according to "A History of the General American Airslide and Other Covered Hopper Cars" by Eric A. Neubauer 1989