Modeling SAL 40' PS-1 Beer cars and others

"A man walks into a bar.....", and now you find yourself curious about Seaboard Air Line beer cars. "Welcome", says the bar tender, and you order up a round. For many, any silver Seaboard Air Line boxcar was considered to be a "beer" car used in the transport of Tampa's finest Schlitz and Anheuser Busch lager, however, there are several interesting facets to these cars. 

The fleet of beer cars was in assigned service to Hillsboro, Florida (not to be confused with the alternate spelling of the county of Hillsborough), which was a jointly operated yard by the Seaboard Air Line and Atlantic Coast Line. The line was accessed from the west by the Seaboard which switched the area alternately with rival ACL. The area was once home to Hillsborough Army Airfield which can be seen to the southeast of the topographic map.

In 1958, Joseph Schlitz Brewing opened its Tampa, Florida brewery as major brewers made inroads to relatively untapped Florida markets. In 1959, Anheuser Busch brewery was opened in the same area with the two breweries separated by less than a 1/4 mile from one another. Today, the Schlitz brewery remains active as part of the Yuengling family of beers, while the Anheuser Busch brewery is now shuttered.

Schlitz Brewery, Tampa, Florida (above), and the Anheuser Busch brewery (below) courtesy of Florida Memory.

It's not always been as easy as you think to model these unique SAL cars. The bones are there by way of Kadee's excellent 40' PS-1, but the decals have always been lacking until recently.

Looking at the scale models of the Pullman-Standard 40' PS-1 boxcars as produced by Kadee Products, a majority of the models are assigned to Tampa (Hillsboro) for beer loading. The models are truly excellent and capture so many of the fine details Kadee is known for producing. The comparable Intermountain model of the PS-1 lacks the small changes that can be found on the Kadee model, but is acceptable for later built cars. To date, Kadee has produced only three SAL beer cars as SAL 25403 (part number 5109), SAL 25255 (part number 5114), and SAL 25099 (part number 5121). 

Finally, we have some excellent decals to work with from K4 Decals that are specific to these cars and can open up several additional paint schemes. 

Previously, only Speedwitch Media, now National Scale Car, produced decals (sets D103 and D194, seen below) for the earliest schemes but these could be cobbled together with others to create several variations.

   

Lastly, Microscale has two decal sets of use, 87-965 and 87-1287 of use but these are limited in scope to larger 50' cars and the heralds are inaccurate.