| The Canfield & Northern is one of those railroads which, although
small, stays in the black and 100% steam through efficient maintenance
of their 90-pound rail and 40-year-old locomotives. This frugality is reflected
in many of the on-line industries and explains how Smelzika-Sovbich Chemical
Corp. acquired a fleet of unique "baby" tank cars.
When the firm needed tank cars to carry sulfuric acid from its other plants to its fertilizer works at Grafton on the C & N, it bought a string of narrowgauge tankers about to be scrapped by the Denver & Rio Grande. At the firm's "back yard" in Grafton a crew went to work and, with a judicious use of parts from a railroad salvage lot and home-grown metal work, turned the cars into homely but economical transporters. Small? Of course! Some commodities don't move in quantities as large as others. An old Model Railroader Photo: Tank cars come in all sizes and shapes. Here in a for example, are three: the common 6,000-gal. car, 3,000-gal. car that is the subject of this article, an 10,000-gal. ear--all DuPont and all painted the yellow and green. |
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