Putting Together A Tropicana Train

A string of Tropicana reefers looks great!

I always wanted a Juice Train and finally put one together earlier this year.  Researching the Juice Train to Cincinnati, I found that it had several trailers on the train.  Thinking it might add interest, I chose to paint and decal my own trailers and mount them on home-made roadrailers.   I run 1 Premier Operating car, 11 RailKing reefers, one K-Line trailer, and 8 MTH 20' trailers.  The Premier Operating car is shorter than, but the height of the RailKing cars.

 

Here is a video of my train.  In the video it is being pulled by scale locomotives and when I run the train with scale locomotives, I add a scale MTH Premier reefer as the first car.  So in the video you can see the size difference of the Premier and RailKing cars.

 

Actually, I just looked and at 0:37, in the video, the orange car is an older Premier item.

Weaver is coming out with tropicana cars this fall sometime. I have 8 on order and I will pull them with my Penn central E44 electric. 

 

Weaver may have some painted samples at York. 

Driving back from Naples to Atlanta about two years ago, I ran into the juice train coincidentally.  All the refers were white with the Tropicana logo.  I remember being a little disappointed not seeing one orange refers like the Lionel ones I have (6-173XX series), which really like and reminds me of the old tropicana logo when I was a kid.

 

 

Here's my version pulled by three 1st generation TMCC/ RS Geeps. The cars are Lionel, MTH & Atlas.

 

I believe Scrapiron Scher has a processing plant.   

Juice train runs past 1/2 mile from my house everyday. Its a fun train, I use 3 ac 6000's

The plant was my idea and built by Lance Craven <gelgoog328@yahoo.com>

 

Jerry

I don't know if this will help but I put two of the SD 9 on track with three of the

 Lionel  Tropicana Reefer numbers 6-17307 08 and 09. I was trying to give you a idea of the size. Hope it helps some. They look ok to me. I have some of those other cars you posted but I'm in lay out re build mode here and can't find them.

for the real thing ....

 

 

if you ever take the auto train, the unit runs right bye the station in the early afternoon.

 

Bill D

Thanks Larry, that's exactly what I was looking for. Think I'll be going with the orange cars.

 

Jerry

The Lionel MPC cars are 70's era colors but wooden which is too old for the juice train and the orange 1990's cars are better for the 90's era. Both are undersized but the MPCs are more. The Seaboard Air Line had been replaced with SCL by the time these trains started. I grew up watching the RF&P pull this train. A better engine choice may be PC,CSX,Chessie or Conrail considering SCL and RF&P engines are hard to come by. As far as Lionel engines that could pass as SCL with some new decals. The ACL GP 20 the SAL RSD2 or GP9 and the NW2 are close to SCL.

I think I have a coupe of these Lionel Seaboard SD9's and I also have 2 custom painted and decaled Tropicana cars if you are interested I can send you some photos. Willing to sell at a reasonable price.

Here is a link to a You Tube Video presented by GE on moving the juice train from Florida to New Jersey   "Florida to New Jersey in 156 Seconds (GE Juice Train)"

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb8mk2HSJUc

 

Here in New Jersey on the Lehigh Line I catch the juice train every so often while out railfanning

 

Enjoy

 

Frank