Large Scale Central

Beer Cars and Breweries

Hi everyone, my first post since joining.

Im wanting to build a German style brewery and on-site beer garden as the eventual focal point for my layout when it gets going. Ive considered doing a large complex scratchbuild, but a kitbash from the Piko brewery buildings and parts seems more likely. This should give my kegs and beer cars a destination.

Now that Ive kinda rambled on, Im curious to see and hear what other people have for beer cars and done for their breweries, if there are any out there.

Thanks! Mike

I collect the USA Trains and LGB beer reefers and have a couple of the Delton and Aristo cars. Many of the USAT beer reefers made in the 1990’s are getting harder to find. I’d like to know about brewery or beer distributor buildings too. There are some nice G-scale beer accessories (kegs and pallets of beer cases on pallets etc.). I know there’s guys on this board that have probably put together buildings from kits or scratch built them.

Thats great, Ive always liked the USA Trains cars, Ive been slowly adding some Cardinal beer cars to my LGB collection.

Im glad that there is some interest out there on this topic, especially agree with ^ Michael Kirrene. There are some great brewery details out there, recently discovered that my local Hobby Lobby has some great barrels in the miniature/dollhouse isle. Theyre stained wood and ‘carved’ with alloy bands wrapping them, not bad addition for $2.65

Michael,

you might find searching for details about the Milwaukee Beer Line helpful. From memory I remember pics showing the railroad when it was operating.

The book “Model Railroader’s Guide To Industries Along the Track Volume Two” by Jeff Wilson has some great information about breweries. I think most of the examples are US breweries, but I would guess that a lot of the general information would apply. Especially since many American breweries were started by German brewers.

-Kevin. `

Thanks for the suggestions guys! So true ^dieseldude, the majority of the States buildings have the european look to them.

Alan, I have looked up the Beer Line, I have also been following the new articles in Model Railroader magazine. Its neat to see theyre still working on that influential layout.

I recently took a trip to Hobby Lobby and really inspected the miniatures isle. I found a few detail items, other than the barrels/kegs.

I picked up a few crates that come with cola bottles. Since the LGB Cardinal beer cars and old German style brewing is my starting point I painted the crates yellow and left the cola bottle caps red and stripped off the ‘cola’ sticker. The crates are slightly oversized because of the wood thickness but on a forklift they look right at home, the bottles may be a bit too big as well but they could be those giant German bottles.