Hiram and Duneland Cars

What railroads owned the "Duneland" and "hiram" CSS&SB business cars and where are they now?

checking the CERA book, theres no reference to those cars.

It mentions John Stephenson building a business car but that was in 1904..perhaps too early.

Parlor cars either got converted to coaches or sold.

Diners were scrapped.


to me its likely it was a post C&O ownership done with the Venango group.

Theres only one reference and it the Piedmont and Northern rebuilding one of its standard cars into a business car "Caroline"

yeah, i'm pretty sure those 2 cars were brought in in the vernango era

Agreed - they used to sit at the east end of shops near the wash rack. I have an old photo somewhere. In the mean time, take this link - one of these was renamed and is 2/3 down the page, painted dark red.

http://community.webshots.com/photo/177 ... 5581NZxySg

Squint and you can see duneland in the background, circa 1993.

Here's the "Duneland" circa 1991

I can't remember which is which, but one of them was from the New York Central.

Well....lookie what i found.. Dated 95' in Peoria, IL on the TP&W

Hiram was a business car, ex NYC, that was owned by a guy that leased it to the South Shore in them crazy Venango daze. The trade was car work and paint in exchange for usage. "Duneland" was a CN diner that was aquired in a dubious manner form its owner.

I gave the "Duneland" its name. In one of the more whack-a-doo schemes of the Venango era came the notion that a dinner train should be operated. Daily, right in the middle of the rush hour. But that's a whole 'nuther story.

In the scheme the line would have these diners and they were to have names, of course. Duneland was the first to be painted and lettered. Memos, directives, and meetings were held on what to name the diners. "Chief Calumet," "Sam Insull," and the ever popular "Spirit of The Shore," were bandied about. The car was ready for lettering but nobody, and I mean nobody could settle on a name. So I did. This was when I was the art and advertising director.

I had the Shops send me some strips of maroon decal fabric. This was the stuff a glibb salesman sold us for putting the stripes on the 2000 and 2001 when we put them in orange paint. I just happened to have a set of orange car letterboard decals (the full-sized ones) and I went to work. Not wanting to spend to much time on this I decided on the name "Duneland." That sounded OK to me. So I took tracing paper to the letterboard decals and traced letters until I had the name. I retraced them onto the decal fabric and outlined them with a juicy black magic marker. I cut the letters out with an exacto knife very carefully. I placed them in an envelope and sent them off to The Shops with a note that read, "Lettering for dining car "Duneland." Apply centered on the car body, same height as road numbers. Two days later we had the diner "Duneland."

Everyone else thought that someone else ordered the name. I said nothing.

Sorry I couldn't respond sooner, but I didn't even know about this Website. And one can't imagine my surprise at finding that Venango was a subject of some speculation that's a "bid wide of the mark." The Hiram was an ex-NYC business car CSS leased from Buzz Norton, as Mitch correctly stated, in exchange for protection, maintenance and use. Somehow, after Venango sold the CSS to Citibank in November 1988, Citibank's management "team" (a/k/a "Frick and Frack") must have converted that lease to some form of ownership interest, and the car was later sold to the TP&W.

Contrary to Mitch's inaccurate and misleading allegation regarding the "Duneland" acquisition, there was nothing "dubious" (his word) about that purchase. The deal was straight purchase deal. Venango bailed the owner out of a tight situation (they had to move the car or loose it) and acquired an ownership interest in exchange for so doing. The owner (an historical association of some kind) could use the car under certain conditions (the details of which, after all the years, now escape me). Here again. we don't know what Frick and Frack may have done with that agreement. The letterboard decals were among a number of such decals John Dukehart purchased from 3M for the old cars during the Chessie days.

There was a second diner, known locally as the white elephant (in part, because, it was covered with a badly applied coat of white paint) which was essentially abandoned on CSS property. I have no idea what became of that car. Its highest and best use may have been as scrap.

So far as "whack-a-doo schemes of the Venango era," under Venango, not every creative idea passes "final muster." Some ideas, such as the dinner train, died on the drawing board -- so to speak. However, CSS's EBITDA ("Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization") went from $1.3 million in 1985 to $5.3 million in 1988. That's a not-too-shabby 59.7% per year compound growth rate. Where Venango screwed up was in paying the insurance premium and not the mortgage payment in October 1988 following NICTD's unilateral abrogation of the subsidy contract. What they should have done was paid the bank, cancelled the insurance and slowed the trains down to 10 MPH! CSS’s history might have been a lot different.

But then, Venango would not have had the opportunity to collect millions from NIPSCO for breach of contract.

You sound as if you may have experience working for the Shore or close to management - care to share any other stories with us? I think you'll find most of us quite friendly and receptive to newcomers and railroaders. Welcome to the forum.