Why are there Gallery Cars parked at Fox Lake, WI

While driving to Beaver Dam along Hwy 33, is noticed that there were about three dozen, six window, stainless, gallery cars, parked on the line to Fox Lake off of the Wisconsin & Southern.
The signage was painted over, but appeared to be METRA size, color, and position on the cars. From the outside the cars look to be in good shape, save for a few tattered buffers.
Why are these cars there? Seems like a waste to me.

They are retired CNW/Metra gallery cars, dating from the 1960's. A dealer bought a lot of them from Metra a few years back, and they have spread throughout the country - some are on your siding in Wisco, some are at WSOR in their colors, some are/were in Joliet at the EJE shop, some are now in TN or VA in commuter service. It's nice to see some escaped the torch, because I used to live by Metra's preferred scrap yard, and saw some of the same class of coaches sitting on a siding just hours away from their demise. I believe MikeF probably knows the builder (it's P-S or StLCC) and maybe number series, and can also give you info about the coaches his illustrious home road (WSOR) owns.

It sounds like Scoring's description fits the Q Budd cars rather than the CNW Pullmans. Aren't those supposed to be for a proposed Madision WI area commuter line?

The Fox Lake cars are the original Burlington gallery cars (all Budd-built and including #700, the first gallery car every), which were bought at auction by a DIFFERENT leasing company than the one which owns the MTDX Pullmans that are stored down in Joliet.

They took out a full-page spread in Railway Age a few years back, but as far as I know, no one has leased the cars. Since there's so much federal money sloshing around in the transit world, it's just not cost-competitive to lease anything except for very short-duration projects. Therefore, look for them to end up sold off again in a few more years, much like Great Lakes Western did with the ex-Amtrak, nee C&NW intercity bilevels.

SlowFreight's got it right. There is an abundance of information on the gallery cars in storage on the WSOR elsewhere in this forum; look through the older threads and you'll find it.