Brookside Dairy Milk & Cream boxcar, TT scale printed reefer sides

Brookside Dairy - Milk & Cream MTC #1833 reefer boxcar sides printed on cardstock, blank on back to glue onto pine, balsa wood or plastic boxcar. 

There are two sides in black, yellow, & white on red background. Left of the door it says Fresh Milk. Right of the door it says Fresh Cream. Along the top it says Bellows Falls Co-Operative Creamery. Along the bottom it says First National Stores, Inc. On the door it says 4% Butter Fat. When completed, this car would be right at home on any steam-era layout. Private owner cars like these were traveling billboards for their owners and were seen from the 1800s until the 1930s, when the government required all boxcars to be repainted in "standard" colors, the end of an era. These car sides are not reproduced from any Z or O scale boxcar you may see for sale on ebay, which all have different car numbers based on the original fleet.

The village of Bellows Falls is in the southeastern corner of Rockingham, Vermont. The former Bellows Falls Co-operative Creamery complex, now owned by Flock Fibers, Inc., comprises the creamery building, constructed during four different periods of original development and subsequent expansion ranging from c. 1918 to 1964. The buildings are placed against a steep bank, railroad sidings serve the complex on the lower level, and a brick-veneered, shed-roofed full-length loading dock was added in 1938 for milk receiving. The nearby Boston and Maine Railroad passenger station (c.1922) stands at the junction of the Boston and Maine's Connecticut Valley main line and the Green Mountain (former Rutland) Railroad's line to Rutland, Vermont. The one-story brick building with a shallow-pitched roof is now used for Amtrak and excursion passenger train service, the latter operated by the Green Mountain Railroad. The Green Mountain Railroad continues to use the Railway Express Agency building (c. 1880) for its offices. An earlier creamery, a two-story, wood-framed building, was constructed c. 1906 for the Boston Dairy Co. on the site of the present southeast block of the multi-part main building of this industrial complex. The newly organized Bellows Falls Co-operative Creamery acquired the buildings in 1921 and installed modern milk-processing plant that opened in November, 1921 as "the best equipped and most complete of its kind in New England," handling milk received from some 215 member-farmers. The cooperative gained a major contract with a chain of Boston grocery stores and rapidly increased its production. The bottled milk and cream were shipped by the Boston and Maine Railroad (the former Fitchburg division line across southwestern New Hampshire) to Boston for sale in the chain of John T. Connor and Co. (later First National) grocery stores under the brand name of "Brookside Milk." In 1932, a major expansion enabled a 50 per cent increase in maximum output. Another expansion in 1938-39 added the southwest wing and more equipment to handle the great volume of milk then coming from 1200 member-farmers in Windham and Windsor Counties in Vermont and Sullivan and Cheshire Counties in New Hampshire. In 1943, the Edelstein Co. leased space in the creamery for making cottage cheese, most of which was shipped to New York.

The shipments of bottled milk to Boston were usually made in milk cars owned by the Mystic Terminal Co. with the reporting marks MTC, probably later changed to MTCX, a subsidiary of the Boston and Maine Railroad. During the 1920s and early 1930s, these cars were painted in a colorful "billboard" scheme; later they were identified by metal placards bearing the Brookside brand name. The Bellows Falls creamery continued to ship packaged milk long after most other milk plants in Vermont had switched to bulk-tank shipments. Indeed the Boston and Maine Railroad purchased new non-bulk milk cars for this service as late as 1957 and 1958, probably the railroad's last new cars of that type. Those new cars were justified by the contemporary volume of the shipments from Bellows Falls; during 1956, the creamery sent 1,498 carloads to Boston. In 1965, the Bellows Falls Cooperative Creamery closed after losing its contract with First National Stores in 1964 according to the Bellows Falls Times. In November, the rapidly decreasing membership of less than 200 dairy farms decided to-join a larger Massachusetts co-operative. Active operation of the creamery ceased on the last day of the same year according to the Connecticut Valley Times - Reporter

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