Railroads had a major role in delivering booze from Canada to a thirsty United States from 1920 to 1933 and so anyone modeling that period can have a lot of fun adding boxcars full of beer and liquor to their roster of rolling stock and delivering the booze as a part of their operational plans.
How it all worked was outlined in my 1987 book King of the Mob, the story of Rocco Perri, sometimes called the “Al Capone of Canada.” Perri might also be called a railroad operations magnate-- he created a system of “laundering” beer and liquor as he shipped it to the US by rail.
It's well known that Canada supplied alcohol to the United States throughout Prohibition, The picture most people have is that booze came by ship or boat. There were fleets that headed south from the Canadian Maritimes, Newfoundland (then a British colony not part of Canada) and the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon. Small boats made regular trips across the Great Lakes.
Quirks in the Canadian constitution, the division of powers between provinces and the federal government created a giant loophole. Consumption of liquor was a provincial responsibility and most provinces had some form of prohibition. Manufacture of alcohol was under federal jurisdiction. There was no federal law prohibiting making the stuff. The federal government didn't care where the booze went as long as the purchaser paid the excise tax. So on paper, all the beer and alcohol was manufactured for export. (Some of it was smuggled back into those provinces that had their own form of Prohibition.). It is said by some economists that in the period after the great crash of 1929 and the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the Canadian economy was dependent on sending alcohol to the United States, a major reason the feds looked the other way.
So how did the railroads come into the picture?
Rocco Perri, the leader of a small Calabrian mob in the city of Hamilton was the right man, in the right place at the right time. While Perri didn't “control” the region, he wasn't a boss of bosses, but Perri was certainly the most important force in a region known as the “bootleg triangle” which reached from Detroit in the west (the Hiram Walker distillery and British American brewery) through Toronto (the Goderham and Worts distillery) and east to Corby's Distillery at Corbyville (outside Belleville, Ont.). The apex of the bootleg triangle was in Kitchener, Ont with the giant Kuntz Brewery and the Seagram's distillery.
Perri and his competitors organized a huge and profitable operation buying beer and alcohol from these companies and creating paperwork that showed the product was being exported to Cuba—since it was illegal to export alcohol to a country where there was Prohibition, that is the United States. As far as the Canadian customs was concerned, if the booze had to cross the United States to reach Cuba, that was okay with them.
On early indication of how things work was a court case where alcohol was “reimported” to Ontario. The booze was loaded on Grand Trunk boxcars (one of the predecessors of CN) for Havana Cuba but in this case never reached the American border, much less Cuba.
As you can imagine it was a profitable business. You could buy a case of Seagram's in Waterloo for $35 (including $14 Canadian excise) sell it for $50 in Buffalo or wait until got to New York where the wholesale price for that case $140.
While the US Coast Guard was busy intercepting fishing boats off Long Island and small boats crossing Lake Ontario, the authorities, it seemed, ignored the railroads.
That is until the Canadian government held an inquiry into the “liquor traffic.” One of the men watching the proceedings was Richard Boyce the young American consul in Hamilton, Ontario.
(Before the era of efficient communications, the United States had consulates in many more places than the country does now.)
Boyce wondered how the beer and booze was going south, so he and a US special agent watched as barrels of beer were loaded into a boxcar at the Kuntz Brewery. No way bill was issued until the train reached nearby London, Ontario where suddenly a way bill said the load of “scrap leather from the Kitchener Rag & Metal Company was bound for American Tanners in Pittsburgh. There was no American Tanners in Pittsburgh and when Prohibition agents raided the Pittsburgh siding where the boxcar was waiting, they found 278 barrels each with 30 bottles of beer.
On his own initiative Boyce went through the filing cabinets full of invoices filed with consulate and usually ignored.
Boyce's investigation showed that between 1924 and 1927 hundreds of boxcars had gone from Canada to the United States loaded with beer or liquor but with way bills describing the the cargo as hay, scrap leather, rags, paper and rubber.
The same name that had appeared on the invoice for the “scrap leather” bound for Pittsburgh also appeared on shipments of turnips to the United States. The only problem was that there were also a large number of legitimate shipments of turnips from the farms of the southwestern Ontario to the Campbell Soup Co. To Boyce, it quickly became apparent that the gangsters were “laundering” the alcohol shipments amongst legitimate cargo.
Boyce's investigation showed that between April 1 and June 23, 1927, six shipments of hay were sent from Hagersville, Ontario to a company called Dwyer Reed in New Jersey. Only one box car went to the real Dwyer Reed in Newark, the other eleven box cars when to non-existent Dwyer locations in Montclair, Englewood, Garfield, Manuet and Raritan. (So modelers can think of the switching possibilities in this sort of business)
Boyce's found that in those 12 weeks in 1927, 60 boxcars of beer left Hamilton, Kitchener, or St. Catharines for the United States via Niagara Falls. The Canadian government inquiry showed that the price of a dozen pints of Canadian beer at the border in 1927 was $3.25. If each boxcar had 278 barrels with 30 bottles, a single load would have been worth $2,258,75 at Buffalo. Sixty boxcars would have been worth $135,525 at the border, much more in New York and New Jersey.
Boyce got no support from the State Department for his investigation, which told him it was considered “inadvisable” to pass the information to the Justice Department. As for more paperwork, that might help detect alcohol shipments, the State Department said “ the system would cause irritation among innocent shippers out of all proportion to its probable value in preventing the shipment of liquor.”
So for those who model the period 1920 to 1933, there all kinds of possibilities for both modeling operations. Model men unloading beer at a tanning plant. Barrels of beer among a load of hay. Switching the legitimate boxcars to one location, the smuggled beer or alcohol to another. Raids by Prohibition agents or, of course, gang wars.
You could also have variety of rolling stock, since the Grand Trunk finally went bankrupt in 1923 and was then absorbed by Canadian National. So it is likely alcohol could be found in Grand Trunk, Toronto Hamilton and Buffalo, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific boxcars plus those from affiliated American railroads or railroads that shipped into Canada.
Rewritten from King of the Mob Rocco Perri and the Women Who Ran His Rackets. Copyright 1987 by James Dubro and Robin Rowland. All rights reserved.
King of the Mob is out of print, but is available from used books sites like abebooks.
Labels: boxcar, model railroad, model railway, Prohibition
-------- AUTHOR: Robin Rowland DATE: 1/22/2007 10:42:00 PM ----- BODY:
What is a tier trestle?
The term “tier trestle” is fairly recent, given by historians to the bridges built along the route of the Burma Thailand Railway (the River Kwai). See, for example, this Australian government report.
The term could, of course, refer to what are called the levels or stories on a standard trestle.
(The Oxford Dictionary defines tier as one of several units of a structure placed one above the other.)
There are key differences with the “tier trestle” and the engineering standard.
The river bridges built by the Imperial Japanese Army engineers using prisoner of war and indigenous slave labour did follow engineering standards and were solid enough to survive repeated attacks by British and American bombers.
On the other hand, the bridges over the hundreds of ravines were not-so-solid, built hastily and by engineering units that were not as experienced or competent as those building the actual river bridges.
Recent scholarship seems to indicate that the long-term Japanese plans called for these bridges to be filled and covered with earth. a method described in the Merriman Wiggin American Civil Engineer's Handbook, an indication that the similar methods were used in North America.
Steam era modelers may want to use the tier trestle bridge or some variant for what the Handbook calls “Construction trestles” on temporary lines, or on narrow gauge railways.
The handbook recommended removing the bracing during the fill process “when it is reached by the fill to prevent the pull in the bracing under the load of the fill from distorting the posts and even breaking them.
In muddy conditions, common in the rain forest, it warned that "if piles were driven into the mud, sudden movements of the mud and newly made fill frequently not only break the braces but snap off the piles and demolish the entire structure. Such trestles should be built of piles of large diameter, driven to hardpan and heavily sway braced and the sway bracing removed when reached by fill."
Due to war time pressures, in many cases, this step was never completed and so the tier trestle bridges were used until the line was abandoned, often requiring frequent repairs.
Characteristics of a "tier trestle."
The Japanese engineers used local hardwood, mostly teak, to build all the bridges. In my preliminary research experienced bridge modelers told me that dowels that are true to N scale are not available.
Finished logs
Weathering
To weather this bridge, I had to keep in mind that it will be in a model rain forest.
The track was painted a grayish color and then given a teak wash as I describe in the Apalon bridge post.
The first step was to use a variety of green chalks brushed onto the bridge.
The second step was to use black and gray chalks along the track and on the bents, since this was a heavily traveled steam railway.
I had tested the standard weathering mix of heavily diluted shoe dye and alcohol on stir sticks but the result was far too dark for my purposes, based on some of the bridges I saw on my trips to Thailand and in the first colour photographs from the 1950s (WWII photographs are in black and white).
Then I remembered that this was rain forest. So I tried a new, two-fisted, approach, black weathering spray, followed immediately by a heavy spray of wet water. The result was a soaked newspaper and a very light grey with occasional patches of black.
The two sprays also took away most of the chalks, so after all was dry, I added more green, brown and black chalks.
Support tree trunks
The leaf stems were soaked in dilute matte medium as a preservative. There were two levels of support logs, smaller ones attached to the lower tier and the second tree trunk logs to the upper tier.
The stem/logs look good in the photograph but are quite delicate. Once all the bridges are ready and the track laid and glued, the stem/logs will be cut to a proper length and anchored.
The spider webs.
A glue called Liquisilk was distributed as free samples at the Toronto Christmas Train Show so I tried it out when adding the tie supports where I wanted to test the company's claim that the glue could be strong in small amounts. It wasn't until I took macro photographs of the bridge that I noticed that there was excess glue, that it did look like spider webs, especially when fragments of chalk adhered to the dried glue.
Liguisilk
Finishing
At this point, before final installation on the layout, I sprayed the bridge with Krylon matte, then cleaned the track and temporarily installed it on the layout and successfully ran tests with my trains.
Coming up in the next few months
A river bridge
A viaduct
Smaller river and ravine bridges
Labels: Burma Thailand Railway, model railroad, model railway, Sonkrai, tier trestle, trestle, Wampo
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