The Short version of he move
I will give you a Readers Digest version of the “Troop Kitchen Car” saga.
One day shortly after graduating ACSC I was perusing through GL and ran across a railcar for sale. Now, I’m not a train nut but this car had an interesting history and I thought I could turn it into a nice guesthouse and perhaps a B&B. So I bid on it and won the auction. The car was sitting on Tyndall AFB property so I spent the next YEAR dealing with some very unprofessional “Real Property” managers in CE, a underhanded bidding competitor in the rail business, AF lawyer medaling, and finally the Base commander to secure access to the site and move the car off the base. If I wasn't in the Air Force at the time and knew how to work the system I probably would have given up and accepted GLs offer of a refund.
Once off base it was moved to the local shortline rail yard. While the railcar sat in the Bayline rail yard, a friend and I spent a week rebuilding the brake system and otherwise readying the railcar for “mainline Interchange”. Within 2 weeks it was moved up to Dothan AL where it was to be interchanged with CSX and brought up to Maryville TN. Well, the CSX inspector wouldn’t approve the railcar for interchange. So I spent the next 6 MONTHS trying to get the inspector to stop misapplying federal railway rules that didn’t apply and to apply those that did. I worked my way up the chain of command in CSX to the president of the company to no avail. It seems that once an inspector says “no go” no one will overrule him. In the process of all this I found out that the inspector was a friend of the railway bidding competitor and probably would not have given the railcar clearance even if it were new. I think they were trying to get me to give up on the railcar and sell it. This same bidding competitor stirred up trouble for me on base by telling the base CE real property people that the train tracks between the base and Bayline Yard were unsafe which was untrue. This part of the story could go on for 5 pages but I'll move on.
I moved on to plan B and moved the car to the Norfolk and Southern interchange. I made another trip to FL re-inspect the railcar and change some markings on it in preparation for the NS inspection. They inspected it and even commented on how good of shape it was in. Since NS doesn’t service Maryville it had to be moved to Oak Ridge TN. NS moved the railcar within a week after the inspection. My wife and I got to ride in the Railcar the last few miles as it was pulled into the Oak Ridge National Laboratories rail yard. The same friend that helped me prepare the railcar for interchange also runs the Oak Ridge shortline so I was able to use his rail yard to hold the railcar until we had a crane lift it onto a Low Boy truck and haul it down to my property. And so ended a 2 year ordeal of buying and moving the railcar.
Now just a few words on the history of the railcar. It was built by American Car and Foundry in 1943 for the US Army and was designed and built to be a Troop Kitchen Car. Essentially it was a large kitchen, which would be in the center of a troop train and would feed the troops in transport. In about 1965 The Strategic Air Command converted it to be a support car for its mobile flight simulators. It was teamed up with another converted railcar that housed a computer and KC-135 flight deck and crew stations for the flight sim operators. My railcar has a large generator on board to supply power to the flight sim computer. It also had a work area for equipment maintenance and crew quarters so the flight sim operators had a place to stay while traveling between SAC bases. This was in the day when flight sims were very big and expensive so SAC couldn’t afford to have one at each base. So they built a few KC-135 and B-52 sims and moved them around the country.
I am now in the process of gutting the railcar in order to build it back into a 3 room guest house. I had one side and the end painted OD and the other side is silver with the SAC shield and star sash. I still need to get TROOP KITCHEN CAR stenciled on the OD side and UNITED STATES AIR FORCE on the silver side
