Back in the 1990's Jim Trowbridge ran one of his annual charters. Each year I tried to come up with a consist that was different from those in the past. One year we decided to run a string on drop bottom gons. We had several that had been in somewahat regular use, but to fill out the train I had to dig out a few old nasty ones from the south yard that had not turned a wheel since that came over the hill in 1970. I put our car toad on them to check out the journals, put air in them and in general, see if they were worthy of 128 more miles of travel.
A couple of days later he told me they were in fine shape, repacked and oiled journals, good brakes, etc.
They performed splendidly until our first day out at Big Horn. During a runby at the west siding switch, I noticed a squalling from a car about mid train. I went forward, packing hook in hand and found a "smoker". I yanked open the lid, and that's all she needed - a little bit of fresh air. Flames erupted out of the box, started to singe the body. Things got pretty lively for a bit while I ran to the head end and got a bucket of water to dowse the flames and cool things down a bit. It turned out there were 3 other brasses approaching meltdown. The car toad had taken all that "nasty old waste" that was soaked full of nasty, old - but quite usable oil and replaced it with nice clean dry waste, He put enough oil in the box to get it 45 miles down the road before the waste soaked up the oil and the journal ran dry.
Lucky for us we had the 0503 with us and it was still stocked with extra brasses, hotbox coolant sticks, and a bucket of soaked wool waste. Jim's passengers got an extra treat of seeing some real railroading - at the expence of a few cancelled photoruns.
