The Royce Files

 What is this a one post a year blog now?! No! At this rate it will be a 2 post a year blog. On to the sign. Grain Belt Premium was the beer of choice in the upper midwest. These signs were everywhere in small town beer joints across Minnesota and the Dakotas and even into Nebraska (Grain Belt had a brewering in Omaha at one time.) They might even still be there considering how slowly things change out in the boondocks. As a side note, there was a bar in my town called the Boondocks. I think they only served 3:2 beer. They did not have a sign like this.  I discovered this sign out at Bonanzaville in West Fargo on a cold weekend in December. The pioneer museum has numerous old buildings from the region on the property including a few bonanza farm houses. The Brass Rail was a saloon and hotel in Page, ND . It existed since ND became a state in 1889 but did not serve alcohol until prohibition was repealed in 1933. ND was a dry state until that time. Although, considering the larg...

  My search for this beer first led me to Canada. There was a Northern Breweries that had a presence up in Ontario. I could find nothing about their beers beside a label for an ale. They happened to be the first employee owned brewery in North America. However, after selling to an investment group that intended to revive the brand, Northern Breweries went bankrupt somewhere around 2006 or 2007. However, this Northern Breweries was a dead end for this particular label. After a little more digging, I found the Northern Brewing Company of Superior, Wisconsin. This is the brewer that produced Northern Beer amongst other labels. Northern had been around since 1890 when it was the Klinkert Brewing Company. Through some reorganization in the years following, Klinkert became Rueping and finally Northern. It was quite the prosperous operation in Superior and NW Wisconsin. They even distributed some batches to Milwaukee. Unfortunately, their fortune would begin to diminish when a bad batch...

Spud Valley returned this year. Well, it never left during the troubling times. When October rolls around the Red River Valley- the Spud Valley show appears unlike the Great Pumpkin. This year's edition (the 44th) had a big change. It was held at the fairgrounds in West Fargo instead the the Delta Hotel in Fargo. Chatter around the show was Delta upped the rental fee. No confirmation on that but these days it would not be uncommon. The building at the Fairgrounds seemed up to the challenge to host. To me it seems about the same size as the hotel conference room. This year's show seemed heavy on diecast, toys, and traditional plastic models. Lots of toy tractors. A few more railroad collectibles than usual. There were trains but mostly outside my interested gauges or operating prerogative. A little less Lionel and O. A sliver of G. Some N and HO.  My interest in O gauge has changed- I am only looking for items I will immediately use on the layout like figures or line side shacks...

I see these scenic Schmidt Beer cans so often but I do not think I have ever written about them. They look good afor me harken back to days of hunting and fishing in the North Woods someplace while listening to a Vikings or Twins game on the radio. Schmidt Scenic Cans from G. Heileman era As it goes with collecting not all of them are that collectible. The early flat top cans that you needed to use an opener on command the most interest. The cans I have pictured abovecome from the G. Heileman ownership time and thus  are not very valuable. One collector even said he has recycled quite a few of them.  This style of Schmidt can were first produced when it was still Jacob Schmidt Brewing (early 1950s.) Artist  Les Kouba produced the art on these early cans.  After 1954 the brewer changed hands a few times until Rainer was producing the beer in the early 90s and this type of can were still being produced. As the the decade progressed the label seems to have gone dormant...

I found some additional photos of the BNSF 1885, a SD40-2 with a snoot nose that plies the yard in Fargo and occassional pulls a train west and visits Northtown Yard. That distinctive snoot and blueboonet  freightbonnet* Santa Fe scheme makes it easy to spot. I think I took these from Great Northern Drive near the throat of the yard.  Formerly SF 5121 and then BNSF 6805 after the merge. Built in November  1979 with builder number  786223-7. On the Santa Fe this engine saw time out west in California then made its way to the Midwest in the early 2000s and then to Minnesota and North Dakota around 2010. Sometime between spring 2019 and Fall of 2021, the BNSF 1885 was repainted in what looks like the H4 scheme (see here  BNSF 1885 in Oct 2021 ). Looks like they added an air conditioning unit or two too. From the angle of the photo I cannot tell if they reduced the nose size as well. *It came to my attention that bluebonnet was a color scheme only on passenger engin...

  Lionel's foray in the G-Scale realm between late 80s to early 90s, produced a few buildings. In fact 4 buildings were produced and they were near duplicates of kits that were produced for the O scale line. These are really fine looking models and the difference between them and their O scale counterparts is they are wood kits and include a bit more details including some brass on the doors of the engine house and shingles and window glazing, . The watchmen's shanty in O did include a figure and a dog  but all the O scale kits were plastic. I would enjoy assembling one of these kits. Like their O scale little brothers, these are sadly out of production and have been so for a long time. They occasional show up on Ebay and I suspect you may find them in some old stock at a hobby shop that has not sold off its old Lionel dead stock. Scale Model Supply in St. Paul, MN comes to mind but I am sure there are others disbursed across America. I actually have 3 of the O-scale versions....

My Lionel Large Scale Gold Rush Special on display  I found very little about Lionel's Large Scale products online so I decided to post something. In the late 1980s Lionel decided to produce a very small selection of 'G' scale trains. Lionel marketed them as Lionel Large Scale. From what I can tell from online sources, this Lionel scale was more akin to the size of the Lionel's standard gauge trains from the pre-war era and a bit smaller than the typical G trains from makers like LGB, Bachmann, or Piko. G is a sort of a catch all for those big trains you typically see in outdoor layouts- the scale can range anywhere between 1:13 up to 1:32.  The 1:32 scale is where standard gauge falls. They seem to also have been rereleasing standard gauge trains under the Lionel Classics moniker in the early Kughn era. MTH had produced standard scale trains under the Lionel brand between 2009 and 2019 and  G scale under the Rail King 1 Gauge  From reports I have seen online, L...