The Freight Yard - 2705M - Tank Car, Single Dome, 50 Foot - Chevron - 22809

Specific Item Information: Twelve (12) different road numbers in this series 2705A-M

Model Information: This is a fairly nice quality tank car from MDC Roundhouse. It likely first appeared in the late 1980s. It appears to model a general service tank car and the road names and paint schemes seem to suggest this is what MDC had in mind. The Roundhouse models were available in both kit and RTR packaging. It doesn't have a ton of detail. Most versions were released with Rapido Couplers so it therefore qualifies as a late 1st generation model. Nevertheless, once the couplers are swapped out, it will look just fine on even the most modern of layouts due to the high print quality and molding on this model. Like all other N Scale toolings made by MDC Roundhouse, this one was acquired by Athearn in 2006. Eastern Seaboard Models has also sold these in custom paint schemes.

Prototype History: Larger, 50' Tank cars replaced their smaller predecessors in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Richmond Tank Car Company was one of several manufacturers to produce these general purpose railcars. They generally had about 20,000 gallon capacity and were used to transport many different commodities.

Road Name History: In 1985, Socal merged with the Pittsburgh-based Gulf Oil and rebranded as Chevron; the newly merged company later merged with Texaco in 2001. Chevron manufactures and sells fuels, lubricants, additives, and petrochemicals, primarily in Western North America, the US Gulf Coast, Southeast Asia, South Korea and Australia. In 2018, the company produced an average of 791,000 barrels (125,800 m3) of net oil-equivalent per day in United States.

Chevron is one of the largest companies in the world and the second-largest oil company based in the United States by revenue, only behind fellow Standard Oil descendant ExxonMobil. Chevron ranked 10th on the Fortune 500 in 2023. The company is also the last-remaining oil-and-gas component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since ExxonMobil's exit from the index in 2020.

Brand/Importer Information: The Freight Yard was a hobby shop that did custom decoration and special runs of other manufacturers' N Scale products. It sold its custom products under several brands or collections: Premiere Editions, by The Freight Yard and Dreams Design.
It was located in Anaheim, California and then moved to 2006 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Established in the late 1980s, it stopped business under this name by the end of the 2000s.
The Freight Yard was owned and operated by Darren J. Cohen. Darren is now operating North Valley Trains.
The Freight Yard / Premiere Editions runs are usually available in series of two to twelve different numbers (suffixed A to M, with I not used).
The first two digits of the stock number correspond to the release year (9x being 199x, and 2x being 200x).