Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: van

The title pretty much says it all. This is a beer van, or boxcar, that doesn't appear to be refrigerated. In reality, beer doesn't need to be refrigerated until maybe the time of serving, so that makes sense. I don't know for certain, but I assume that crew shelter is for a security guard rather than a brakeman, as beer theft seems a likely possibility in Czechoslovakia. Does anybody know for certain?

I was in Andel looking for a place to wait for someone, and I accidentally found this van while walking. Amazingly, it appears to be for a fairly successful company servicing and renting steam locomotives, and judging from the photo, old cars. I'm not sure what a 1970's Cadillac and an old Czech steam locomotive have in common, though.

Here's the rather complex data on the freight van, which was outside braced in spite of being (by appearances) steel.

These freight cars, the lead one a "freight van," or boxcar, in American English, were sitting in one of the sidings at Hostivar, and the light seemed perfect, so I tried some shots.

One of the more surprising things I spotted on this trip were these wooden freight vans, or boxcars in American terminology. These went out of service in the U.S. in the 1950's, for the most part, and in most of Europe by the 1980's, but if you really scout around Eastern Europe it still is sometimes possible to find them.