Question: How were Ice House operations accomplished, and by what year were "Ice Box" operations pretty well taken over by refrigeration cars, refrigerators at home, etc. (analogous to asking when Class I RR diesel power took over steam power).
Conemaugh Road & Traction circa 1956
I remember bunker reefers in the late fifties and maybe on through the 60s. Probably sometime during the 60s mechanical reefers began appearing. (I'm really not certain about this). How were Ice House accomplished(?) Sorry, don't understand your question. If your asking where the ice came from, it came from lakes here in Minnesota. My parents owned a place that had an ice house. It had a very well insulated storage room and the Ice Storage area had walls that were almost 2 feet thick and insulated with wood chips/saw dust. The ice house had not been used in decades, and this would have been in 1966 when the parents bought the place. I do not remember Ice Boxes in my home, I was born in 1950. Ice boxes at home where replaced by refrigerators long before the ice bunker reefer was replaced by mechanical reefers.
NP 2626 "Northern Pacific, really terrific"
Northern Pacific Railway Historical Association: http://www.nprha.org/
During my formative years, the Wonder Years, my dad would take me to NYC's Collinwood yard in NE Ohio in the early 1960s and on through the Penn-Central era 1968 up until around '73 or '74.
When the hot-shots would stop for fuel and crew changes I would sometimes see an orange/yellow "CITY ICE" truck pull alongside the iced reefers and this truck had a scissors lift that would take the "iceman" up to roof level where he could push the big blocks of ice that NP2626 mentioned.
The truck would move along and ice each pair of cars at the ends where the ice hatches were, then move on to the next, raising the platform each time. There were only a handful of cars to be iced.
Fun stuff for a kid to watch. I don't remember seeing the truck much after about 1970 or so.
Ed
Ice houses, to store ice cut from frozen lakes, predate the first ice reefers by a century or more. I recall seeing a reference to ice shipped down the Mississippi so pre-Civil War plantation owners could make ice cream, and offer their guests mint juleps. That was well before the first reefer load of Budweiser left St Louis.
Ice bunker reefers faded away in the decade of the '60s, as mechanical refrigerators proved sufficiently dependable to handle the job. So did the use of icing stations and the process of switching reefers so they could be iced.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - without any ice reefers)
My parents had a home ice box as late as 1956. We moved July 1 that year and they had to get a refrigerator in the new town.
In 1969 I worked the summer at Ford in Oakville, Ont. and they had big blocks of ice delivered as a cooling system.
I know neither were railroads, but histirical context.
Dave
We were still receiving ice reefers on the Big Four at E St Louis in the late 60's. When the eastbound traffic moved to the PRR yard after the merger in 68, the TRRA still came to Rose Lake every night with a big delivery of perishable mostly off the SSW. The majority of those cars were PFE icers up into the early 70's. The bulk of that traffic went on the head end of NY-6 and SW-6 for Selkirk and Enola (Harrisburg). I can still smell the cantalopes.
Charlie
In THE HONEYMOONERS of the fifties, Ralph and Alice Kramden had an ice box --- not a refrigerator. As far as I know, ice boxes had been replaced with refrigerators in the homes in my working class neighborhood in Ohio, right after WWII. I vaguely recall that an aunt of mine might have still had an ice box around 1952, but I'm not sure.
Milk distributors used ice for refrigeration in home delivery trucks well into the fifties. In the summertime, we kids would pester the milkman into giving us chunks of ice to suck on.
On the railroads, you could probably track the change by noting the number of iced reefers vs. the number of mechanical reefers in the ORER in a given year. Maybe somebody has already charted this. Ice dominated in the forties; the fifties were a time of transition; by 1970, the ice cars were pretty much a thing of the past.
Tom
wikipedia has the date of the first production mechanical reefers as 1951 for PFE.
They list 1971 as the last year of iced reefers. That one I'm not so sure of as I recall seeing somewhere that it extended a few more years in the 70s.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
At the Northern Pacific Railway Historical Association, I can find Joe Caron photos of Ice Bunker Reefers as late as 1979/1980 and Mechanical Reefers started showing up as early as 1960. My guess is the ice reefer photos from 79/80s may be of out of service cars.
Yep, those old bunker ice cars seemed to serve on for awhile on those roads that had an ownership interest in a reefer subsidiary. One's with plug doors often found favor with MOW and shop crews for rebuild/reuse.
The date I had in mind for ending icing operations was something like 74 or 75, but I'll grant it could have been as early as 71. I was out of the country in that time frame (following dad's most expenses paid tour for the Air Force) and had just gotten seriously interested in RRs, so that's all kind of vague-ish.
Old reefers often found use as ventilated cars (run with the hatches open) or as insulated box cars, without ice. I imagine that it was often a case of, "We've got 'em. Might as well use 'em."
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with hatchless top-iced reefers)
tomikawaTT"We've got 'em. Might as well use 'em."
Yes. Gotta remember the 70s wasn't the best time to be investing in new rolling stock, which I suspect is another reason why some hung around in service longer. There simply wasn't money to replace all the needed equipment, so cars that could be repurposed often escaped the scrapper's torch.
I am working to model an icing facility on the Great Northern in Willmar, MN. The average sized yard and station had a total of three large ice houses at its peak in 1945. Ice was harvested from a lake just north of the yard as well as from another large lake 15 miles away on a branch line. Local contractors were often hired to cut the ice during the winter and would haul it on trucks to Willmar. Mechanical reefers started showing up in the mid-1950's and a fueling station for the reefers was added to the ice house complex there. By the early 1960's, only one ice house remained in service and the icing platforms were removed. In Willmar during this decade, scissor trucks were used to load remaining ice reefers while mechanical reefers were fueled. By 1970, the entire complex was shut down and any remaining reefer facilities were consolidated and moved elsewhere. This is fairly typical of many icing operations across the country.
The MP converted a bunch of old ART reefers into small box cars dedicated to flour loading. This work was done in St Louis Mo around 1969 or 1970 if my memory serves me correctly.
Note: The omitted word above was "operations" (now edited).
Great insight thus far! I'm surprised how late into the 1960s ice house operations were still in existence.
Looks like an ice house can be a bonafide industry addition for my circa 1956 layout. Railway Express Agency would also work for a similar prototype era industry.
A quick search at Trains Magazine Index: Ice house + ice reefers.
Any more insight into ice railroad cars (reefers)?
Quite a few heavyweight passenger cars were cooled with ice-activated AC. I don't know when that ended, but it was another significant use of ice by RR's.
While one often thinks of the traditional ice house as a place where is cut from lakes or ponds was stored, there were and are ice making plants. This facility in Marysville CA is still in business, supplying ice for grocery and convience stores.
In the days of ice reefers, there was a two car spur with a platform for "emergency" icing to prevent spoilage of the cars load.
The reason for the odd shape of the facility is that there was a branch line that ran from this location on the Southern Pacific's East Valley Main Line to the SP's West Valley Main Line in Woodland.
Mid4_zps2039c533 by Donald Schmitt, on Flickr
Midvalley5_zps137e45a9 by Donald Schmitt, on Flickr
Mid2_zps65abcc10 by Donald Schmitt, on Flickr
I tried to sell my two cents worth, but no one would give me a plug nickel for it.
I don't have a leg to stand on.
If you want to read a history of reefer operations, get the book "The Great Yellow Fleet", by John H. White.
Model railroaders seem to want to put an icing facility any place there is an industry that uses reefers. The ATSF, which owned one of the largest reefer fleets in the US (SFRD) only had 27 icing stations and ice plants on the system. PFE which was a combination of the UP and SP only had 51 ice plants and stations between the two roads.
According to the above book (p. 126), there were about 124,000 reefers in the US in 1955, of which about 5000 were insulated boxcars (RB cars) and about 700 mechanical reefers (RP cars). By 1965, there 108,000 reefers, 31,000 of which were RB and 10,000 were RP. In 1970 there were 115,000 reefers, 54,000 were RB, and 21,000 were RP. By 1975 out of 108,000 cars, ice reefers (RS) had shrunk to 13,000 cars, with 69,000 RB and 27,000 RP. In 1980 the reefer fleet had shrunk to 88,000 cars and only 2000 of them were ice cars, with 62,000 RB and the rest RP.
If you look at the data, what killed the ice reefer wasn't the mechanical reefer, it was the insulated boxcar (RB/RBL). It could handle loads that just needed to be kept cool, while the mechanical reefers handled the stuff that needed to be kept frozen.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
We have a local Ice Business near where I live and no, they don’t cut ice from the local lakes to get the ice. They produce ice in blocks and cubes that are sold from ice vending machines throughout the area. The business was started probably 30 + years after the closest Great Northern tracks where torn up and were 2 miles away from the tracks, any way. Difficult to believe, but, there is still a demand for ice, even up here in the frozen wastes of Northern Minnesota!
While I'm not modelling the town in which I live, there was a large icehouse here on the CNR line, serving the fruit industry in the Niagara Peninsula.On my layout, there will be a total of six icehouses. This one is the main ice plant:
Although it has a short high-level platform for icing the occasional reefer, it's mainly a storage facility, providing ice for all of the other icehouses.On its east end, there's a retail outlet for local customers, as many homes and businesses on my '30s-era layout still use ice:
Here are a couple of the local icehouses to which the storage plant ships ice:
These are commercial outlets, selling to the public, with no car -icing capability.
The main plant for car icing is this one, although it's also a commercial outlet:
Ice is delivered from the storage plant by a small fleet of ice service reefers - re-conditioned reefers with their bunkers removed:
Almost all of the iced and loaded reefers originating on-layout are shipped to off-layout destinations. Off-line reefers (from foreign roads) may occasionally stop for re-icing, but they're also headed to off-layout destinations.
Wayne
Marysville CA Sanborn map showing National Ice & Cold Storage Co. (Midvalley Ice). 1948 revision of 1921 map.
Some general info on Ice here at wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_car
The fleet of mechanical refrigerator cars grew very rapidly during the 1960's so by the early 1970's, the old ice reefers were being retired en-mass. D&RGW was tearing down it's ice plat forums around 1972 IIRC, there are photo of them still up around 1970/71 but within the next year or so the long platform was a pile of wood.
Rio Grande. The Action Road - Focus 1977-1983
1973 was about it here in California for traditional reefers and ice stations. As stated previously, many continued on in venilator service for loads that did not require icing until at least the mid seventies as I observed several in revenue service during a visit to Wyoming in 1975, a similar trip in 1977 found none in revenue service, but many relegated to MW service or in storage pending disposition.