I am building the Walthers cornerstone ice house kit. The ice shed itself seems to stand alone with no visable means of creating ice for the reefers. Hou was ice made in 1949?
73
Bruce in the Peg
It was frequently cut into blocks from ponds in the winter and transported to ice houses for storage in the summer, so the means of creating it was simply Mother Nature. For much of this period, the railroads had dedicated reefers or insulated boxcars for carrying the ice from where it was harvested to ice houses. The ice houses had extensive insulation (mostly sawdust) and stored ice based on their calculations of how much would melt during the summer.
Harvesting from ponds was rare, but not extinct by WWII, in the west ice storage houses were typically supplied from a plant that had the ability to produce ice in the required quantities based upon a seasonal cycle, many of whom were independent concerns with no involvement in rail operations as the haul was short distance and melt was not an issue.
Then you had the opposite extreme with Pacific Fruit Express which had a fleet of ice service reefers in restricted service that supplied PFE owned storage houses, by the late 40's in California at least, PFE surrendered most of this seasonal ice business to Union Ice Company among other independent concerns who enschewed rail service in favor of trucks as PFE devested from ownership of storage facalities.
Dave
Bruce, if you're modelling the area in which you live, ice harvesting from natural sources continued pretty-well until the end of ice reefer operations. Not in all locations, of course, but it certainly wouldn't have been uncommon.
While I model the late '30s, when ice havesting would have still been common in the rural areas of southern Ontario, it also affords additional operational interest for your layout.
I model one large reefer icing facility (the same one which you're building)...
....but it receives its ice from another icehouse:
This one is situated on a lake (unmodelled at this location) from which the ice is harvested, and is primarily a storage facility.It does have a small platform for icing the occasional car though...
...and there's also an office and loading dock at the west end of the structure for commercial and residential sales - many homes and businesses in this area are still in the "ice age" when it comes to refrigeration:
Pretty-well all of the small towns on the layout have a coal and ice dealer, too, the latter represented by small icehouses like these:
Local deliveries of ice (and coal) are made by both truck and wagon:
To get the ice from the storage facility to both the local icehouses and the reefer icing location, ice service reefers are used. These are reefers from which the ice bunkers have been removed and their associated hatches either sealed or removed. To model these, I modified some old LifeLike (Proto-no-thousand) cars with new roofs and a few added details:
The capacity of the smalltown icehouses is about half a car, so a loaded car spotted in one town usually moves on to the next the following day. Railroads also used regular boxcars for delivering ice, so you don't have to have dedicated ice-service reefers if it doesn't suit your operations.
Wayne
At the Great Northern RR Hist. Soc. convention a few months ago there was a presentation on ice harvesting that included some decent c.1950 color 8mm home movies of ice being harvested from a lake in Minnesota. The blocks of ice were slid over to a lake dock and then lifted by a sort of conveyor to be loaded into GN refrigerator cars waiting on spur tracks right near the lake. They pointed out that the lake, because of the make-up of the lakebed, had unusually clean and clear water, and GN used the ice harvested there on all it's name passenger trains.
Bruce, I am going from memory and my wife will tell you that can be very selective at the best of times. However, I believe I read somewhere that ice was harvested at Gimli and moved via what is now the "lake line railroad" to Selkirk and then on to Winnipeg. I think they just loaded up regular boxcars with the blocks, using sawdust between the layers.
As we Winnipegers all know, there was little likelihood that warm weather would cause problems for this ice harvest and transport. There are photo's online and You-Tube video's that show the process of cutting the blocks out of a lake well into the 1950s.
I am not sure when the last ice delivery man went out of business as electric refrigerators became more affordable. I do know from listening to my parents, that getting an electric refrigerator through the war was not going to happen, so the ice man came down the street into the 1950s anyway.
It is just another industry that one could model if interested. I suppose an icehouse could have RR reefer cars and platform's on one side, as well as a lower dock to unload the boxcars that brought in the ice. A third area could be a place where the horse and wagons or old trucks could load up for retail delivery.
Brent
"All of the world's problems are the result of the difference between how we think and how the world works."