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[quote]QUOTE: A lot of cars of the same type running on the same train in the same general direction isn't a unit train, it's a block of cars.[/quote] OK, you make a fair semantic argument.. and I did call them reefer blocks. [quote]QUOTE: A steam-era train full of reefers is nothing more than a coincidence, or maybe scheduled planning. In the good old days, many freight trains were scheduled by timetable as second or third class trains, and had specific scheduled times to (try to) meet.[/quote] But I'd beg to differ with you that the SP's reefer blocks (or UP's) didn't all go to a specific and single destination (or the Overnights for that matter--though I have no idea what commodity they carried between the two metros), and in that context then they were certainly kin to 'unit trains'. BTW, a cantaloupe block out of southern Arizona headed for either Los Angeles of Chicago had priority over everything except perhaps the Golden State (CRI&P/SP) or the Sunset Limited (SP), even the 2nd class passenger trains such as the Argonauht and the Imperial, and I can guarantee you that they didn't just peel off cars before getting to a destination. Furthermore, the vast majority of them WERE single-commodity trains made up at the vast production fields of the southwest and pacific. The same applied to a tomato block coming out of the San Joaquin Valley headed for New Jersey... it didn't break-down until it arrived there (one of the strange things about the 1930s and 40s was that tomatoes were sometimes being shipped en bloc from California to New Jersey while at the same time being shipped en bloc from New Jersey to California... ah, I guess you'd have had to have lived back then... and there) ;). These trains were in no way considered as being '3rd class extras' and were definitely pre-planned for and had the right-of-way over virtually everything else.
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