I have an old Rivarossi heavy weight observation car. On the roof, hand brake end, there is a hatch for I don't know what. Can anyone tell me just what is the function of that hatch?
Did thery put ice for ac in there ?
Some heavyweight and a few lightweight cars had roof hatches depending on the manufacturer of the air conditioning equipment, especially steam ejector systems.
The Santa Fe and Southern Railway were both users of steam-ejector air conditioning. I believe the HW Rivarossi car is based on Santa Fe drawings.
My understanding is that they were to access the evaporator and overhead heating coils and blowers when the configuration of the car did not allow access from below:
Pullman_mechanical by Edmund, on Flickr
Ice bunkers for air conditioning were in the belly of the car (tons of ice) however ice for drinking fountains and dining car use was dropped into smaller roof hatches.
The PRR actually had emergency escape hatches (which Rivarossi "somewhat" represented on their lightweight cars. I'm not awate of any other railroad doing this but there may have been.
The Ferdinand Magellan, the Pullman specially outfitted for POTUS use had two roof escape hatches.
Good Luck, Ed
banjobenne1I have an old Rivarossi heavy weight observation car.
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Thank you for asking this question, and thanks to those who answered.
I have also wondered what this hatch was supposed to represent, but I never asked.
-Kevin
Living the dream.
SeeYou190I have also wondered what this hatch was supposed to represent, but I never asked.
Here is a little more information on the subject of the Santa Fe cars:
http://www.pullmanproject.com/Santa_Fe_Pullmans.pdf
I have a "former" AT&SF business car that I lettered for the Big Four but it shows what a model roof hatch should look like:
Big4_business-car2 by Edmund, on Flickr
ATSF_AC-hatch by Edmund, on Flickr
Cheers, Ed
gmpullman The Santa Fe and Southern Railway were both users of steam-ejector air conditioning. I believe the HW Rivarossi car is based on Santa Fe drawings.
I don't have one handy to check but my recollection is that the AHM/Rivarossi observation had the inset side sill which is a hallmark for Santa Fe cars. It was not their only HW passenger car model with a Santa Fe prototype. Modelers of other railroads had to laboriously fill in the inset side sill with strip styrene. Some AHM Rivarossi heavy weights were NOT Santa Fe prototypes. I seem to recall the coach was Soo Line for example.
Dave Nelson
Note that the old AHM/Rivarossi heavyweight Observation car is a Cafe-Observation car. The front part is a small kitchen, the middle part a dining area, and the rear part was the observation lounge.
Heavyweight dining cars often had a small roof hatch so that blocks of ice could be loaded into the car through them. This is the era before electric refrigerators were common, things were kept cold in an icebox.
Hello again, I dug out one of my old passenger car diagram books to do some more research. It looks like ice-cooled passenger cars generally had one or two fairly large rectangular hatches on the roof. Dining cars had a smaller hatch towards the kitchen end for loading ice to be used to keep food cool. For example, the Rivarossi dining car has a large hatch near the middle of the roof, and a smaller one over the kitchen area...presumably, the large one for ice A/C and the other for the kitchen icebox.
Since the Rivarossi Cafe-Observation car only has the small hatch over the kitchen, I'm pretty certain that was a hatch used for kitchen ice, not A/C. The Rivarossi car does have one side of the clerestory filled in, which would indicate the car had A/C, but apparently modelled on a car with more modern air conditioning, not ice-activated A/C.
wjstixIt looks like ice-cooled passenger cars generally had one or two fairly large rectangular hatches on the roof.
I believe ice activated air conditioning required a fairly large amount of ice. Four tons is what I recall. The ice was usually in blocks weighing 300 to 400 lbs.
That's an awful lot of weight to lug up to a roof hatch. There were a few, older wood cars that had roof hatches for "chilled air" but these weren't quite the capacity a heavyweight pullman might need.
Pullman_ice1 by Edmund, on Flickr
Ice A/C cars I'm familiar with had two or three large bunkers below the floor. They could easily be confused for battery boxes. They sloped toward a central collection point for the chilled melt water to be picked up by a small pump and circulated through a finned coil at one end of the car and a forced fan to provide air flow.
Ice would have to be replenished every couple hundred miles in warm climates.
Regards, Ed