General Discussion (Model Railroader)

What industries would want to send or get mech reefers or insulated boxcars in the early 1980s?  I thought to have some co-ops and warehouses for these types of cars in southern VA.  For waybills, what type of companies would want to get or send mech reefers or insulated boxcars?

If you know of specific companies and locations, that would be even better!

TIA!

Lee

 The first that comes to mind is grocery store distribution centers.  They would get a lot of there merchandise in insulated box cars and produce and meats in mechanical reefers.

A meat processing company could recieve/ship meats in a reefer or say a produce distributor.

Insulated boxcar could go to a beer/whiskey distributor,tobacco warehouse etc...

The Operations SIG offers a free database of real-life industries that you'll find very helpful. Anyone who is planning on operating their layout would also find membership in the SIG very useful and there are low-cost online-only memberships available.

Byron
Model RR Blog

Mechanical reefers in the 1980's would be beer or frozen foods to distribution centers.  Also frozen spuds in PFE/UPFE cars for your local fast food chains (via a distributor).    They wouldn't necessarily go to a "co-op" but would generally go to a large windowless warehouse cold storage facility.

Insulated boxcars were primarily beer.

Tropicana ran (runs?) a solid reefer or inuslated boxcar train of OJ from Florida to New York.  It was a unit train and did no work.

By the 1980's a large part of the refridgerated food biz was moving in TOFC/COFC reefer units, not reefer cars.  In the 1980's in Texas all we handled in mechanical reefers was beer (kegs, bottled and canned went in boxcars) and frozen french fries.

On a portion of a major western railroad last year, looking at a one day snapshot, there were 735 insulated boxcars, about 84 contained canned goods and 50 contained sugar.  The majority were loaded with flamable solids.

There were 132 reefers, the majority were loaded with meat or frozen meat, frozen veggies or cheese.

This is out of a sample of over 44,000 cars.  So reefers and insulated boxcars are not really all that common anymore.  Just at 2% of the cars.

I don't know about the 80's but even today they are in use.  Here in Tulsa, Tulsa Cold Storage which is located downtown has three spots and usually has cars there everytime I railfan the adjacent BNSF Cherokee yard.

I am modeling my own version of this industry on my HO scale Central States Railway.

 A lot of canning companies use RBLs (Refrigerated, Bunkerless, Load restraints).  The current big ones I switch out are Seneca (3 plants) and Del Monte (2 plants).  They make the canned goods for many companies, just the label is different.  WSOR started in 1980, so some WSOR cars on your layout wouldn't be out of place.  Canned goods makers were part of the reason the railroad was started. 

Some places also recieve and ship frozen vegetables, and butter.  

 the old pennsylvania and later pc and cr used to handle an occasional 50' mechanical reefer of frozen hog pancreases out of hunter packing in e st louis to lilly, the drug company, in indianapolis.  they were used for insulin production.  these were only occasional movements since it takes a long time and a lot of hogs to accumulate a car load of pancreases.  (everything but the squeal)

grizlump 

In general an insulated box car would be used where you wanted to keep something cool and at a steady temperature, but not necessarily cold or frozen. Beer is a good example, a plug-door insulated box can be mechanically cooled down at the brewer to around say 40-50 degrees and loaded with beer. It will only gain a few degrees of temp over the next few days to a week, even if travelling across a desert in the summer.

Remember too that in the winter, things like fruit and produce would be shipped in insulated cars to be kept warm...that is, kept from freezing in the harsh northern climes.

The DT&I supplied hundreds of XLI (Insulated box cars) to the Campbell's Soup Factory in Napoleon, Ohio.  They also received nummerous mechanical refridgerators of vegatable and meat products from all over the country as supplies for these soups as well as the locally grown tomatoes. The area around Napoleon is the best tomato growing area in the world.

Rick 

I worked for a company that made household and commercial cleaning products. Some of these products were liquid in plastic bottles, glass bottles, gallon and larger containers. The majority of these products were water based and susceptible to freezing. We also had a lot aerosol products and  they needed to be protected form freezing too. For this reason we used insulated box cars to maintain a warm environment for our products. These products were shipped all over the United States all year long.

Once we got a mechanical reefer loaded with our product. Someone decided to turn on the reefer unit while the car was in transit and froze up the entire railcar of product. Needless to say the carload of product was scrap.

Periodically we would put a temperature recorder in a railcar when it was loaded. These recorders are battery operated and record the car temperature while the car is in transit. The recorder scribes a line on a roll of graph paper while the recorder is turned on. Upon reciept at the receiving destination the batteries were removed and the batteries and recorder were sent back to the main plant via UPS. 

We had simialr recording devices to record shock or excessive jarring of the car that might cause damage to the product within the car. A lot of times the hump yard switching could cause damage to the car and contents.