but it is a long time ago, and possibly i simly failed to see them.
not all wood refers had the fans, however, nor needed them.
I seem to recall seeing chains and belts used to drive the fans on the older wood sided ice bunker reefers in the 1950s and '60s. And they always had lots of water dripping from the melting ice.
Would like to know the mechanism that would transmit movement from car wheels to fans; hard to imagine how they did this. Come to think of it, I sort of remember grilles/vents, etc., on outside of car bodies.
Northtowne
but the wood cars relied only on natural convection, ice hatches and the ends of the roofs, with cool air resumably falling since it is heavier and warmer air rising to be cooled again. it did seem to work ok.
The steel cars that you were likely to have seen back then had circulating fans that were driven by mechanical means, with a wheel that made contact with a car wheel. I'm not sure of the exact workings of the fan(s), but if one knew where to look along the bottom of one side, one could tell that they were working.
Carl
Railroader Emeritus (practiced railroading for 46 years--and in 2010 I finally got it right!)
CAACSCOCOM--I don't want to behave improperly, so I just won't behave at all. (SM)
I rode an ATSF freight Needles to Amarillo, summer 1953. Got to see them ice reefers along the way. Question; was there anything mechanical in the reefer design, that would circulate cool air? Or was it just the presence of the ice in each end that cooled the lading? Things like that didn't enter my mind back then.
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