When were 36ft reefers phased out? I ask because I have come across many 36ft reefers on that well known auction site,that shall remain nameless , for a vast variety of BEERS , my second favorite hobby, and I was wondering (living in Scotland,modelling the UP) how long these cars survived.?Thanks again in anticipation.
-G .
Just my thoughts, ideas, opinions and experiences. Others may vary.
HO and N Scale.
After long and careful thought, they have convinced me. I have come to the conclusion that they are right. The aliens did it.
Deep in one of the storage areas of my mind is a recollection about the ICC banning billboard reefers for some reason in the 1930s. Can't recall why though.
ndbprr Deep in one of the storage areas of my mind is a recollection about the ICC banning billboard reefers for some reason in the 1930s. Can't recall why though.
AH! that would be true, I was only looking at the structure, and not what was on teh outside walls.
He is right. They were banned as thieves knew what the contents of a container held by the billboard advertising o the sides and would break in to steal from them.
36' reefers came in several 'flavors'. Many of the general purpose 36' reefers with truss rod under-frames were gone by the 30's. They had been replaced by 40' 'steel under-frame' reefers(still with wood sides) in general service. The one class of 36' reefer that survived into the 60's was the 'meat' reefer. These 36' reefers had steel under-frames and were used by the meat packing industry to haul frozen meat products. So if you are talking about Swift/Armour/Wilson/Rath type of 36' cars, they hung around for quite a while. The combination of a very heavy load, and docks set-up for 36' cars kept them in use a lot longer that their beer/produce cousins.
Someone mentioned 'billboard' reefers. This colorful advertising was banned in the 30's - Unless the car was in service restricted to carrying what was advertised on the exterior. Even in the 60's, there were Hamms Beer reefers, and those colorful Johnson's Wax cars(with the JWAX reporting marks).
Jim
Modeling BNSF and Milwaukee Road in SW Wisconsin
Wasn't there a movie about them in the 50s? "Reefer Madness"
Marlon
See pictures of the Clinton-Golden Valley RR
The cars themselves weren't banned, just the 3rd-party advertising on them. Also, these "billboard" reefers were never more than a small fraction of the nation's reefer stock.
If you like billboard reefers, look at Art Griffin's Decals, he has literally hundreds of billboard reefer decals from the 1880's through the 1930's available.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
jrbernier ... Someone mentioned 'billboard' reefers. This colorful advertising was banned in the 30's - Unless the car was in service restricted to carrying what was advertised on the exterior. Even in the 60's, there were Hamms Beer reefers, and those colorful Johnson's Wax cars(with the JWAX reporting marks).
... Someone mentioned 'billboard' reefers. This colorful advertising was banned in the 30's - Unless the car was in service restricted to carrying what was advertised on the exterior. Even in the 60's, there were Hamms Beer reefers, and those colorful Johnson's Wax cars(with the JWAX reporting marks).
Companies owning or leasing railroad cars were allowed to advertise/promote their companies and products. For instance, railroads often applied heralds and slogans (such as "Santa Fe, All the Way) on their own equipment. Leasing/owning, non-railroad companies such as Roma Wine could also advertise their companies/products. Such cars carried the leasing/owning companies' products, but needn't contain the specific products or all the products advertised.
Truss-rod wood cars without steel underframes, and archbar trucks, were banned from interchange in the years leading up to WW2, so any cars with either of those wouldn't be appropriate for post-war layouts. 36' cars stopped being built early in the 20th century as 40' cars became standard, and 36' cars generally were being phased out by this time anyway. As noted, many meat packing plants were set up to use 34' or 36' cars (warehouse doors spaced the right distance apart for example for the shorter cars) and continued to use them into the 1950's.
There's a common misbelief that "billboard reefers" were railroad cars that companies paid to advertise on, like renting billboard space. Actually these were cars leased by private companies either from railroads or more often from leasing companies. The "billboard" part is because the companies decorated them in large colorful lettering, often with pictures...like a billboard sign.
Generally, any reporting marks ending in "X" indicates the car is in a leasing arrangement (or at least not in general service) like "BREX" for Burlington Refrigerator Express or "FGEX" for Fruit Growers Express.
Long story short, the problem was that railroads had to often back haul an empty reefer to it's starting point. Company A would load a car in Kansas City and send it to Chicago. In Chicago Company B would request that a railroad provide it an empty reefer, and when the railroad presented the Company A reefer, with Company A's name written in six foot high letters, Company B would refuse it, not wanting to in effect pay to have a competitor's rolling billboard crossing the country. The rule change said the lettering of the private cars could only be a certain height, and I believe that the car could only be used in the company's service, so the company would have to pay if the railroad had to haul it empty.
This rule re lettering didn't apply to the railroads, who around this time (1930's) began painting their own cars in colorful slogans and ads in a style similar to the old billboard reefers.
BTW re beer - many companies make fake beer cars for collectors, you have to be very careful before buying a beer reefer to be sure it's based on a real car, and not just a "collectible" with a fantasy paint scheme...sometimes for companies that actually never existed.
p.s. "Reefer Madness" came out in the 1930's, I think 1933??
Having seen the movie in my glory days of college, i can attest to the fact that the title refers not to a refrigerated car but to marijuana and the supposed insanity it caused. quite funny looking back.
Reefer Madness I do remember walking home from the LHS one time years ago (as a teen) with a Baby Ruth billboard refrigerator car and a couple of bags of Woodland Scenics green grass mix in a shopping bag, and thinking to myself that if a cop were to stop me and ask me what was in the bag, saying "a reefer and two bags of grass" might be taken the wrong way....
Is owning 256, 1925-1927 era specific PFE reefers a severe or mild form of "reefer madness"?
Dave
Long live the wooden reefer!
I have a variety of MDC/Roundhouse 36 foot cars. Some were the truss rod wood frame type and some were the “fish belly" type cars which were steel frames.
I think River City Railroad sells only the truss rod wood frame car kits but I have not looked at the site in a couple months.
Rich
If you ever fall over in public, pick yourself up and say “sorry it’s been a while since I inhabited a body.” And just walk away.