Iceing facilities,ice houses,frequency (miles between)of refills, etc.
Also when these (typically wooden) cars vanished from revenue service.
I am modelling the midwest in the 1952-60 era.
Photos, tips, links appreciated!
Well I think the last Pacific Fruit Express iced reefer was retired in the early seventies. It was thought that wood was a better insulator than steel, so as you say wood reefers lasted longer than other wooden cars, although there certainly were steel iced-reefers around.
For your other questions, you'd almost have to research it by area - the ATSF going thru the desert would have to ice cars more often than a railroad in a cooler climate for example.
Throught the '50's and '60's there were lots of wooden reefers that still needed ice. Mechanical cooling became much more prevelent as time wore on though.
The first reefers just used ice to cool things, and small slots were often added to the car sides to get air circulating. In the '40's and '50's many reefers had interior fans added (powered by truck mounted generators) to circulate air and make them more effective. Wood was still the construction material of choice, though metal ends started appearing. In the late '50's you began to see all steel constructed reefers and mechanical cooling started coming into use more. By the late sixties most of the wood cars were gone as were the supporting icing facilities.
There's a decent history to be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerator_car
Well, you're well within the "ice age", even though mechanical refrigeration was starting to make some inroads. The wooden cars lasted into the '70s, at least, although steel cars had started appearing in the '30s.
Not all refrigerator cars required icing, depending on the commodity that they were carrying. While some produce required ice in the bunkers, others required top icing (crushed ice blown over the produce itself) or merely ventilation, with no ice in the car at all. Reefers could also be used to back-haul non-perishable packaged goods, too: in this case they acted more like insulated boxcars.
The location of ice houses would depend on the commodities hauled, and the geographical location of both shippers and markets. In some locales, ice was harvested from lakes and ponds in the winter months, then stored in icehouses for use in the growing season. In places where the climate precluded this, ice was made by mechanical means, or imported in ice-service reefers from areas where natural ice was available. Many railroads stored ice in large storage icehouses, then shipped it around to local icehouses as required. Most model railroads could support a single icing facility of any size, and perhaps a smaller facility, too, but it's unlikely that most people would have room to simulate the several icing stops that a long-distance run would require. Many shippers required that cars be pre-iced before delivery for loading, so this can add to operations. Empty cars might also require cleaning before icing, too. You could simulate in-transit icing by either stopping a through train at a mainline icing platform, or by cutting out those cars requiring icing, then re-assembling the train before it leaves.
I attempted to model several phases of the ice industry on my free-lanced railroad. The railroad and the icehouse business are affiliated, although most roads operated their own facilities.
First is the main icehouse. This is where ice is harvested (from an unmodelled inlet of Lake Erie in this case). There is a very small reefer icing platform to handle the odd car, but the main purpose of this facility is to store and ship ice.
At the east end of this complex, there's an office and a loading dock (behind the bus) for the sale and delivery of ice, by truck or wagon, for home or commercial use, a common business in my late-'30s modelling era.
This fish processing plant, not too far from the icehouse, receives block ice by truck for its coolers, and also for crushing to use for top icing of the open crates of fresh fish. The car spotted at the loading door is a former Athearn reefer. I replaced the steel ends with wooden ones, and built a new roof with no ice hatches, as this car is used in dedicated service for fish (top icing only) or raw milk (no icing, due to a short haul).
Ice was transported from the main icehouse to smaller icehouses along the line in ice service reefers, usually older reefers downgraded to this service. In colder climes, ice was also hauled in boxcars during the winter months. Some ice service reefers had their ice bunkers removed, to increase the cargo space, as all ice shipped this way was loading through the doors.
Although the roof hatches are still intact, both of these 36'-ers have had the bunkers removed, as they are assigned to ice service.
This is a local coal and ice dealer's operation, and there is no provision for car icing of any kind. Block ice comes in in an ice service reefer, and is stored for eventual distribution to local customers, delivered by truck or wagon. I have several of these around the layout.
Car icing takes place at this facility in the one major town on the layout. All ice originates at the Lake Erie site, and is shipped here in ice service reefers. Some large city plants had their own mechanical means of ice-making, too. I plan for another icing facility in another town on an as-yet-unbuilt part of the layout.
Hope that this info will be of use.
Wayne
Thanks for the replies, Wayne- I have the same station on my layout!
I am thinking of a mechanical plant to make the ice, as (from reading) in later years the "natural" ice was not as clean as earlier thought. BUT I am modelling in the late 50's,as technology and money was a bit easier to come by than in your awesome '30s layout.
LOVE the fish market idea! Do you know of any wooden reefers that have opening tops?
By opening tops, I assume you mean ice hatches. Here's a picture of what my fish car looked like before I modified it.
It's an Athearn car and originally had operating hatches (with oversize hardware) The car shown above was modified to have non-operating hatches, with hardware more to the proper scale. Other wooden reefers with ice hatches (non-operating, but you can model them open, closed or in the ventilator mode, as shown) are available from Red Caboose.
This one is from Tichy:
And here's another Athearn, with modified hatches. (all cars shown have been modified somewhat, and have new paint and lettering)
Another Athearn, but with scratchbuilt wooden ends and an older style roof.
I am in the early stages of building a layout based on Santa Fe in the island seaport of Galveston TX in the 1950s. Lots of refrigerated traffic FROM Galveston- seafood from the shrimp fleet, imported meat from South America and a shipload of bananas every 7 to 10 days or so. Santa Fe's reefer fleet was nearly all steel by middle 1950s-- including several classes of formerly wooden body/steel underframe USRA cars rebuilt as all-steel. Some private owners still used wooden reefers.
A Santa Fe document shows the railroad owned no ice-making plant at Galveston, but bought ice from some non-railroad sources. One was among three ice plants in a row beside the waterfront, just north of the famous "Strand" main business street. One of these plants had an elevated "ice run" over the street to deliver ice direct to the shrimpboat dock. One of the plants had leased space on premises for Swift & Co.
I have started kitbashing an ice plant to represent this facility loosely.
Santa Fe also bought ice from the Galveston brewery, a Teutonesque 19th century structure similar to the same architect's San Antonio brewery , which still stands, used as an art museum. To be approximated on the layout with the Heljan kit.
Santa Fe had a 14' x 39' ice house (storage, not ice manufacturing) as part of its facilities in Galveston at one time. I found a document referring to this building in the Santa Fe operations collection at the historic archive of the Houston Public Library/ Houston Metropolitan Research Center. The 14' width would fit within the same track spacing as a typical Santa Fe 15' icing platform for which plans were published in Santa Fe Modeler 2nd Quarter 1989 p.13.
From all this, I deduce that Santa Fe had its own icing platform with storage for ice, but not ice manufacturing. I have been period photos of the harborside ice houses. They had loading platforms suitable for one or two cars but not a block of reefers. I presume ice was transferred from the manufacture either by truck or rail. Santa Fe had a fleet of ice cars-- not refrigerated cars but cars for transporting ice. I don't know if they would have used rail for crosstown transit of 2 or 3 cars of ice per day to their icing platform, but until I learn otherwise, I plan my layout to allow for this operation.
Santa Fe also had company-service REFRIGERATOR CAR SALT boxcars built "to reefer standards", presumably to be handled in high speed reefer blocks. These cars carried salt from a mine at Hutchinson Kansas to Galveston to reduce ice cooling temperatures below the normal freezing/melting point.
Santa Fe also had a handful of dry-ice refrigerator cars but I do not know exactly how or where they were used.
Thanks for all of the comments!
I have a foundry,a rubber plant, a coal gas plant (all prototypical) and a small local coal dump (for houses)
I have a long boring section off of my mainline where the B&O and NYC interchange, I think an icing platform and mechanical plant will fill that nicely.
I am enjoying the forum and comments. thanks again!
wheeler wrote: I have a long boring section off of my mainline...
Gee, I wish I had room for a boring section on my layout, maybe one train length between towns with no industry, no sidings, just straight tangent track with a highway alongside and a line of telephone, telegraph and power lines and a farm field. Maybe a culvert. Some "plain ordinary" scene against which the high points can stand.