Cornerstone Ice House

[G Paine]

JWK Railway

Thank you Mr. Paine. Those U-tube video clips were very educational. What was interesting is how the modern ice house used a front-end loader or fork lift to get a number of blocks on a skid into the upper level doors.  (Probably cheaper and faster than building wooden ramps). I guess because of how much room the ramps would take up on a model layout, Cornerstone left them off.

The front loader must have been on one of the other ice harvest videos, at Thompson they adjust the ramp when a level in the ice house is filled.

The ramp is not a necessary addition to an ice house unless there is an adjacent pond with clean fresh water. Typically, ice would arrive at the ice house in a reefer that is designated for ice transport service. The source could be from a lake that had ice harvesting or from an urban area that had power to run an ice making referigeration plant. Many rural areas did not get elecrtic power until the Rural Electrification Program in the 1930s - one of the economic stimulys programs (to us an modern term) to get the country out of the Great Depression. Power companies did not want to spend the capital investment to run power lines out to sparsely separated rural locations (similar to not extending high speed internet or cell phone service today )

[G Paine]

doctorwayne

Ice-activated ac uses the melt water from a sump below the ice boxes, passing it through a heat exchanger downstream of the main blower fan.  The somewhat-warmed water was then returned to the ice bunkers, cascading over the ice blocks and returning, chilled, to the sump to be re-circulated.  

Wayne

The video "New England Glory - The Mountain Division" by Herron Rail Video shows a short clip of preping  the B&M train "The Mountaineer" at North Station in Boston in 1946. The video shows a crew adding ice to the ice activated A/C on one of the passenger cars. Probably not worth buying the video if all you are interested in is icing, but the video is a great view of passenger and freight operations on the B&M and MEC in the NH mountains in 1946 and 1951.

https://www.ribbonrail.com/HerronRail/product_info.php?products_id=46&osCsid=73sb9kkigcrov5njs3lvl3nf66

[trainnut1250]

One thing that needs to be added to this discussion is that East coast icing operations looked different than west coast Icing.  In this thread, we are getting a nice mix of the two.  Many of the pics in the ATSF link of Dr Wayne are West coast prototype.  Check out the book by Church et all on PFE icing operations. 

http://www.signaturepress.com/pfe.html

There you will find a wide variety of icing platforms, Ice plants reefers etc. all centered around PFE ops mainly in the west..   The Walthers Ice storage building looks pretty east coast to my eye.  The platform itself is a pretty good stand in or a PFE platform.

 In the west, Ice harvesting was gradually replaced by ice manufacturing plants.  Most of these plants were of slab concrete construction and used a variety of methods to deliver Ice to cars including the mechanical icing machines shown Dr. Wayne's link..  Most of these operations were huge, so modeling them will require a bit of compression (what else is new).

The afore mentioned book has rough dimensions and specs. for the standard PFE platforms in use during this era.  I am in the planning stages of a scratch building a PFE platform and Ice manufacturing plant from plans and photo interpretation taken from this book.

To me the cars are as a big reason why I like reefer OPs.  Here are a couple of pics of cars on my layout (in the West):

 

Guy

[doctorwayne]

Nice-looking reefers, Guy.

I think that a lot of modellers, especially those of us in the pre-transition era, are drawn to reefers by their colourful paint schemes.  They really enliven the appearance of a train of plain black and boxcar red rolling stock.

Both the CNR and CPR painted their reefers boxcar red in my late '30s modelling era, but lots of imported produce showed up in more colourful American cars.  I probably have a disproportionate number on my southwestern Ontario-based layout, although not all would be on the layout at the same time.

I have several Red Caboose cars like yours, although mine are done in an older lettering style:

 

I used a similar paint scheme on my home road's Accurail cars, too:

 

Tichy also makes a nice version of a PFE car:

 

The Athearn Blue Box cars can be upgraded, too, with better details and more accurate paint:

 

This one's also an Athearn BB, but I added Tichy ice platforms and some other details, including new "wood" ends and a scratchbuilt roof:

 

This Intermountain car is a bit too modern for my era, and will eventually be repainted in an earlier scheme:

 

Here's CN's flashy   scheme on an Athearn car (with new roof and ends):

 

And the CPR's equally-gaudy contribution (Accurail)

 

Wayne

 

 

[hon30critter]

doctorwayne: Neat pictures! Thank you. Pretty good pictures from everybody else too!

Dave

[West Coast S]

True, one seldom sees a dock that services reefers on both sides modeled, the protoype handle ice movement to such a dock via an ice bridge that contained a conveyor and related mechanicals to convey block ice from storage, these could be quite elaborate in design and span hundreds of feet depending how far from the ice source the dock was located.  They require a lot of real estate to be credible but are loaded with detail!

There seems to be confusion about the purpose of low level doors, some facalities had a receiving platform for raw ice on the lower platform and re-iceing on the second, this would be for a storage house  that was supplied with ice from a secondary source, all mechanicals would be contained within the structure unless it was related to an ice harvesting operation, these had exterior stages and conveyors aplenty, most contained a small power house as well . The upper doors provided a means to extract ice for the loading deck, some applications were mechanical in nature using a chain rail to move the bocks , most required manual labor regardless of means.    

Dave

[Sheepdog]

To do that kind of roofing, I use black sandpaper with a very fine grit. You can get that as wide as you like.