A special run of 40ft wooden Burlington reefers with Colorado & Southern reporting marks is to be made by Atlas O, but at present the artwork isn’t available to view.
Every standard gauge CB&Q reefer of which I can locate a picture, shows the reporting marks as BREX.
Can anyone tell me the life-span of such C&S reefers, and whether they were used in the usual manner, that is, the transport of fresh produce, or is it likely that they were equipped for meat service?
Is it also probable that their use was confined to specific portions of the Burlington system?
I’m assuming their standard gauge?? Obviously cars on the C&S narrow gauge would only operate on the narrow gauge. Could be the cars pre-date BREX, the court ruling (or legislation?) that required railroads to separate their refrigerator companies from the railroad itself was around 1905 or so IIRC.
Otherwise it could be as you say that they were maybe just used for online service so didn’t need to be BREX. Early air-conditioning for passenger cars was done with ice, so railroads used reefers to move ice to ice houses along the line for example.
Looking through a 1949 ‘ORER’ for C&S freight cars: C&S 50050 - 50249 - basic 40’ refrigerator cars. A note indicates that they are owned by the C&S and operated by BREX as agents. BREX was the Burlington’s refrigerator operation. Part of the separation was so that ‘reefers’ were not normal ‘interchange’ cars. An empty reefer could not be ‘stolen’ after unloading and used by the delivering railroad. This kept control of these expensive cars so that they operated in normal cycles. Of course operating them as ‘private’ cars meant that the return home empty trip had to be paid for. A normal interchange freight car gets a free trip home after unloading. Jim
Many thanks for posting the information above. I hadn’t forgotten that I still needed to thank you for that, but I had been hoping to be able to post a picture of the reefer. However, the image was only made available to me yesterday.
Regretably I cannot post it here because I don’t know how. I’ve already lost the first draft of this entry trying to do so. I don’t have pictures hosted elesewhere, and I have been unable to paste any image here.
I’m pleased to tell you that the reefer illustrated is car number 50050, so the details that you gave me were spot-on. It doesn’t have the familiar ‘Burlington Route’ logo, but has a Colorado & Southern circular herald.