After seeing all the history and comments on the tall doors, I will go a new route and install wooden beams with tackle at the top of each of the four tall doors much like a farm barn used to haul hay into the lofts using horses to pull the loads up and down.
I added a beam to each door. It doesn’t look too bad.
I stuck with white partly because I already have a lot of darker coloured structures. I’ve seen pictures of CNR icehouses in the '50s and the '30s, though, and all appear to have been painted boxcar red.
As for keeping the heat out, CNR painted a number of wood-sided reefers with aluminum paint in 1933, in an experiment to test the reflective value as compared to their standard boxcar red. The cars were re-painted boxcar red in 1935, so I would guess the benefits were negligible. Their first overhead bunker steel reefers, in 1939, were painted boxcar red, too. In 1943 they changed the steel reefers to grey, but the wooden ones remained boxcar red right to the end in the '60s.
Wayne
The ice bays for the C.P.R. in Moose Jaw were boxcar red, like every building the C.P.R. owned. A new thought, these ice bays were only for passenger cars, and were used for air conditioning, which was a common practice until the 1950’s and early 60’s. I haven’t read on this forum any mention in the U.S. of icing passenger cars, was it that long ago they quit using ice on passenger trains, take a look at those old passenger cars on your layout and look underneath and you will see 2 rectangular boxes with hinges, thats where the ice went, any replies???
In addition to ice-activated air conditioning, there was the Pullman Electro-Mechanical system, Pullman Mechanical air conditioning and the Safety-Carrier steam-activated system.
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. Depending on the layout of other underfloor equipment, there might be more than two ice bunkers.
I used ice-activated ac on this business car, a shortened Athearn observation:
…and mechanical air conditioning for all other ac-equipped cars:
Wayne
Flashwave: I recall seeing a picture of a ‘between the tracks’ icing platform but please don’t ask me where. As I recall it was a rather long platform capable of serving many reeefers at once. The ice blocks came from the ice house via an underground conveyer system and there was a conveyer on the icing platform to move the blocks along. I would guess the era to be 40’s to 50’s because of the large scale of the operation. LIke they say, there is a prototype for eveything!
Dave
Dave is correct, as I’ve seen similar pictures, too. The Walthers platforms include a cast-in representation of a chain-type conveyor for moving the ice blocks. Where ice/brine mixtures were used, the platforms often had tracks that allowed a chute-equipped machine to travel alongside the reefers, depositing the crushed ice and salt mixture directly into the cars’ bunkers. There are some photos HERE and here’s a photo of a platform between tracks.
Wayne
Thank you guys. Boxcar Red might fit in nicely on my layout…
Dr. Wayne, thanks for those links. Very cool photos there. If anyone hasn’t clicked on the ice chute pic
it would be an awesome thing to model ! I’ve never seen that type before.
Also, thanks for the close up of your rusty door hinges. The doors on this kit seem a little challenging to spring to life (the way they are cast as part of the wall).
I’ve been considering using black masking tape for roofing as well, thanks.
It’s cool to know that I could place the icing platforms between tracks if it’s too tight to fit in front of the house. That may come in very handy…
Thank you guys. Boxcar Red might fit in nicely on my layout…
Dr. Wayne, thanks for those links. Very cool photos there. If anyone hasn’t clicked on the ice chute pic
it would be an awesome thing to model ! I’ve never seen that type before.
Also, thanks for the close up of your rusty door hinges. The doors on this kit seem a little challenging to spring to life (the way they are cast as part of the wall).
I’ve been considering using black masking tape for roofing as well, thanks.
It’s cool to know that I could place the icing platforms between tracks if it’s too tight to fit in front of the house. That may come in very handy…
Great photos. There certainly were a lot of variations on how to ice a reefer.
Rustoleum makes a line of multi-colored textured spray paints.
http://www.rustoleum.com/CBGProduct.asp?pid=31
I use the mostly-black one for roofing, both flat “tar” roofs and shingles. It gives a great “speckled” look. It can be touched up with weathering powders, too. They have a number of other shades, too. The brown with black specks is excellent for stone walls.
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 [:(])
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.
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
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. [swg]
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 [:P] scheme on an Athearn car (with new roof and ends):
doctorwayne: Neat pictures! Thank you. Pretty good pictures from everybody else too!
Dave
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
To do that kind of roofing, I use black sandpaper with a very fine grit. You can get that as wide as you like.