Hi, I am looking for some books that will give me a general history of reefers. I am not after specific railroads, I just want to learn about their history, usage and the infrastructure behind them etc etc. I am also modeling the ATSF around the late 50’s so if there are any books specific to the ATSF that would be even better.
Shaun
White, John H., 1986, Great Yellow Fleet: A History of American Railroad Refrigerator Cars (ISBN: 0870950916). Unfortunately, out of print and commanding around $200 for decent copies in the used market.
But if you don’t mind a UP/SP-oriented book, get your hands on Thompson, A., Church, R., and Jones, B., 2000, Pacific Fruit Express (ISBN: 1930013035). Here’s the publisher’s page:
http://www.signaturepress.com/pfe2.html and it’s also available discounted elsewhere.
While the intro contains a brief discussion of reefers prior to 1900, the rest is an extensive, very detailed, and abundantly illustrated look at the company, reefers, and operations – i.e., representative of the history, usage and infrastructure for which you’re looking.
I know of nothing dealing with SFRD, but some of the Santa Fe equipment pictorials may be useful.
You might try contacting the ATSF historical society to see if they know of any books dealing specifically with SFRC/SFRD reefers.
Many thanks for the info on those books, found one for $165 which isn’t too bad as the exchange rate is pretty good at the moment.
Shaun
Fellers,
There was a great movie out in the 1930’s called “Reefer Madness”… you can still find it on Amazon and I suspect Youtube. Google video is sure to have it as well.
'Course, that’s an altogether DIFFERENT type of reefer they’re talking about. Funny as heck, though… the movie, that is 
Respects
This is no book, but Wikipedia has quite a bit of information about the history of railroad reefers –
I see one of the links at the bottom of that page is “Reefer Operations on Model Railroads with an emphasis on the ATSF.”
Hello Shaun, The Santa Fe Railway Historical & Modeling Society (atsfrr.net) has just the book you want. It’s shown on the Web page at http://www.atsfrr.net/store/book3.htm. The original book published several years ago is out of print, but the society is offering digitally scanned reprints to non-members as well as members. Happy New Year, Andy