Before mechanical refrigeration ice was shipped by rail Does anybody know a source to research this traffic further? Thanks
Well, as a first attempt, if you haven’t already done so, search for ‘Ice Harvesting’, and while railroad cars (which on the various sites seem to be standard Ice Reefers - guess no top iceing needed) are not the main subject, they are definitely mentioned and some operations discussed.
I have done that but I would like to learn more about car loadings, number of cars, destinations, frequency, etc. It must have been a booming business until mechanical refrigeration took over.
There was no one concern responsible for this business, if fact many independent non-rail related entities were major players, but why not study the example of the Pacific Fruit Express, the largest refrigerator owner/operator in the world.
PFE maintained the following locations for natural ice plants:
Donner, Ca, abandoned 1922 property sold for incorporation into a state park
Carlin, Nv, ice gallery burned in 1950, SP/PFE razed the remaining plant in 1951, capacity 55 tons block ice. At one time PFE also supplied a small WP dock in Carlin as well
North Powder, Id, Sold to private operator 1938, capacity 15 tons block ice
Monteplier Id, abandoned 1933, property sold
Evanston, Wy, abandoned 1933, property conveyed back to Union Pacific, capacity 35 tons block ice
Laramie, Wy, converted to ice manfacturing plant 1951, capacity 71 tons graded ice, several hundred tons could be also be stored outdoors, believed to be the largest ice gallery in the world 16 gallerys, 900 feet long, 108 feet wide, 34 feet tall also had a 89 car icing dock, 6 car ice unloading track, 2 car salt unloading track, 55 acre main pond with thousands of additonal acerages available if required.
North Platt, Nb, abandoned 1920’s, capacity 40 tons of block ice
Council Bluffs, Ia, converted to ice manfacturing plant 1921
Payette, Or, sold to private operator 1930
One must include hundreds of tons of salt and burlap required for each location, at several locations, salt storage capacity exceeded that of ice.
PFE divided operations into 5 districts, northwest (Union Pacifc), south central (Union Pacific), western division (Southern
Maybe I am not being clear. Before mechnicanical refrigeration made ice manufacture possible the main source was pond and lake ice that was harvested and shipped by rail to packing houses and meat plants among other users. I am looking for data on car loadings where Ice was the product being taken to an end user not refrigerator cars using ice to keep the contents cool. In one case Ice was shipped by ship to India from Massachustes. I am interestted in determining what portion of rail business Ice was for the railroads among other facts like how far they carried it.
Nah, you’re being clear - I understood immediately what you wanted, except there doesn’t seem to be one condolidated source about Ice Harvesting and it usage of rail transport - lots of sites out there by various historical concerns discussing Ice Harvesting (which in and of itself is very interesting, especially where they have early gas engines hooked up to large circular saws, these units pushed forward over the ice to cut it into blocks - I guess planning ahead to avoid ending up in ice-cold ponds was essential in this business), usually with images of re-enactments; mentioned peripherally was the storage of this ice (usually in double-walled wood buildings, with sawdust, felt, etc insulation between the walls); loading of this ice into railcars (on a few sites there were some cool images of a chain conveyer which lifted the ice blocks from the pond surface to a wood-frame loading dock, thence loaded into waiting reefers (standard ice-bunker refrigerator cars, I supposed used during the summer for produce and the like); finally some mention of ice tonnage per car (20-30tons the usual number) and numbers over a season (for some sites, 500 cars/yr - others 80 cars/day but that may be for several ponds in the vicinity). Oh yes, to unload, at least several operations just moved the ice blocks from the reefers right into the waiting ice truck backed up to the door (substitute wagons for the pre WWI era).
Since apparently every operation in railroading history has had at least one book written about it (and often dozens), you’d think ice handling would too - and maybe somebody knows of such a book.
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear, my post was not a dicussion of bunker ice, but block and crushed ice that was transported for company/industrial use. Very few commercial ice plants of that time had the capability of mass producing the clear,dense ice demanded of non industrial use consumers, I believe PFE had two such plants that proved unproffitable in the end. I suppose ice would be carded in the same manner as any other special instruction load, however, it would require frequent inspections to maintain proper tempature and possibly the application of burlap wraps to control melting. Ice intended for consumption would require a class A reefer, thus any reefer type owned by any road/operator not employed in meat service would qualify, the only dedicated, purpose built cars for this type of service were those employed for dry ice, even PFE employed several in captive service . Since your scope is the consumer end, you are much better off researching the independent compinies such as Union Ice or any local favorite if applicable and investigating how they moved bulk ice. one could speculate that the advent of commercial residentia/hotel refrigeration ended the majority of ice use by said consumers by the late forties, and the end of the ice age altogether was not too far off.
Dave
A significant amount of ice harvesting was done around Noxen, PA on the Lehigh Valley Railroad. You might try Ice harvesting in Noxen, PA for starters. Thee are many good articles and some photos if one digs a little.
My guess would be very little block ice would have been moved by a railroad to a commercial customer. Most likely any large business needing ice before mechanical refrigeration was common would be located in an area where they could get it locally in the winter and store it in a large ice house, which could be as large as a big warehouse. Most ice moved in reefers would probably be moving to areas where it was needed to stock or re-stock refrigerator cars hauling produce from the South and West towards the Northeast.
Remember too that most food and drink production was done locally because of shipping limitations. National brands of beer for example were less common 100 years ago, each area had it’s own local brewers…especially before pasteurization allowed it to last longer before going bad. Same with ice cream, you wouldn’t have big factories using carloads of ice to make ice cream and shipping it all over the nation. It would be smaller companies or more likely individual ice cream parlors making their own small batches of ice cream. (Remember, ice boxes didn’t allow you to freeze things, so people couldn’t buy a gallon of ice cream and keep it for several days in a freezer.)
A lot of natural ice was harvested along Central Pacific’s route over Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Ice was shipped initially in box cars using sawdust or straw for insulation. The ice was shipped to San Francisco and other western cities, and when insulated refrigerator cars were developed, ice was shipped east to the finer hotels of New York City and New Orleans (and undoubtedly elsewhere) where it was widely regarded for its purity. Boca Beer used the same water and shipped bottles of beer equal to 30,000 barrels a year. It was popular at the 1883 World’s Fair in Paris. The same water was also shipped in tank cars to points such as Sacramento.
Mark
“Before mechanical refrigeration…” can have at least three meanings.
The first practical large-scale mechanical refrigeration moderning the meat industry by the late 1870s, according to America Past & Present by Divine et al., a standard college freshman U S History text. That referred to a plant that made ice which was used in ice bunker refrigerator cars. The process used ammonia and usually required the services of an engineer to run the operation. It was not an automatic process where you could just buy a refrigeratuion unit, turn it on and forget it. But it was mechanical artificial refrigeration and it changed the world’s way of life.
The next “coming of mechanical refrigeration” might refer to making refrigeration accessible to the home. According to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers website, increasing use of electric motors helped make home refrigeration possible in the 19-teens. At first, the motor, compressor and refrigerator itself were separate entities, often housed in a basement or utility room. By the 1920s, manufacturers began competing making self-contained units. What we think of as the nhome refrigerator. For more information, see the Association website: http://www.history.com/exhibits/modern/fridge.html
The THIRD advent of mechanical refrigeration meant designing units dependable and rugged enough to stand mobile operation in railroad cars and truck-trailers. These began replacing ice bunker reefers on the railroads in the middle 50s.
I agree with Stix…
A local supplier could furnish the needed ice at a fraction of the cost(harvesting,loading shipping and lost due to melting.) and the ice would be available the year around.
Depends on the time period you’re modeling. Before commercial refrigeration was widely available, ice needed to be shipped significant distances.
Mark
Mark,It couldn’t be ship to far because the railroads still wasn’t the fastest way because of meets,mechanical problems etc.
I have read where frozen meat was ship by lake freighters because it was faster then rail.A ship could leave Chicago in the morning and be in Buffalo the following afternoon.
That’s too bad for those modeling areas where there is steep competition from ships. Fortunately, us Southwestern modelers don’t have such a problem. With a hot, dry climate and few navigable rivers (but also having premier ice and water sources due to the varied climate and geography), us Southerwesterners were busy shipping ice and water by railroad. For example, see my earlier post about ice shipments from the Donner Pass area.
Mark
If you’re looking to model this industry, here’s a LINK to my rendition of the ice industry.
Wayne
As stated in my earlier post, many natural ice ponds were sold to private operators, they supplied both commercial and railroad needs, Union Ice was a large independent here in CA, I am old enough to remember the wanning years of home ice deliveries, I too remember tagging along to Bayshore yard to the PFE/ SP/Union Ice house for occasional purchases (and some great railroad action besides).
Boca Beer, there are some memories!
Dave
The point of this interest is that ice was a very large commodity for the railroads before mechanical refrigeration that totaly disappeared for the most part. No doubt much was shipped south for fruit and vegetable shipments. I have found reference to a pond on the Michigan Central that shipped over 1200 cars one season and 78 cars on one day. I would be willing to bet that these were priority trains that moved right along. As a side bar ice was shipped to India and 50% loss was considered good since the ship had to go round Africa and cross the equator twice on the trip. Ice apparently was a very valuable commodity.
Here’s an interesting/informative article on Boca Beer.
http://www.sierrasun.com/article/20070803/COMMUNITY/70803003/-1/rss04
I have over the years purchased a magazine titled American Heritage’s INVENTION AND TECHNOLOGY; some years back they did a feature on ice manufacturing and its movement to, among other places, salubrious climes. This movement was, as I recall, done in boxcars with an additional lining of pine(?) for insulation. In addition to this pine(?) insulation the load was further insulated with added material usually sawdust or hay. At its destination it was off loaded and re-stored in insulated facilities again under an insulation of hay or sawdust. Except in remote locals the local cutting of ice from ponds had ended by the late 1870s because by that date virtually all urban centers had ice plants which not only were supplying the local community but was producing quantities for shipment to out-of-town locations.
I had an uncle who was a section chief/foreman with the Onion Specific in Eastern Idaho. As a section chief/foreman he resided in company housing and the railroad had built an icehouse which they stocked with a couple of tons of ice for use by the section crew while working. This ice was supplied by a local manufacturer and my uncle used to purchase an additional couple of hundred pounds for his personal use; in additon to household use he used to supply ice for picnics and reunions and we always took a cooler of ice when we went fishing. The point of this information is that this icehouse was constructed with ties and some kind of a wood interior for additional insulation and a raised floor to allow any meltwater to keep from puddling; I would think that, with the exception of the ties, this would have been the practice for the early-on distribution of ice via boxcar from pond sources. After the ice had been placed in this icehouse it was liberally covered with sawdust. It doesn’t get particularly balmy in Eastern Idaho and this ice would generally last until late-September and into October. I understand from this article that several distributors in the