I am looking to start aquiring 40ft reefer cars like the ones Atlas sells for N-Scale. I want the ones that are the alcohol and food products cars. What type of loco would have pulled these cars. Steam or Diesel doesnt matter to me and road name is unimportantant at this time. Also what time period would these cars been in. Thanks for your help.
Thanks for all the great replies. Here is a link of what I am looking at if it helps clear up my intentions.
From my own experience in the Northeast, 40 foot reefers lasted through the late sixties. Any F-unit (FT through F-9) would be OK, along with all GP units through the GP-40, and SD units through SD-40 and SD-45. On the GE side, anything from the UP Turbines to U-33’s would be about right. Electrics like the GG-1, E-33, E-44, etc. would be allright as well–only the E-60, AEM-7, and the Acela’s HHP locomotive were built after 1970. All models from the “minority builders” (so named because of their relatively small sales) like Alco, Baldwin, and Fairbanks Morse would be allright, because all three were out of the new locomotive business by 1968.
Personally, I’m stuck in the 1960s because there was a great mix of refrigerator cars to work with–wood and steel, iced and mechanical, 36, 40, 50 feet and lots of oddballs. Ice and mechanical cars require different handling and replenishment (ice and salt for one and diesel fuel for the other). This is a headache for reak railroads, but fun for operators.
If you go for a steam engine to pull a string of reefers, you’ll want one with some speed to it. Reefer trains were generally ‘hotshot’ trains running at or near passenger train speeds. A 4-8-2 or 4-8-4 would be a good choice for example, something with large drivers for speed and big enough to generate some real power to pull with.
Virtually any steam engine built “could” have pulled these cars. But…it all depends on exactly which cars you’re talking about.
You mentioned beer and “food” reefers. In general, those are older billboard cars that are pre-1934. So that limits the “correct” engines to smaller, pre-superpower steam like 4-4-0s, 2-6-0s, 4-6-0s, 2-8-0s, 2-8-2s, 2-10-2s, and 4-6-2s (yes, Pacifics did pull freight on occasion).
Bowman dairy reefers regularly ran on the rear of CNW trains 703/706 between Chicago and Freeport. In the 20s and 30s this train was frequently assigned an Atlantic. A combine, one or two coaches and the reefer were a typical consist.
As others have noted solid “reefer blocks” would have gotten bigger power. Milwaukee Road’s Northerns were used in thsi service for example.
Ray makes a good point, “billboard” reefers were banned for interchange service by the ICC in the thirties so if that is what you’re going to be running the engine would have to be from that era or earlier. Still, except for a few mallets, most engine types would have been around by 1934 - 4-6-4’s, 4-8-2’s, 4-8-4’s etc,
The 40ft ice reefers were actually used until the mid-70’s.A large number of cars from the fruit express fleets were re-equipped with modern sliding type plug doors(as opposed to the swinging plug doors as originally built).Burlington Northern didn’t close the ice house at Whitefish,Montana until about 1975 or 1976 and I believe it was torn down sometime between 1978 and 1982(this from research sources when I was studying about the Kalispell branch).GN/BN had quite a mix of ice and mechanical reefers in service thru their Western Fruit Express subsidiary as did Fruit Growers Express and Burlington Refrigerator Express(CB&Q)which all three were pooled equally(this clearly shows on a lot of the GN’s wheel reports of 1968-70).
While ice reefers made it to the 70’s, billboard reefers (the type the original poster asked about) were outlawed in the 1930’s. So if he wants to run billboard ice reffers then a 2-6-0, 2-8-0, 4-6-0, 4-6-2, 4-8-2, 2-10-0, 2-10-2, 2-6-6-2, 2-8-8-2 would be appropriate. Dave H.
Simple: truth in advertising laws. The reason why the reefers with the fancy paint jobs were called billboard reefers was simple: the leasing companies that owned the cars leased out their sides to whoever wanted to pay to have them painted. Thus they became rolling billboards. Problem was that what was on the sides of the cars wasn’t usually what was inside the car. You could have a car lettered for Hershey chocolate that was really carrying frozen pig ears, or a car lettered Borax cleaning powder that was carrying ice cream. Worse yet, you could have a Swift car carrying Hormel meats.
Between customers mad at advertising their competiton’s products and consumers not knowing what was really going where, the Federal Government had to step in and put a stop to the practice. 1937 was the drop-dead date for this practice. Cars had to be repainted by a certain date, or railroads had to refuse them in interchange (which they did; there was no fudging of these sorts of laws). The l;easing companies had several years to make the switch (plus a couple of extensions to the date) so there were no excuses for not repainting the cars.
After the ban, leasing companies went to more conservative paint schemes for their cars. Individual shippers COULD still paint cars with their names on them, but the rules had changed: cars painted with a specific company name could ONLY be used for that one company. That meant a lot of complicated car shuffling in yards to get cars to where they were supposed to go (instead of “hey, those guys need six reefers. Grab the first six and send 'em”), and a lot of empty backhauling of cars. It took until the 1950s before most reefer leasing companies started painting brilliant schemes on their cars again, and by that time, most of the fancier schemes were meat reefers.
It’s a persistant misconception that railroads or leasing companies sold space on the sides of their cars for advertising, don’t know how it got started but it’s just not true. (Maybe it comes from looking back at the 1800’s when companies leased cars directly from the railroad, so a car might have the railroad name on one side of the door and the lessor company’s name on the other side.) The term “billboard reefer” referred to the fact that the companies that the cars were leased to (Heinz 57, Swift, Hershey’s etc.) used the cars like rolling billboards with big bold colorful decoration to advertise what they were hauling.
The problem came along when the car was empty. Let’s say you run a small brewery in western Wisconsin, and you ask your local RR to provide you with four iced reefers to ship out your beer. When the reefers arrive, one of them has “SCHLITZ” in six foot high letters across it - a reefer leased by Schlitz and now empty and heading back towards Milwaukee. You’re not going to pay the railroad to run this big advertisement for your competition around Wisconsin !! So you demand they take it back and provide another reefer…and the railroad ends up having to send the car back empty (earning little or no money for the railroad).
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