On my previous layout, I accumulated a lot of rolling stock just because it looked interesting without giving it much thought about how it fit in my operational scheme, primarily because I just liked running trains with very little in the way of operations. Naturally I am trying to use most of those cars on my current layout but there is one that seems rather odd. It is a billboard reefer for Van Camp’s and I started to wonder why a canned food company would need a reefer. It apparently is supposed to represent a company owned car since it’s road number is prefaced by VCIX.
I did some research and learned that Van Camp’s began in Indianapolis in 1861 as a canner of summertime fruits and vegetables for winter consumption. It got a jump start when it was contracted to supply the Union army and when the war was over, those soldiers continued to want their products. Throughout its history it has always been a canned food company through numerous mergers and breakups. It is now exclusively in the canned beans business. Does anyone know why a canned food company would need the use of reefers.
I considered that but that doesn’t explain the VCIX prefacing the road number. I’m guessing the VC stands for Van Camp which indicates to me it is a company owned reefer. Why would Van Camp need to own a reefer?
I checked the historical car reporting marks website and VCIX was assigned to Van Camps back in 1935 and is still valid for use by Van Camps along with 3 other reporting marks.
I don’t know how Van Camps operated but I know Campbell’s in Napoleon received raw materials to make soup in various kinds of cars so I would assume Van Camps would also.
So what you are telling me is this car might be used to bring fruits and vegetables to the cannery cooled by the ice bunkers. I think I’ve read that reefers could be used as boxcars without icing them as needed. At least that’s what I’ve read about the REA reefers.
One possible explanation is that before the invention of insulated boxcars, temperature sensitive products still needed protection from temperature extremes. Reefers were insulated and in the summer often ran in ventilated service with the hatches open, un-iced, but carrying things like potatoes, beer and – just maybe – canned foods that would spoil (or have their shelf life shortened) if they got too hot. In winter closing up the car would keep out extremes of cold far better than a boxcar could.
I suppose another possible use was to ship refrigerated produce TO Van Camps for canning. I suspect they had a cold storage warehouse.
Still a third explanation is that the reefers were used to ship the pork that Van Camps needed.
And even if that Van Camp’s reefer rarely hauled Van Camp’s own products or raw materials, if they owned it or leased it it was making money for them, with the “traveling billboard” advertisement being a nice bonus.
By the way one of Jeff Wilson’s Industries Beside the Tracks books has a chapter on railroads, the canning business, and the rolling stock that served it.
Vegetables would need to be refrigerated going into the plant and in the winter “canned” goods in glass jars would need to be kept warm to prevent freezing.
I wish I could tell you but it was probably a either a flea market find or from my LHS second hand shelf. Turning it over doesn’t give me a clue. Having built lots of Athearn and Roundhouse kits early on and more recently Accurail, its not one of them. I’ve also accumulated lots of Atlas RTR and it doesn’t look like that either. Just don’t know.
EDIT: Out of curiosity I went out to ebay and found this for sale:
It’s a Van Camp milk reefer. It’s looks to be the same style as my reefer. My research hadn’t indicated the were ever in the dairy business but a few more google searches indicates they were in the early 20th century.
Searched a little more on ebay and found another one that indicates it is a Walthers kit built car.
Just to add, since there’s always been some confusion about “billboard” reefers…
The “billboard” name was because early versions of privately owned reefers were painted with large letters and slogans of the owner’s products - like a rolling advertising billboard. It was NOT a situation where a company paid a railroad or someone else to paint advertising on a regular freight car.
If it’s correct that VCIX reporting marks indicates the car was owned (or more likely, leased) by Van Camps, it would only be used to haul their products. A railroad could not put anything else in the car. The company that owned or leased the car wouldn’t allow it, and other companies would not want to use it anyway. There’s no way Oscar Mayer would allow it’s products to be loaded into a Swift or Cudahy reefer and then pay a railroad to haul their competitor’s rolling advertisement across the country. That meant railroads often had to haul empty cars back to their owner, meaning the railroad got less money than they would have earned hauling a full car.
That’s a large part of the reason billboard reefers were effectively outlawed in the 1930’s. It gets kinda complicated, but basically if you wanted to use lettering over a certain size on your car, you had to either have something to load into the car and send it back to where it started, or pay to have the empty car shipped back to the starting poing at the higher loaded-car rate. However, cars with smaller lettering had to be accepted by other companies if the car was not specifically in some sort of captive or limited service.
f course, this didn’t apply to railroad owned cars, and about the time the billboard reefers were outlawed railroads began changing their freight cars to have larger lettering, slogans, and graphics.
Also depends on what you mean by “billboard reefer.”
A car with advertising on the side of it was not banned per se. Meat packing plants, chemical companies and other private owners continued to put product names and slogans on their cars to this day. Think Tropicana orange juice train.
Or a chemical car:
What was banned was the use of advertising on railroad owned cars.
If the reporting marks are a private owner then the car could be owned by or leased by the company whose advertising is on the car. If the reporting marks are private and owned/leased by the company doing the advertising then it could be valid :
If its railroad owned/controlled reporting marks or reporting marks not owned by the company advertising stuff, then its probably not valid.
That seems a good enough reason to keep my billboard reefers. Two of them are Swift meat reefers although they are red with white lettering, not like the exampl
I think the reason billboard reefers may have been outlawed is that companies didn’t want competitors products carried in their cars Think Miller Beer in Budweiser car. But if Budweiser owned the car it would only carry Bud products. This of course restricts where the car goes and what it used for.
