Would meat wholesalers with warehouse facilities receive private owner reefers such as from Armour and Swift or would they always be sent to their “namesake” wholesalers? Where would meat reefers from ART, URTX, etc. be sent?
How about reefers with perishables, such as PFE, FGEX, etc.? Would they be sent to fruit and vegetable wholesalers a good distance from their point of origin?
I want to utilize these cars in a prototypical manner on my layout.
Well, according to “Livestock and Meatpacking” by Jeff Wilson (Kalmbach, 2013):
“There was a big difference in how reefers in meat service were handled. Unlike cars hauling fruit and vegtables, meat cars remained in dedicated service to specific packing companies. For example, a car leased to Swift would never be found at a Armour packing plant or branch house”
There’s a chart in the book on Page 34, which covers lease fleets - for example, Union Refrigerator Transit (URTX) would lease to companies like Hormel, Iowa Beef Packers (which according to the book introduced new business practices which helped kill the older union stockyard system), Oscar Mayer, etc. Looks like the reefers had the Leasee’s name promiment on the car (e.g. “Hormel”), with the reporting marks of the leasing company. The book doesn’t seem to state if by the 1960s various such meat reefers were spotted at Supermarket distribution centers as needed for unloading, but it does say by the early 1970s most transport of beef was over the road, so any remaining meat flows going by rail would be TOFC.
Would meat wholesalers with warehouse facilities receive private owner reefers such as from Armour and Swift or would they always be sent to their “namesake” wholesalers? Where would meat reefers from ART, URTX, etc. be sent?
Actually the private owner reefers would be spotted at wholesalers that order there mets-remember(say) Armor didn’t have a a plant or company owned distributor in Columbus(Oh) but,you could still buy their meats in Columbus.Same applies for other reefers carrying meat products.
How about reefers with perishables, such as PFE, FGEX, etc.? Would they be sent to fruit and vegetable wholesalers a good distance from their point of origin?
Yes…PFE ,FGX,Santa Fe reefers was seen in every state of the union…How else would California produce end up in in stores across the nation?
Remember back in the day there was no interstate highways and 80% of the goods traveled by rail.
Even today you will see modern reefers hauling produce and meat products.
Reefers from various lines could often be found in use a VERY long way from their points of origin. Here’s an example. Two of the primary cargos that The Bangor & Aroostook carried were potatos & peas. Both were major crops in Aroostook County back during the transition era. Peas were harvested in late spring/early summer and transported south by the BAR. Potato harvest was in late September/early October. But, in high Summer, the BAR’s need for reefers slacked off & many sat idle. So, in 1950 the BAR worked out a lease/loan deal with Pacific Fruit Express, which was in dire need of more reefers during the summer months. They transported California crops year round. As a result, it was not unusual to see Union Pacific & Southern Pacific trains hauling long strings of red, white & blue BAR reefers in the southwest, mid-west, up & down the Pacific coast and all across the country. (That was what brought the BAR’s famed reefers such nationwide recognition.)
To reciprocate, PFE leased/loaned PFE reefers to the BAR, as needed, during peak harvest times in Northern Maine. One of my reference books on the BAR shows some photo’s taken in the early 50’s showing BAR trains hauling long strings of PFE reefers up through the north woods of Maine. You can’t get much farther from their point of origin than that.
It proved to be a very lucrative & successful deal for both railroads.
And a lot of them up here in the Great White North, too. Our orange-, grapefruit-, and banana-growing regions are fairly limited due to the climate. [swg]
around the time of the PC merger in 1968 the fresh meat business was about gone from our lines out of E St Louis. as i remember, Royal Packing still shipped hanging beef east at that time and there was a good bit of Kosher beef out of St Joseph Mo for New York that came to us in reefer trailers via the MOPAC. at that time we could still do 21 hours ramp to ramp (ESTL to North Bergen or Kearny) so that traffic stayed kosher.
we were still getting 50 car cuts of perishables off the Cotton Belt nightly via the TRRA. most of the SSW stuff went east on the head end of trains NY-6 and SW-6. there were several common destinations but i distinctly remember, Phila. Produce Terminal and Baltimore traffic on the SW-6 for Enola (harrisburg pa).
Boston and Hunts Point (new york city) were a couple of the common destinations on the “green side” that went on the head end of the Selkirk block of NY-6
other than the Royal Packing business, the only thing close to meat products going out from the local packers would be a tank car of lard now and then from Hunter in ESTL and every few months they would ship a mechanical reefer load of hog pancreases to Lilly in Indianapolis for insulin production. the trucks had just about all the fresh and frozen meat business by then.
as a side note, this was about the time that MDT was winding down it’s refrigerator car mantenance and repair operations out at Mitchell Illinois. demand for the little ice reefers was quickly dying out. MP was converting former reefers to box cars for flour loading over at the ART shops in St Louis.
having spent over 30 years in the food distribution industry it was common practice to see private owner reefers at all of the wholesalers. Swift, Armour, Berks, Hatfield etc would be seen at other packers. It was common for many of these companies to pack product for the others, not always under their Name but under a generic name, ( what is known in the industry as a Packer Label. Also, produce would commonly travel across the country. I saw many west coast reefers sitting on a siding in New Jersey, and other East coast facilities that we owned.
Your layout and cars look great. I do not think I have ever seen a so so photo on here of your layout or equipment . Also the photo composition is excellent as well.
As an “industry,” one of the interesting things you can do with ice-bunker reefers from the Transition Era and earlier is to provide an icing platform. Not only is the facility itself a nice scenic element, but there’s a lot of operational action with pre-icing (prior to loading,) top-icing (after loading) and even in-transit icing which is one of the few things you can do with through freights. Even if you don’t have a brewery, fruit warehouse or packing plant, you can still justify pulling your beer, PFE or meat reefers into an icing station for service. I’ve even got some Railway Express ice-bunker reefers that travel as head-end cars on my passenger trains.
Here, ice is being added to a car destined for the Strumpet Brewery across town. This is the Walthers icing platform and ice house. J.L.Innovative also makes one, and probably others.
Digital cameras make it pretty easy to get a useable picture, and if the first one isn’t, another attempt is just a click away.
They also allow pictures in areas where normal in-person viewing would be impossible, and I’ve been able to get some “interesting” views on my around-the-room-style layout by placing the camera on the layout, aiming it towards the aisle.
This one goes a long way to explaining why there are so few LPBs on my layout [swg]:
Here’s a more conventional view (minus the cobwebs) of the same area, but looking more-or-less in the opposite direction:
This ice house has only a small platform for icing the occasional car, as its main function is as a storage facility for ice cut from the nearby lake, which is then shipped to other ice houses on the layout. Most of those are commercial outlets selling ice to businesses and homes, as I’m modelling the '30s when many homes, especially in rural areas, still had iceboxes. This facility itself deals directly to the public, too, with a fleet of delivery trucks and wagons working from this office and loading dock (partially hidden by the bus):
The local ice houses are much smaller, with an unloading platform trackside for inbound ice, and another on the opposite side for loading onto delivery trucks or wagons. Each one holds about a half-carload of ice:
In Toledo both Swift and Armour warehouses were on the same spur on the south edge of downtown and were serviced by the NKP from their ex-Cloverleaf yard at South Street and the Anthony Wayne Trail.
The Campbell’s Soup Plant in Napoleon, OH received many car loads of vegetables by reefer from California in the making of soup and V8 juice.
The statement, “That was what brought the BAR’s famed reefers such nationwide recognition” needs clarification. The author is talking about the red, white and blue BAR reefers.
The BAR reefers used by PFE were the 7000-7856 series Type RS reefers. Sometimes the model manufactures offer BAR reefers in the red-white-blue “State of Maine” scheme and these would look striking in an otherwise all-PFE orange reefer block.
Use them if you want to but they are not prototypical. You may see photos of BAR cars in the red-white-blue “State of Maine” scheme that appear to be reefers but they are plug-door insulated boxcars (Type RB, I believe). The reefers leased to PFE (7000-7856 series) had yellow sides and ends.
The BAR did not buy their first reefer until 1951. The first series 338
strong in 1/1953, #6000-6999, were ex-MDT reefers and were painted yellow with black ends. The second series were the #7000-7856 which were built by Pacific Car & Foundry - 500 in 1951-52 and another 357 in 1953. These had yellow sides and ends. The 7000’s were the ones rented to PFE during the summer - the off-season for Aroostook County spuds.
Eric Neubauer says “a few specially rebuilt reefers had the State of Maine Potatoes scheme, so I’ll take his word for it. But I’ve never seen one. The 1953 ORER does not list them so evidently they only lasted a few years.”
In my late-'30s modelling era, most freight cars were boxcar red or black, so I have fairly extensive (some might say too extensive) roster of reefers to brighten-up things a bit. This includes a couple dozen “foreign” road cars, and almost as many “home-road” ones, too.
In addition to seeing them at the icehouses shown previously, the layout will eventually have a couple of grocer’s warehouses and at least one fruit-packing plant, and a couple of food processing industries.
If your layout space, like mine, is limited, you can still have reefers on the layout as run-through cars coming from somewhere else, on their way to another “somewhere else”.
Here’s one of the grocer’s warehouses:
A home-road car at one of the processor’s plants:
…and a string of re-built home-road cars about to be spotted at National Grocers:
The area of southern Ontario in which I live was (and to some extent still is) a prime agricultural area for fruit growing, and the CNR, in the harvesting season, would run solid blocks of fruit cars from here to Toronto, a distance of less than 80 miles. These cars were, however, not usually reefers, but older wooden baggage cars, modified with ventilators. (I’ve been searching for years for good photos showing the construction of the ventilators, as I’d like to build some models of those cars.)
The point is, depending on your modelling era and location, you may be able to prototypically justify short-haul reefer traffic.
Otherwise, if you like reefers, just run 'em anyways. [swg]
I can approach this only from the PFE and SFRD perspective.
In general if you would like to have foreign reefers mixed in with your PFE fleet operating in PFE territory, then reefers from ART, BAR, FGE, MDT would be appropriate at some point after about 1930. PFE arranged to use reefers from these companies in times of shortages, and PFE supplied cars to these other companies when possible. There were no such arrangements to use Santa Fe’s SFRD cars.
Overall, once east bound PFE and SFRD reefers left their home rails they were somewhat likely to be mixed in with other reefers heading to the same destinations in expedited trains.
Trains headed westbound often were expedited blocks of empty PFE (on the SP or UP) or SFRD (on the Santa Fe) reefers heading back for seasonal rushes. General merchandise trains also carried empties but sometimes the PFE and SFRD refers carried cargo.
Tony Thompson stated “The statistics I found for PFE indicated that in the late 1940s and early 1950s a little less than 10 percent of westbound PFE cars were loaded. At that time there were virtually no insulated box cars, so these loads were cargoes that needed insulation, not refrigeration. But no one should think that there were ZERO westbound loads, just not many.”
As for Santa Fe, in non-peak times Santa Fe was not eager to run their produce reefers back home empty unless they were in great demand for another trip east. In the less busy periods, common dry loads headed west would include newspapers and magazines from East Coast publishers, tires, furniture, various clean items, such as canned goods, candy and boxed items, or LCL shipments from companies like the mail order houses in Chicago or Kansas City.
Santa Fe developed the Mahoney transload facility at their Argentine Yard in Kansas City. Box cars of LCL goods were brought to Mahoney where they were transloaded into reefers for various western destinations.
