I searched but didn’t get any hits on this, so forgive me if this is an old topic. I have a couple of questions regarding pre-mechanical reefer operations.
Were the cars iced before or after they were loaded with the cargo?
Once delivered to the receiving spur and unloaded, where were the bunkers drained? Were they left until they were iced again, were they drained along the ROW enroute to the next customer, or was there a drainage facility in the yard somewhere?
Thanks,
Jim
From what I’ve read, most cars were pre-iced before being delivered for loading. Depending on the commodity, weather, and distance to be travelled, they might also be re-iced at some point in the journey. Most ice reefers had drains near the corners of the car, and the melt water simply dropped onto the right-of-way.
On the Tichy car shown below, the drain scuppers can be seen just above the outboard wheels of the trucks.
I doubt that the ice would be removed once the car had been unloaded. If the car was to be re-loaded with cargo requiring cooling, it would, of course, be re-iced, but many reefers returned home either empty or hauling clean cargo which didn’t require icing.
Wayne
Jim,
Reefers were cleaned and the bunkers were loaded with ice before loading the cargo. They usually were allowed to sit(pre-cool) to get to the desired temp. You need to think of them as a fixed temperature containers that moved. The railroad was selling a fixed temperature service.
Depending on the type of shipment, there could be different types of icing:
Fresh Produce - many times blocks of ice were put in the bunkers and the fresh produce was laid on a bed of lettuce and then covered with a bed of crushed ice . Cooling fans in the car moved the air and they could keep a very constant temperature.
Meat/Frozen Goods - Special bunkers with ‘brine tanks’ held a mixture of crushed/chunk ice and salt. This produce a very cold temperature in the car.
Re-Icing enroute was done on a regular basis. There were tables that gave the hours in any temperature range that could be covered before re-icing was needed. In winter time, charcoal heaters would be needed to keep some produce(potatoes) from freezing.
Operation on a model railroad can be very interesting when you need to factor in pre-icing the car, moving it to the loading dock and expiditing it to the shipper. I think most modelers think about those long lines of PFE reefers moving California produce east. But meat from packing houses, apples/cherries from the Pacific NW, and bananas moving north on the IC are examples of big time reefer operations.
Jim Bernier
OK, I see that iced reefers would likely drain the melt enroute and might have to be replenished along the way. My original question of draining the bunkers was in relation to the brine cars. I assume that they did not drain during movement, but would have to be drained and reloaded at some point. Where was this done? Were they drained after delivery or when they were required for a new load? The reason for all of this is I am looking at three customer spurs. Two are wholesale grocery warehouses and one is a wholesale meat warehouse. They would receive reefers, unload them into their coolers, and return the empty reefers. I am wondering what the servicing railroad would do with the empty reefers? In this scenario, the cars would most likely be returned to the originating road, rather than being filled locally and sent elsewhere.
I can’t speak about regular meat reefers, but both the CNR and CPR ran overhead bunker reefers using brine (ice/salt) for cooling. The melt water was collected in floor gutters and later drained at icing stations. This was supposedly in accordance with 1923 ARA (later AAR) interchange rules, and likely applied also to brine-cooled end-bunker cars.
I built a model of one of the early CNR cars by modifiying an Athearn end-bunker reefer:
Wayne
Hello Jim,
I’m afraid it wasn’t as simple as some of the answers given here have implied. Books published about Santa Fe and Pacific Fruit Express refrigerator service, and a 1941 Santa Fe circular on handling perishable freight, all show that the service was customized to a high degree to suit the shippers’ needs.
For produce service, shippers could order empty cars dry (no ice) or pre-iced, with the bunkers full. The produce was usually pre-cooled to save on en-route icing requirements, but that could be done in any of several ways. One was for the packinghouse to hold the produce in cold storage before loading, so the packer’s refrigeration plant could remove the field heat from the perishables.
Or the packinghouse could precool the load in the car, by blowing cold air through ducts fitted over the ice hatches. This could be done at the packer’s own refrigeration plant, or by trucks fitted with ducts and refrigeration units that would drive up next to the car.
Or the shipper could have the railroad precool the produce in the loaded cars. The Santa Fe and Pacific Fruit Express both operated large precooler/icing plants in Southern California for this purpose, in San Bernardino and Colton, respectively.
After precooling, t