What ever happened to Santa Fe’s reefer division, Santa Fe Refrigerator Dispatch (SFRD)? Did SFRD last up to the merger with BNSF, which was the case with BN’s BNFE, or did ATSF do away with it at some point? The newest pictures of ATSF mech reefers marked SFRC I found on rr-fallenflags.org were taken in the mid 80s, most of which were painted orange. BNFE mech reefers, some of which date back to BN’s predecessors, can be found on BNSF’s roster, not so sure about former ATSF reefers?
It went away before the merger. the surviving cars (at least a lot of them…orange and blue/black) wound up on SLC and are still around)
I can’t tell you about the corporate existence of Santa Fe Refrigerator Despatch, or when it may have ended, but Santa Fe reefers, under any of their reporting marks (SFRA, SFRB, SFRC, SFRD, SFRE, SFRF, SFRM, or SFRP), did not survive to the BNSF merger–they were all retired many years prior, and most of them, including their newest mechanical reefers, were scrapped. San Luis Central got a few.
September 1987, during the height of the harvest season, on several consecutive afternoons I saw a Tidewater & Southern crew (U.P. actually) pull a series of heavy interchange cuts from the Modesto & Empire Traction Co. at Modesto, Calif. Mostly they were insulated boxcars of canned food products, but there were also a fair number of UPFE mechanical reefers, fired-up and under load. Commenting that I didn’t see any refrigerated trailers, the conductor on the transfer job told me that the Santa Fe handled that segment of the business at their interchange and piggyback ramp located at the east end of the M.& E.T., in Empire, Calif.
I seem to remember reading either in the trade press or in Trains Magazine where the Santa Fe Railway decided, in the mid '70s or early '80s, to focus exclusively on moving perisables in refrigerated trailer service rather than with mechanical reefers. They probably did this for two principal reasons:
- to supplement their already heavy commitment to the piggyback concept and
- to achieve better equipment utilization wherein each trailer might move dry freight westward and refrigerated perishables eastward from the California and Arizona markets.
A book put out by the SF Historical Society on SFRD states the final four reefers on the property were retired in 1988. Back in 1962 & 1964 the SF rebuilt several small size reefers into flour loading boxcars. The cars were painted brown and leased to Wichita Flour Mills Company and Kansas Milling Company both located in Wichita, KS. I remember seeing these cars back 40 yrs ago @ Wichita. They were retired in 1972 as both mills did not like the cars due to their small size.