I’m planning to build my first layout based on a US prototype. It will probably be a switching layout intially. The MR special edition on 1950s railroading featured a citrus packing plant plus support industries. I’d like to know what happened at the end of the journey. Can anyone point me in the direction of plans and/or photos of a small town fruit and vegetable wholesaler that was rail connected? How did a small plains town take delivery of its cranberries at Christmas? Did the yellow reefers come to town, or was it less than carload in a boxcar by that stage? This could prove to be an excuse to run a wider varirty of reefers from different parts of the US, but even modellers’ license has its limits. What arrangements were made for the cleaning and return of the cars?
Most fruits and vegetables came from the West Coast, particularly California. Shipments in Reefers were sent to major cities. Besides standard reefers handled by priority freight trans, express reefers usually operated in passenger or express trains, usually for highly perishable fruit like strawberries and cherries, but sometimes for other fruits and vegetables if they were the first of the season when earlier arrival commanded higher prices
Shipments to small towns would be by truck or as a shipment in the express (baggage) car on a passenger train. So, if by rail the delivery would be at the depot where someone under contract with the Railway Express Agency would truck the shipment to the addressee if not picked up at the depot by the addressee. At certain major yards the reefers were cleaned with heated water using large (fireman-like) hoses.
I highly recommend Pacific Fruit Express from Signature Press for information on reefer operations. Also, The Ghost Trains of SP’s Overland Route from the Sou
There really weren’t any endpoints for reefers in small towns, unless they were being loaded there. Most endpoints for reefers were at large-ish cities (50,000+) at grocery wholesale terminals. From there, reefers were unloaded and the crates of produce were transloaded to trucks for final delivery.
Porbably the single best collection of photos online is at the Library of Congress’ American Journey photo colletion. Do a search routine for “South Water Street”, and dozens of 1940s-era color & B&W photos of the IC’s transloading facilities in Chicago will pop up, illustrating what these places would look like.
Mostly, the cranberries woulr be canned somewhere in New England and shipped by boxcar to grocery warehouses, which would truck in the cranberries. Fresh fruit in the fall, especially specialty fruit like cran, would only be found in major metropolitan areas.
In general, the only time you’d see a single reefer parked in a small town without a dedicated industry that would pack them on a regular basis, would be in instances where a certain crop was grown in small batches. Asparagus and white onions come to mind: a reefer would be set out in a town, the local farmers would load their crop, and the local would move the reefer to the next town. This sort of practice died with the increased use of trucks after WWII. I’ve really never heard of a reefer being staged to UNload produce in a small town, except for the wilds of Alaska and Minnesota.
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Both the CPR and the CNR shipped fruit out of the Niagara Peninsula in southern Ontario in ventilated baggage cars. The CNR used to drop empty cars at the various packing houses along the line, then later in the day they would run an extra to pick up the loaded cars for a quick run to Toronto. I think that most of the fruit went to the food terminals there, although some may have been shipped farther afield. Anybody out there shed some more light on this? These cars were older wooden baggage cars, 60’ or 70’ers, with various styles of ventilators cut into the upper part of the carbody sides. I have been searching, unsuccessfully, for some time for information on the construction details of the ventilators or a source of photos which show this area in some detail. I have general photos of the cars, but need more detailed information in order to build some credible models.
Wayne
Another possibilty for modelling reefer madness would be to model a yard with an icing facility. It was a long trip for those oranges from California going to Kansas City or Minneapolis or Chicago, across a lot of dry western territory, and they usually had to stop the cars at least once along the way to put fresh ice in them. A decent ‘model sized’ icing platform wouldn’t take up too much room, especially on a shelf type layout, since they were only servicing one or two tracks…in some yards, the platforms were long enough to service an entire reefer express train at the same time.
This is the Walthers retired N scale icing platform, I believe they made this in HO at one time also…
http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3245
Although…a Maine 2’ gauge line hauling cranberries to market would be interesting. [:D]
I second the suggestion for Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd Edition. It has almost all, if not all, of the answers in there.
There is an obvious west coast bias being presented in the asnwers that isn’t totaly accurate. Numerous blocks of oranges and grapefruit came north out of Florida. In more recent times ever hear of the Tropicana Orange Juice Train? Georgia sent cars full of onions north. The Delmarva peninsula sent numerous extras to the Campbell soup plant in Camden New hersey for soup making. Wisconsin is a potato and onion area and western Michigan is one of the biggest fruit areas for apples, cherries, peachs, grapes and pears. the mission peninsula north from Traverse City had a PRR branch that handled nothing but fruit in season. Yes the west coast namely the Imperial Valley is a year round supplier of vegetables and fruit but many areas of the country did also. With the exception of Florida the others were and are seasonal but they do exist and in large numbers. There was a very large shift in processing in the 50’s-70’s with more of it being done regionally and final products being shipped. this is also true of the meat industry which accounts for the drop in stock car usage but there was a corresponding increase in reefer usage to ship final products to market. Most of that is heartland produced so be careful in calling for west coast railroad names as the commonly seen cars. In the east we saw just about every car name imaginable.
One other thing. Nearly every major city had a produce terminal run by the railroad where transfer from railroad car to truck and/or end user occured. Major supermarkets had dedicated trucks that would take the produce from the railroad warehouse to either their warehouse or direct to the supermarkets. They still exist today. Greenwich yard in Philadelphia, as an example, has a huge facility for this spanning several large buildings that are probably well over 100,000 square feet or more each. From there the produce fans out probably in a 100 mile radius with the exception of toward New York which has its own facilities. For a small switching railroad you could model this industry one of two ways. The Tropicana cars are returned by whatever route feasable and come back in dribs and drabs. Solid consists are sent north blocked for various cities. Your yard could be the intermediate point on either the route out to the suppliers or the route back to a major industry or you could model a produce terminal as a flat against the backdrop with numerous stations to unload cars. you could also model a supermarket warehouse that recieves all kinds of cars with priority given to frozen and fresh produce. You would also get boxcars filled with everything else on supermarket shelves form soap to cereal. The Acme supermarket warehouse in North Philadelphia received over eighty cars per day and had its own four track yard. It was a block long building several stories high to house all the goods needed for the supermarkets. That is a great industry to model becasue products some in from literally all over the country. the PRR in Philly had three such supermarket warehouses within ten miles which added to the corridor traffic and logistics. Fun stuff!
Believe it or not, a lot of reefers came out of Maine during the frigid weeks during and after the potato harvest. They would have charcoal braziers in the ice bunkers to keep the tubers from freezing - sort of refrigeration in reverse.
Chuck
Thanks to all those who took the trouble to respond to my enquiry; I really appreciate the effort that you have all put into the replies. I have been monitoring the arrival of the posts, expecting to respond at the end. However, the end seems to be a moveable feast, so here goes.
From all the information you have provided, I can now see that my original notion to model a wholesalers depot isn’t really on in the space I’ll have available, and the scale in which I model. It may be preferable to pursue the idea of the icing facility and/or the maintenance and cleaning yard. I had admired Bob Smaus’s packing plant model, and it was only after my original post that I obtained the July MR, and I found the answer to the location of his icing plant; it isn’t in the immediate vicinity of the packing plant, and probably didn’t have to be.
I was pleased that two of you specifically recommended the “PFE” book, which I have now ordered. I had been waiting for someone to express an opinion. I shall be ordering some more books relating to freight car working in the near future. I was very interested to hear Wayne’s remarks about the movement of produce in Canada. The parallel to that here in England many years ago was when the brocolli harvest reached its peak, cattle wagons were scrubbed out and the boxes of veg sent up to London by express train.
The mention of the cranberries was not intended to be facecious, as I knew that the NE provided fruits in season, and the inevitable potatoes. Chuck’s remarks about heaters in reefers was news to me, but I was aware that goods susceptible to damage from low temperatures were also transported in this manner. NDBPRR’s information about practice in the Philadelphia area was of particular interest as it is the one corner of the USA that I know best. The info re the return working was fascinating; perhaps demurage cha
One book I have (currently sitting in a box somewhere in my new basement waiting to be unpacked after my recent move) is one called “The Great Yellow Fleet” which is a history of American refrigerator cars, how they were built, how they were used, etc. I believe it’s still available, if nothing else on ebay perhaps??
Several excellent points were made about what produce was shipped where…depending on where you live, your grapefruit could come from California, or Texas, or Florida.
It sounds like you’ve got some good ideas on limiting yourself to a prototypical spectrum of cars, rather than the ‘one of everything’ method so many of us fall into. I might add one thing - keep in mind very few reefers were owned by the railroads. Most were owned by private companies (usually car leasing companies affiliated with the railroads) such as Pacific Fruit Express, Western Fruit Express, Burlington Refrigerator Express, Union Transport Leasing Co., etc. Even though a WFE reefer had a Great Northern herald on it, it wasn’t technically owned by the Great Northern.
BTW - I did sneak in a little joke in my earlier comment…“Reefer Madness” was a movie made years ago warning (in an unintenionally hilarious way) the evils of drug addiction. A “reefer” can also refer to a non-tobacco weed that is legal to smoke in Amsterdam and a few other places but is generally not legal and frowned upon, as it causes giggling and a craving for oreo cookies…[:D][:-^][:-,]
I think, more to your interests might be a small scale produce market yard. A prime example was the Silver street yard in New Haven, CT behind the Union Station. A spur looped around behind the station a few blocks away and a small yard with spurs serviced the produce warehouses. Huge blocks of “reefers” came up from the Hudson River float transfers from New Jersey and over the Poughkeepsie bridge from Maybrook yard in New York. I have been buying “reefers” like crazy because it was such a big part of the New Haven’s revenue taffic. Because I don’t have the room to include that yard I am just designing the spur to disappear behind some buildings and go down to a hidden two track staging loop under the table. Also, there was a spur from the Water Street Yard to a large hog slaughter house that made ham and sausages on the riverfront that received hog “cattle” cars. Hard to duplicate that aroma though.
Dont worry about the reefer mania.
I built a A&P Cold Storage that will handle just about anything chilled.
Most of the others have already responded but I’ll toss in the fact that it would take 8-12 days to get a reefer cleaned, iced, loaded and transported to the other side.
Some cities had barges with reefers on them to unload direct to the customers.
Other cities had very large areas where tracks were double spurs with pads for trucks.
Food complexes are very large in space you can model a section of it and still justify large groups of tracks.
Icing is one good way to get reefers to and from both ends without actually modeling the end users or loaders.
Does the great yellow fleet cover fruit growers express reefers also? I’m looking for info on fge 40 foot plug door cars. thanks for input
Sounds like a song from my youth, “Where did all the reefers go? Long time passing…”.
Ndbprr, we are all in danger of giving away our ages here. I have to admit that once the question was framed the song came to mind. I remember Peter Paul & Mary singing this Pete Seeger song, but not particularly fondly, as folk wasn’t my thing. Marlene Dietrich’s version was, shall I say, far more attractive; I don’t think model railroaders are supposed to know what s**y is. Afterall, we are all reputed to be nerds or such like! Could be we have all been within inhaling distance of that other reefer stock!!
Thanks to you all for the additional posts. I recalled another layout, featured in Great Model Railroads 2005 that inspires me. Blair Kooistra managed to accommodate a number of interdependent industries in a layout that looks compact and interesting to operate. Such a set-up offers some scope for architectural modelling which I enjoy. I shall employ as many tricks as I can to create the illusion that there is more to the layout than first meets the eye. I suppose I first put that into practice in the garden. All this is in addition to the ultimate aim of building a layout based on a British branchline. I feel a bigger house is in the air!
And as I recently read a remark to the effect “that we all model the Pennsylvania Railroad”, I have two B60b baggage cars on order. That should please NDBPRR.
Regards, Ed
“The Great Yellow Fleet” by John W. White is a good overview of all reefer operations. Unfortunately it looks to be out of print and a bit pricey to find right now. [:(]
Contrary to what most have said - As a small boy I remember individual reefers, usually West Indies Fruit cars, in the small Reading yard in Shippensburg, PA. Probably loaded with bananas. Also the neighboring town or Chambersburg had a Heinz plant which was loaded with various reefers. I guess they brought in vegetables and fruits and shipped out finished products. I know at one time they did bottle ketchup and other tomato products at this Heinz plant.
Bob Bufkin
I’m sure before the interstate highways made it easier for truckers, it wouldn’t be uncommon for one or two reefers to be set out at a food wholesaler or even a team track. Even one 40’ car full of apples or bananas would have a lot of fruit in it !!