Which Reefers?

If you want quality there is only one way to go.
Westerfield
They give a little note on who ran them and where.

 

SlimJim gives good advice. Westerfield is an excellent resource and gives darned good history for the cars they build.

Additionally, there is a wealth of information on the internet, historical societies, etc. Here is but one Western Maryland forum I found. May be worth it to join the site and post a "query" thread into the reefers you are interested in.

Western Maryland discussion forum

 

Westerfield kits are nice, but not for $30.00 a kit!!

 

Santa Fe, PFE, NP, GN were seen all the way to the east coast loaded with west coast produce, so it would depend wether you want them as loads in or out on your layout. If you can find any online pics of the yards in New York, SFRE and PFE reefers show up in them quite a bit.

Intermountain does fairly good PFE and ATSF cars, plus a steel car that works for other roads, the Santa Fe cars look quite different, you'd need to get kits though to be able to model them with a mixture of open and closed hatches. IM also does RTR cars from a company called 'Pacific Freight Enterprises' who also does a nice PFE wood reefer.

Red Caboose does a nicely detailed wood reefer kit as well, and Accurail does a car that has it's usual standard of moulded on but fairly fine detail. Either of those can have the hatches built open from the kits.

If you are talking eastern, some of the eastern roads seemed to have their own equivalent of PFE, MDT appears to have been allied with the NYC for instance.

 

No real idea on that! It would seem silly to send them back empty though...

 

When the "Salad Bowl Express" reefers were unloaded in the eastern destinations, they were re-loaded and iced with fruits, corn, and other produce to be shipped out west. Very few were "dead headed" back to the west coast.

The Salad Bowl Express was one of the most exciting runs of the high speed trains back then! It was pulled by Challengers and Big Boys at speeds over 75 miles an hour with up around 100 cars with clearance over other freights, and a few passenger trains!

Check with Pentrex and get a copy of the VHS tape that takes you along on that trip! You will get a thrilling ride and a sense of what real railroading was like back in the steam days! It is well worth the money!

[ 05. January 2005, 19:42: Message edited by: watash ]

 

I bet whatever road you are modeling in the PA area there is a "Code" governing the operations. I did a "QUICK" check at the Pennsylvania RR Historical Society but didn't see one. However, I didn't spend much time.

However, it took me about 20 seconds to locate one on the Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Society website.

I have a couple of these books on other subjects and find them fascinating. As an example..........

El Linko to C&O offering on "perishable" goods transport

 

Alan, Take a look at Branchline cars too. They have some nice looking kits!

 

http://www.branchline-trains.com/

They have two lines of HO kits, the yardmaster ones are accurail standard cars, moulded on detail, but fairly well done. The others are to the same standard as Intermountain etc, separate parts for everything. Some good designs in the range. The passenger car may be of use to the AW as well...

 

Alan, your original post got me thinking and I did a little research. The following is a summary of some data from the January 1953 ORER.

There were 119,195 Bunker Refrigerator Cars (Type RS) in revenue service. There were operated under 77 different reporting marks. [I have summary of the different AAR Reporting Marks by car types on an excel spreadsheet if you are interested.]

Here are some of the listings:

Pacific Fruit Express Co. [PFE] had 38,526 RS cars which was about 32% of the total. General offices were in San Francisco and Chicago.

Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe [SFRD] had 14,517 RS cars which was about 12% of the total. General offices were in Topeka.

Fruit Growers Express Company [FGEX] had 9,865 RS cars which was about 8% of the total. This might be an interesting set of cars for you to feature because they were probably pretty prominent on eastern railroads. They also operated cars with FCEX, FDEX, FOBX, and FHIX reporting marks. General offices were in Washington DC.

American Refrigerator Transit Co. [ART] had 9,287 RS cars which was about 8% of the total. General offices were in St. Louis.

Merchants Dispatch Transportation Corp. [MDT] had 7,976 RS cars which was about 7% of the total. General offices were in Chicago.

Western Fruit Express Co [WFEX] had 5,192 RS cars which was about 4% of the total. General offices were in Washington DC [not sure why - I tend to think of these cars as more "western"].

Dropping down to RS cars that had Reporting Marks of operating railroads (instead of private car companies) the leaders are:

CN - 2285 or 2%
CP - 2105 or 2%
NP - 1200 or 1%
BAR 1189 or 1%
IC 689 or 1%


It seems that you would have several options to go with depending on the locations of the major shippers to your layout's consignees and the overall prevalence of reporting marks in use during the time you model.

Hope this helps some, and thanks for getting me started on this train of thought...

Charles