Icing Stations

If a car was to be iced, it frequently began its day at the ice house getting iced up. Six men working as a team could ice a car in 90 seconds. 300 pound blocks of ice would be moved along skids and men with sharp pronged forks called bi-dents knew how to hit the blocks to break them into chucks with great rapidity.

Once cool and loaded with the initial ice, the car was ready to go to the shipper.

After the car was loaded by the shipper it was returned to the icing platform for topping up. In the case of produce, it would be pre-cooled. Keith Jordan reports, "The purpose of precooling was to take the latent field heat out of the citrus. Typically the cars were precooled before shipping. I'm sure some cars were precooled when empty, but probably for spotting at packing houses which had precooling rooms, thus putting cool fruit in a cool car. Warm fruit in a cool car would only bring up the ambient temperature. Precooled loads used less ice enroute." In better equipped areas, a system of flexible ducts were connected to the reefer hatches and cold air was blown through the car, like modern air conditioning. This process took about 4 hours. White's book shows a portable truck mounted pre-cooling rig which could be taken to the packer. Santa Fe opened their pre-cooling plant in San Bernardino in 1910.

ATSF promo film, "At Your Service," dated 1947. It says, "This is our San Bernardino precooling plant. By blowing cold air into cars, temperatures are lowered even before the cars are spotted for loading."

In some cases this was not only filling the ice bunker, but also opening the door and blowing crushed ice over the top of the load. Such blown in ice would freeze together to form a nearly airtight seal around the product.

Iced reefers could usually operate for 24 hours between icings.

Icing machines came to the Santa Fe in 1949 and cut the icing time in half. A full 100 car reefer train could be reloaded and on its way in under an hour. Many docks had only one icing machine, but the more prominent stations on the Santa Fe had several.

The SFRD Rule book prescribes the amount of ice and salt to be added, as determined by the content of the car and the month of the year. For instance, Dressed poultry would receive 6000 lbs. of crushed ice with 10% salt in December, while butter would receive no ice at that time of year. Fresh fish would receive "chunk ice to capacity" regardless of the season.

Not all reefers required icing. If they were being used in ventilation or insulated car service, no ice was necessary. Portable charcoal heaters were installed in the bunkers of ice reefers as necessary to prevent freezing in very cold weather. After the 1940s, propane was the fuel for these units.

The SFRD rule book prescibes ventilation proceedures for various perishables at various temperatures. For instance, for Avacados or Tomatoes vents were to be open above 45 degrees and closed below that temperature. For Cocoanuts, Pineapples, Sweet Potatoes or Yams the magic number was 40 degrees. For Apples and Pears the vents were only open between 32 and 45 degrees; they were closed above and below those figures.

Of course mechanical reefers also required a different type of servicing. They could operate approximately 2 weeks on full fuel tanks.

It was difficult to maintain a constant temperature in an ice reefer. For produce, the ice was to protect but not freeze the product. Ice alone would not cool below 35 degrees. Meat required frozen temperatures produced by mixing salt with the ice, much like a home ice cream freezer. A mixture of 30 percent salt to 70 percent ice resulted in a temperature of -6 degrees, but this caused the ice to melt much faster requiring more frequent icing and producing highly corrosive saline liquids that destroyed steel underframes, trucks and wheels, bridges, rail, and turnouts. Later cars were required to have brine tanks to catch the melt, but enough leaked out to be a headache to the railroads.

Not all icing took place at icehouses. Express reefers and reefers serving small industries might be iced from a truck. A wooden ramp would be placed against the car and the ice hoisted up to the roof. Often the rope pulley was attached to the bumper of the delivery truck and the ice was hoisted to the roof as it backed up.

Since express reefers were not often pulled from a passenger train for icing, another method used by railroads was to build an icing platform on the roof of an old box car. Frank Ellington described the Shopton car as 'painted work service gray and carrying Santa Fe's "WK-" lettering, that car had a flat-deck platform fixed almost the complete length and width upon its roof.' This icing car would be taken to the ice dock and ice was placed on its roof. Then it was moved to the passenger depot and spotted on a track next to where the anticipated express reefer would stop. Once the passenger train was spotted, planks were place from the ice car to the roof of the express reefer and the ice transferred. This was dangerous work as engineers pulled out when they were ready, icing completed or not.

The Hobart Ice Plant (Los Angeles) was in full operation up until approximately February 1962, at which time the operation there was downsized. Operations at the San Bernardino ice plant were suspended in December, 1972. The plant, which was built in 1909, was torn down in September, 1973. The Newton, KS, Ice Plant was torn down in 1967.

The world largest refrigeration plant was PFE's Roseville, CA, plant. It could produce 1200 tons of ice a day and had a storage capacity for 52,000 tons. The icing decks could handle 254 cars at one time.

D. K. Spencer worked one summer at the Needles, AZ, icing facility and has posted a report.

For some photos from the 40s, go to the Library of Congress and search for "railroad ice." When you find a photo you like, click on the "Display neighboring images in the collection" to find more like it.