Getting Real Column - 9
15: An illustration
of loading orange
crates into a PFE car,
using a hand truck.
Note that crates are
not loaded to full car
height, to assist air
circulation, and that
crate dimensions
permit stacking so
that no crosswise
dunnage is needed.
Standard interior
dimensions of PFE
cars were vital to
shippers. – “Dick”
Whittington photo
for PFE, courtesy
CSRM.
15
artificial ice plant in the world in its day. In a number of places
where mainline trains were iced in transit, such as Roseville
and Ogden, PFE operated 110-car island decks, meaning a 110-
car train could be spotted on each side of the deck for icing.
Even a 20-car deck, fairly small in PFE terms, would be 880 feet
long, or more than 10 feet long in HO scale, pretty large for
most layouts.
Luckily for modelers, there were much smaller and more
numerous icing facilities, called Ice Transfer Plants or ITP,
where PFE did not manufacture ice. This might mean that a
commercial ice company made the ice, Union Ice Company is
an example throughout much of California. This might mean
that the facility had only an ice storage house, and ice had to
be brought in, usually by rail.
16: This packing
box label features
an attractive young
woman. Masculine-
oriented themes
were commonplace
on packing labels.
This actual Phelan &
Taylor label has been
modified for a packing
house on my layout at
Shumala. – Author’s
collection.
16
At an ITP using commercial ice, the ice deck part of the plant
might be owned and manned by employees of the commer-
cial ice company; it might be built and maintained by PFE but
manned by the local ice company; or in some cases, PFE both
built the deck and employed the deck workers, while using
commercial ice. There were also ITP facilities entirely owned by
PFE, such as Watsonville Junction, where ice was brought-in to
an ice storage house.
The icing process normally utilized large ice blocks, the PFE
standard being 300-pound. But these were not dropped
directly into ice bunkers. Instead, they were split into quarters
and then chopped to final size by workers on the deck. There
were three final sizes specified in the tariff: chunk, coarse, and
crushed. For reefer icing, these sizes had the following defini-
tions. Chunk ice was defined as not more than 75 pounds per
piece (a quarter of a standard block), coarse ice was 10 to 20
pounds, about the size of a melon, and crushed ice meant
pieces the size of a man’s fist. Shippers would choose the ice
size they wanted.
MRH-Sep 2013
