Dear Group...

   While looking through the October, 1950 issue of Railroad Magazine, I came across this article on page 64 that I thought the Group might like:


                                             Ice Packs For Reefer Headaches

  At Santa Fe's Bakersfield icing yard, which serves a large part of the vast vegetable growing area of the San Joaquin Valley, the railroad has met the problem of icing whole trains of refrigerator cars by developing, in conjunction with the Railways Ice Company, a specially designed machine capable of
supplying as many as 660 reefers in one day with five to six tons of ice each.

  Like a giant crab the electronically controlled icer shuttles back and forth on a 12-foot wide track running the length of a 1200-foot icing dock at just a little above reefer-top level. Between the two standard railway tracks runs a cleated chain conveyor bringing 300-pound ice blocks from the ice plant and delivering them to the machine. In a matter of moments the big block of ice are whisked up the icer's inclined conveyor to be ground to a cold, slushy mass or smashed into small chunks, depending on the refrigeration requirements of a commodity in a particular reefer. The machine can ice one car in 90 seconds, and move 300 feet a minute icing reefers on both sides of the dock.

  Power for the icer's six electric motors and for the high frequency current for its push-button controls comes from a 440-volt trolley wire which passes beneath the dock.
A two-way FM radio connects the machine's operator with the office of the ice-plant superintendent, A. V. Whitefield, who can also see what is going on through an old-fashioned, non-electronic window.


  Here's my question: When was this "beast" last used?

  Steve Vallee




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