Andy and all:

Could you give me a few line synopsis of how the Bohn
ventilators worked? Were they in place of standard
ice hatches. Did they function as ice hatches and
ventilators?

Thanks,

Mike Aufderheide
Chicago

--- Andy Sperandeo <asperandeo@...> wrote:

Hi Dean,

Those Bohn ventilators were distinctive, but the
cars that had them were ordinary type RS ice-bunker
reefers. The ventilators could be used with any type
of load according to the shipper's preference and
the weather - potatoes were one type of produce
often shipped under ventilation rather than
refrigeration.

The last Santa Fe reefers built with Bohn
ventilators, however, were the 2,500 cars of class
Rr-W delivered in 1920. As accurately modeled in the
Westerfield kit, these indeed had not truss rods but
heavy-duty fishbelly underframes of USRA design.
Later USRA-design Santa Fe reefers had the same
underframes but more conventional hatch covers.

Cars with Bohn ventilators remained in service into
the 1930s, but in 1936 the Santa Fe geared up an
ambitious program to rebuild all of its USRA-design
wood-bodied reefers as all-steel cars on the
original underframes. The result was the prototype
for the InterMountain HO and N scale models.

Four hundred Rr-Ws were rebuilt into class Rr-19
steel reefers in the first year of the program, and
after that their numbers decreased rapidly.
According to the Santa Fe society's reefer book by
Jordan, Hendrickson, et al, the last Rr-W was
rebuilt as an all-steel car in 1945.

So long,

Andy

Andy Sperandeo
Executive Editor
MODEL RAILROADER Magazine
262-796-8776, ext. 461
Fax 262-796-1142
asperandeo@...



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