Somewhere I read that the Southern Pacific had reefers on its roster
lettered for the SP and not PFE. As the story goes, these cars were
acquired from the El Paso & Southwestern in the 1920s.

Does anyone know more about:
What service these cars typically saw?
Were they in captive service?
What was the disposition of the cars?

I didn't find anything in the index of the PFE book.

Thanks.

Bob Chaparro
Moderator
Citrus Industry Modeling Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/citrusmodeling/

Bob Chaparro wrote:

Somewhere I read that the Southern Pacific had reefers on its roster lettered for the SP and not PFE. As the story goes, these cars were acquired from the El Paso & Southwestern in the 1920s.

Yes, indeed. One place you might have read this is in my Vol. 4 on SP box cars (includes ventilated cars and refrigerators).

Does anyone know more about:
What service these cars typically saw?
Were they in captive service?
What was the disposition of the cars?

They were used in on-line company service exclusively and were NOT in revenue service; SP was of course provided with any revenue reefers by PFE. They can be seen in ORER issues to have slowly faded away until about 1960. All were scrapped AFAIK.

I didn't find anything in the index of the PFE book.

Logical, since they were not connected in any way to PFE.

Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, thompson@...
Publishers of books on railroad history