Photo: SFRD 8026 (Rr-39)

A photo courtesy of Tim O’Connor, taken in 1957 at St. Louis.

SFRD 8026 is one of 170 cars (Series 7900-8069) rebuilt in 1945 from former Rr-2, -3 and -4 reefers. These earlier cars, built between 1924-26, originally number 3,500 cars.

The Class Rr-39 car were very similar to the Rr-40 cars.

There were still 165 Rr-39 cars in service by 1959, but the numbers tailed off rapidly to 93 in 1963, 59 in 1968 and only five in 1973, the same year the ICC permitted discontinuance of bunker icing for refrigerator cars. The railroads no longer were required to re-ice reefers in transit on their lines. This meant that large reefer fleet operators such as PFE and Santa Fe no longer could rely on other railroads to re-ice interchanged reefers.

Several spotting features for this particular car. Notice the reverse-opening hatch covers, still in use eight years after Santa Fe introduced mechanical icing machines on its icing platforms. There is a good photo on Page 150 of the Santa Fe ice bunker refrigerator car book showing cars with reverse-opening hatching being iced by a mechanical icing machine. The photo illustrates why Santa Fe started (but never completed) converting these hatch openings to the more common inboard opening-opening hatch covers. I’ve seen number of photos of retired SFRD reefers in the post-1959 large circle paint scheme that still had reverse-opening hatch covers.

The car still has a high-mounted placard board, three years after the AAR Car Construction Committee recommendation to lower these. And the car has Preco fan equipment.

Bob Chaparro

Moderator

Railroad Citrus Industry Modeling Group

https://groups.io/g/RailroadCitrusIndustryModelingGroup