Fruit Growers' Western branch

Fruit Growers Express (FGE) was a very large refrigerator car owner, serving  most railroad in the Southeast and beyond, including, for example the Pennsylvania. Also included in the “family,” as they were wont to call it, were two of the Hill lines: the Great Northern and the CB&Q. The Northern Pacific, notably, did not join. 

The two Hill lines members of FGE kept their own reporting marks (Western Fruit Express in the case of the GN, Burlington Refrigerator Express in the case of the CB&Q), and their cars retained the normal railroad emblems. Those cars were part of the FGE fleet for operating purposes, but they continued to be owned by the two railroads, not by FGE, as was the case for the rest of the fleet.

An example of these cars is this builder photo from American Car & Foundry in 1948, of a string of new WFEX cars (Richard Hendrickson collection). The lettering style is indeed that of FGE, but the cars are not labeled as FGEX, but instead are Western Fruit Express, WFEX.

The FGE fleet was essentially operated as a single unit when cars were in demand, in other words, any kind of car could be loaded anywhere, but when empty cars were in surplus, the late Bill Welch told me that GN and CB&Q cars were sent home.

I’ve always found these “Western branch” cars interesting, and yard photos on the SP and UP do show them in many cases, validating their frequent presence in the West. Accordingly, I have acquired models of several of them. Probably my favorite is a model of a WFEX car built by Bill Welch himself and passed on to me, complete with correct FGE hatch rest bars. 

Burlington’s cars were essentially the same pattern as the WFEX cars, using the FGE lettering characters but with a CB&Q emblem. Here is a Accurail model of one. 

One interesting variation in the pattern is that the CB&Q had subsidiaries (for example, the Fort Worth & Denver City — “City” was dropped in 1951), and the Colorado  & Southern, acquired in 1908. Both continued to be operated under those names. Refrigerator cars were operated by both; the C&S had 143 reefers under the CX mark in 1953, while the FW&D had 59 cars lettered FWDX.

I have an ancient Silver Streak reefer lettered CX, an assembled car I obtained at a swap meet years ago. Like many early Silver Streak models, it is about ten percent oversize, though that is not evident in most freight trains. It’s shown here at the Peerless Foods wholesale grocer on my layout.

I also have a Red Caboose model of an FWDX reefer, again an interesting variant in reefer reporting marks for an operating session. Here it’s shown on my layout at Guadalupe Fruit in Ballard. 

Each of these cars sees operating use on my layout during those peak harvest months of June through September. But the rest of the year, cars being loaded are pretty much all PFE, and you wouldn’t see these Fruit Growers “Western branch” cars in use for produce shipping.

Tony Thompson