Background for my layout ice deck

A visitor to my layout recently asked about the ice deck I have modeled, and I explained a few aspects of it. It occurred to me that others might also be interested in the topic, thus this post.

Like nearly all layout owners, I have limited space for an ice deck. It’s rare, when visiting a layout, to see even a six-car deck (in HO scale, that’s already three feet long), though the prototype often had decks of 15 or 20 cars. Mainline ice decks in some cases were 110 cars long, the size of a reefer block on the SP and UP in ice reefer days. 

My deck is just two cars long. Is this realistic? Absolutely. In Chapter 13 of the PFE book (Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Signature Press, 2000) are listed all the ice decks along PFE territory (SP, UP, and WP). There are a number of small ones, such as the two-car Modesto deck on the Tidewater Southern (a WP subsidiary). 

That TS facility was owned by Union Ice Company, and was contracted with PFE for service. This kind of deck supplemented the much larger, nearby deck at Modesto on the SP, 29 cars long and capable of icing from both sides of the deck.

In building my small facility, I began with the idea that 300-pound ice blocks for icing reefers would most likely have to be shipped in. A small facility making consumer ice would rarely be able to produce such big blocks, and indeed, ice delivery was a common arrangement for small decks. Thus I only needed an ice storage building, not a giant ice manufacturing plant.

I built a simple structure using Evergreen shiplap siding, reinforcing the inside corners with Plastruct angles and the walls with square styrene tubing, as you see below. Outside corners were given scale 1 x 6-inch trim boards. I added five doors: a man door on each end, a pair of ice loading doors, and an ice delivery door for the ice deck, along with an office window.

In the photo below, with the removable roof off, you can see the construction, along with the two doors on the ice-deck end, and the ice loading door on the side, with its buffer timber underneath.

For the ice deck itself, I began with the PFE drawing in Chapter 13 of the PFE book. My ice deck would be a privately owned deck, so wouldn’t match the PFE standard (certainly no roof), but it gives dimensions and some idea about lumber sizes.

The drawing above is only a cross-section, and doesn’t show longitudinal bracing. For that, I relied on a photo of a small PFE deck at Spokane, Washington, which unlike the drawing above, didn’t have a center post (PFE photo, CSRM). It was an 8-car deck, and had PFE’s usual drop-down aprons, though those were uncommon on private decks.

With these considerations, I was able to build a deck from pre-stained stripwood, using a fixture to asemble each bent to ensure they were all the same. I added a stairway at the rear for workmen to access the deck. The door for delivery of reefer ice is on this side of the building.

Looking down on the deck, you can see the steel sliding tray used to slide ice blocks along the deck, from the ice house to where they are needed. Here an ice bridge is in use, to slide ice chunks (chopped from the original blocks) over to the further ice hatch. I included this photo. along with a discussion of the tools the men are using, in a recent blog post (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/04/my-latest-column-in-mrh.html ).

Though my layout’s ice deck is small, it is realistic for the needs of the (fictitious) SP branch I model. I have tried to include prototypical details so this ice facility believably provides refrigeration for outbound reefer loads on my layout.

Tony Thompson

My latest column in MRH

As a regular columnist in Model Railroad Hobbyist (the “Getting Real” series of columns by several writers who take turns), my latest column is now appearing, the 27th I’ve written for this publication. It’s about “Modeling Perishable Shipping,” emphasizing the layout details that reflect handling of perishables, and also a little about operations. It’s in the “Running Extra” part of the April 2024 issue.

There are two main aspects I am trying to model (and that I described in the article). One, the loading of the cars (what can be seen outside the car), and two, ice refrigeration, both pre-icing (defined in the Protective Perishable Services tariff as filling the ice bunkers of an empty car before spotting for loading) and initial icing (again, tariff language for icing a loaded car before departure, at the nearest ice deck to the loading point).

For the loading part, we are limited in HO scale to what we can suggest from outside the car. On the loading docks of my packing houses, I often have a stack of shipping crates visible, as in the photo below at the Phelan & Taylor Produce Co. dock on my layout in East Shumala. The suggestion is that these crates are ready to load.

In addition, I spent a little space in the article describing the use of field boxes, in which harvest is brought to the packing house. A few of these are shown at right in the photo above. This is the easiest way we can depict the harvested perishables. 

Icing, of course, is a familiar operating possibility on model railroading. Most of us cannot begin to model a prototype-size mainline icing station. These ice decks were often 80 to 100 cars long. If I recall, the largest model ice deck I’ve seen is at the La Mesa Club’s Tehachapi layout in San Diego, and it’s about 30 cars long. In HO scale, that is really big: 30 car lengths, at nominally 40 feet per car, is 1200 scale feet, or nearly 14 actual feet.

I have modeled a far smaller facility, typical of small towns, only a two-car deck, and located at a private ice company. Such companies usually did not have the capacity to freeze 300-pound ice blocks for reefer icing, and accordingly the reefer ice was shipped in. (That made it what PFE called an ITP, an Ice Transfer Plant.) Below I show an Ice Service reefer about to be spotted at the loading door in the ice building (at right). Note that its ice hatches have been blanked off; the ice bunkers have been removed for more loading space.

Meanwhile, on the deck, I’ve modeling the workmen using the two typical ice-handling tools. Below, the man at left holds a “bident,” a two-pronged fork used to chop the ice into smaller pieces, and the man at right holds a “pickaroon,” with a point for pushing ice blocks, and a hook for pulling them toward you. Note that the ice is not clear. Modelers who have clear ice on their ice decks need to sand it so it is at most translucent, which is how ice on real ice decks looked.

The photo above is from an earlier period, before I added the metal sliding tray that the workmen used to slide ice out along the deck, and also added some smaller ice chunks. In the photo below, you see open ice hatches, with the plugs on the underside of each hatch cover.

Lastly, I touched on the issue (mentioned above) of pre-icing and initial icing. A couple of the packing houses on my layout don’t have their own pre-cooling capability, and must receive pre-iced empties (all the other houses, since they do pre-cool their produce, receive un-iced empties). 

This can be indicated in a waybill, as you see below, in the line just above the cargo description. The mention of Section 2 under “CPS” (Carrier Protective Service) means “standard refrigeration,” that is, ice in the bunkers.

My purpose in this particular MRH article was to emphasize how one can model perishable shipping, from harvest and loading, to icing, to long-range car movement. Hopefully I provided a few insights that might help modelers decide what they want to include, or can include, and how to model it.

Tony Thompson