Completing a Hendrickson reefer, Part 2

Last year, I posted the first steps in competing one of Richard Hendrickson’s projects that I inherited, which was on his work bench when he passed away. It is a resin kit for a Santa Fe Class RR-21 reefer. You can read the post about it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/07/completing-richard-hendrickson-reefer.html . 

In that first post, I showed the model as it came to me, basic body complete and underframe fully built, and then my first step, painting the side color but not other parts of the model. Unlike a number of Richard’s incomplete projects, this one didn’t have a box of detail parts with it, so I needed to select and install all of them. A first issue is what should they look like.

Here is a photo of a new Santa Fe RR-21 car, showing the ladders clearly (Santa Fe photo, from the Santa Fe Modelers’ book Refrigerator Cars, which Richard co-authored). This is the as-built paint scheme, not the later one I will apply to the model.

Clearly there is a 7-rung ladder on the side and a 6-rung ladder on the end, and the hand brake is Ajax. The brake step is solid metal, not a grid pattern. Grab irons are straight pattern.

As I mentioned in the previous post (linked in the first paragraph, above, I planned to detail the roof and ends, then mask the sides, and paint roof, ends and underframe black. That would allow simple masking of the un-detailed sides. At the same time, side details to be added, such as ladders and placard boards, can be painted black also, prior to attachment.

Although I did not have any ladders on hand that are as delicate looking as what you see in the photo above, I did want to have ladders with decent stiles and free-standing rungs. Most plastic ladders are for taller cars like box cars, so I had to hunt for shorter ladders. I had some ancient metal ladders in my parts collection that are indeed the right height, and trimmed some to the 6- and 7-rung lengths you see above. They are shown below, along with one original ladder at right from which I cut down the others.

I began with the A end of the car. I taped a 7-rung ladder to the side in the correct location, and made sure the 6-rung ladder would have its rungs aligned, then attached it with canopy glue. I also added a placard board, end-sill grab irons from styrene rod, and a wire grab iron at the right edge of the end. I then added what was needed to the B end (see prototype photo above), including an Ajax handbrake.

Another challenging problem with Santa Fe reefers is the hatch rest bars. An example is shown below, showing the hatches of a Class RR-10 car (Santa Fe photo), taken from the Santa Fe Modelers’ book cited above. 

What about dimensions? I haven’t found a modeling article that gives those dimensions, so I turned to the Santa Fe Modelers’ book again for a drawing, page 280. Below I show a portion of that drawing. Scaling the rest bar parts, they appear to be about 3 inches wide and stand about 12 inches high. I have seen them modeled with flat wire, which can be too narrow. (You can click on this to enlarge it.)

One could possibly consider styrene strip for these hatch rest bars, but the result would be terribly fragile. I decided to try using 0.005-inch brass sheet to cut strips to bend to the shape shown above. I will report further on that, and preparation for painting, in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

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 

Crop seasons on my layout

As I have mentioned numerous times in this blog, operating sessions on my layout are always treated as being on the same day on which we operate, but in 1953. Among other things, this means that the packing houses on the layout are always shipping the crops of that particular month. I introduced this background some time back (see for example my post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/09/seasonality-of-crops-and-traffic.html ). 

Recently I was asked (again) about the source of the information, and would I please put it all in one place. It’s drawn from the multi-page table on pages 442–447 in the back of the PFE book (Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Thompson, Church, and Jones, Signature Press, 2000). That table covers all of the SP, with individual growing areas for each crop. Since the area I model is what was known as the Guadalupe–Santa Maria area, I have just chosen data for that area in the tables below.

 These tables, vegetables and fruit separately,  are very useful in that they show peak harvest months in black, with off-peak or “shoulder” harvest months in gray. I usually only choose waybills for peak-month produce in setting up a session for a particular month. The one exception is all-year broccoli, which does get shipped in most sessions. But notice that at least one fruit and one vegetable is being harvested in every month of the year in the area modeled. 

The other point to be made is one about PFE in general. During the peak harvest months over the entire SP and UP systems, June through September, even PFE’s fleet of roughly 40,000 cars was not sufficient for all needs, and reefers of other owners were borrowed. Most of this activity was on SP, which often advertised how much of American produce was loaded on its lines (I’ve show these ads in a number of previous posts, including this one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/05/sps-public-advertising.html ). Here’s an example:

Roughly two-thirds of PFE’s carloadings were on SP lines, with the remainder mostly on UP, with barely five percent on Western Pacific.

In that peak season, scenes like the one below, at a packing house in my layout town of Shumala, were commonplace. American Refrigerator Transit (famously jointly owned by Missouri Pacific and Wabash) was one of the companies from which PFE borrowed extensively.

A scene like this is more relevant at the moment than during much of the year, because I have an operating session coming up later this month.. Scenes like this are, once again, going to fit the 1953 season we will be reproducing.

Tony Thompson 

Reworking a PFE car kit, Conclusion

This is the concluding post in my description of modifying the appearance of an otherwise stock Red Caboose kit for a reconditioned PFE reefer, Class R-30-9. I began with the prototype background of these cars, created during 1938–1940 from (mostly) Class R-30-12 cars built some 15 years earlier, along with some cars of Class R-30-13. 

“Reconditioning” meant a completely new superstructure, with new and upgraded insulation, but without performing work on the underframe and brake gear (other than needed repairs). In the parlance of the AAR and the IRS, in addition to PFE, this did not constitute rebuilding. But because of improved insulation and ice bunkers, they were given a new car class, R-30-9. 

In the first post of this series, I showed a prototype photo of one of these cars (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/reworking-pfe-car-kit.html ). Here is another image, this time showing a car as-reconditioned, at the Stockton, CA ice deck on July 13, 1941 (Wilbur C. Whittaker photo). It has retained the original T-section trucks, but like all the cars of 95737–98718, has new steel ice hatches. Side lettering says it was reconditioned in April 1940, so the paint is barely a year old; it was originally PFE 20028, built in July 1922.

I wanted to model a car like this. After stripping the kit lettering, airbrushing fresh Star brand paint on sides and ends, and adding steel nuts for weight (shown in that first post), I built the kit sub-assemblies of roof and underbody, as I showed in the second post, along with beginning decal lettering with Microscale set 87-501 (the second post may be found at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/reworking-pfe-car-kit-part-2.html ). 

Once the new decals had been protected with a coat of clear flat, I assembled the car body (so far without an underbody). This looks good so far.

 Next I completed work on the underbody, adding sill steps and Kadee #158 couplers, along with the kit truck frames. Wheelsets were replaced with superior ones from InterMountain. Here is the completed car, nicely retaining the black side sill of the 1950 scheme (side sills became orange in 1951). 

Next came weathering. As always with PFE, this is difficult to choose in the abstract, because of PFE’s extensive car washing (for data see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/appearance-of-pfe-reefers-part-3.html ), along with their practice, until the mid-1950s, of repainting any car with even the most minor repairs. I have chosen to apply a light degree of weathering.

The way I did the weathering was following my usual technique with washes of acrylic tube paint (for description and examples, see the Reference pages linked at the top right corner of this post). After adding a coat of clear flat, a few chalk marks, and route cards, the car looked as shown below, being switched to the ice deck in my layout town of Shumala by SP 1284, a Class S-12 0-6-0. 

This is going to be a nice addition to my PFE fleet, and it will certainly be among the cars switched at my next operating session.

Tony Thompson 

Reworking a PFE car kit, Part 2

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have had occasional suggestions about this blog, that I write about PFE car models more often. I’ve now begun one such description, making changes to a Red Caboose kit. I gave the background, and a prototype photo, in the first post. That previous post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/reworking-pfe-car-kit.html .

The kit is generally well designed, and I like to build it in sub-assemblies, as I think the manufacturer intended. First is the roof, a moderately complicated assembly, being a reefer. It has 20 parts in all. I show the completed roof below. 

Next, I chose to complete the underframe. I always find the placement of the cross-bearers in these kits a little tedious, and the center sills never seem to fit without some fiddling. I drilled out the coupler box lids so that the entire coupler assembly can be tapped for 2-56 screws. The kit includes K brakes, appropriate for these cars after their 1937–1940 reconditioning, but in 1949–1951, all were reconditioned again, this time getting AB brakes, so I dipped into the parts stash and added those brake parts.  

One can note in the prototype photo of PFE 98444 in the previous post, even with the low angle from which the photo was taken, that brake piping and rodding is invisible, due to the center sill. I chose accordingly not to add any of those details. This is, in practical terms, a layout model.  Even so, if one counts the coupler box screws, the underframe assembly contains 29 parts (before adding the six sill steps).

Below is the completed underbody, with the car body in the background, with its interior now painted to eliminate translucence (Tamiya “German Grey,” TS-4).  

I wasn’t sure the color of the car ends matched the roof (though Red Caboose colors were generally pretty accurate), so oversprayed them with Star “SP/UP Freight Car Red” (STR-30), then applied decals from the excellent Microscale set 87-501, containing Dick Harley’s fine artwork. As you see below, detail parts had not yet been installed on these ends. At the time of the 1950 paint scheme, wood-sheathed ends still received the 7-inch lettering you see here.

The car number was chosen as part of the 97,000 series, as I didn’t have a model in that series. Long ago, I conceived the idea of having about one PFE model car for each thousand prototype PFE cars, a fleet of nearly 40,000 cars at the time I model. I haven’t been rigid about this, but use it as a guideline.

With the amount of detail on the sides quite minimal on this kit (just add grab irons and a ladder to each side), I decided to start applying decals to the sides. I used the Microscale set mentioned above. Many modelers wait until all detail parts are applied and the car completed before lettering, but I often letter at an intermediate state if it suits the model. 

The car is now well along, and I will describe its completion and weathering in a following post.

Tony Thompson 

Reworking a PFE car kit

In response to a recent question I was asked (“Why don’t you write more about PFE cars?”), I will describe recent work on a Red Caboose HO scale kit for a PFE reconditioned reefer, kit RC-4121-3, for a car of PFE Class R-30-12-9. There are a number of things I will choose to do for this kit.

I’ll begin with the kit as it comes from the box. It’s nicely decorated (as they always say in magazine reviews), but it is the 1936–1942 paint scheme, with single railroad emblems on each side. It’s shown below.

The car body above is molded in orange plastic. This is both good news and bad news. It means, on the good side, that lettering can be removed without affecting the background color; but on the bad side, the plastic is translucent, and needs to have the car interior painted a neutral color like dark gray to kill the translucence.  

This paint scheme was rare on wood-sheathed cars by 1950 and essentially absent by 1953, because newer paint schemes after World War II, and very large volumes of shop work in the postwar years, meant that a wood-sheathed car like this would undoubtedly have been repainted by my modeling year of 1953. 

Here is the scheme that is far more suitable for my modeling year, in a George Sisk photo from the Charles Winters collection. As is documented in the Southern Pacific Freight Car Painting and Lettering Guide (SP Historical & Technical Society, Upland, CA, 2016), authored by Dick Harley and me, page 141, this is the 1950 PFE scheme, with all side hardware orange, along with sill steps, and both railroad medallions black and white. Dimensional data and other lettering details differ from the kit lettering, so all kit lettering needs to go.

Since there is no significant part of the lettering worth saving, nor is it particularly well rendered, I removed all of it with Scalecoat stripper, on both sides and ends. I then fired up the airbrush and added a coat on the car sides of Star brand STR-27, “Daylight Orange,” (a color adopted by PFE eight years before the more-famous SP “Daylight” trains). The same paint was airbrushed onto the sprues of side hardware parts (sprues D and G), provided in the kit in black, so they would be ready to be applied to the body. 

Next I assembled the kit. For the most part, this is simply following instructions. But there are a few things that require explication. Some have been presented before, in a report on a similar car kit (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/01/reconditioned-pfe-car-part-2-model.html ).

For features of the prototype PFE cars that were reconditioned — being formerly cars of Class R-30-12, they were re-classed when reconditioned as Class R-30-12-9, then after World War II this was simplified by omitting the original -12, making them simply Class R-30-9 — one can consult Chapter 7 in the PFE book (Thompson, Church and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Signature Press, 2000). A number of details are provided about the 7694 cars of this class, PFE’s largest.

As I do when car weights are not supplied in a kit, I glued two 5/8-11 steel nuts inside the car body, using canopy cement. This gives plenty of weight, and canopy glue is perfect for joining dissimilar materials, as is the case here. 

One last point relates to the roof. In the last group of R-30-9 cars, steel ice hatches were applied and ice hatch platforms removed, cars PFE 95737–98718. And note in the prototype photo above of PFE 98444 that wood running boards were retained; all these cars were reconditioned during 1937–1940, when this was usual practice. I will do the same, as I’ll describe in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

Seasonality in reefer usage

On my layout, I have chosen to model all of 1953, in that each operating session is on the current month and day, but in 1953. So an April 13 session this year would be modeled as April 13, 1953, and a session this fall on September 15 would be September 15, 1953. One reason for this is so that I can mirror the varying crops being harvested; the area I model was in peak harvest for least one crop in every month of the year.

I have shown this crop seasonality before (see, for example, in this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/09/seasonality-of-crops-and-traffic.html ), but below is the vegetable crop chart for my modeled area, taken from the multi-page chart in the back of the PFE book (Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Signature Press, 2000), pages 442–447.  You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish. Black bars are peak harvests, gray bars off-peak harvesting.

But today’s post is not about accuracy of crops loaded, which in any case only shows up on the waybill. Instead, it is about the cars into which the crops were loaded. At the time I model, PFE had by far the largest reefer fleet in North America, around 40,000 cars. During most of the year, this fleet could handle all of the reefer needs of PFE’s two parent companies, SP and UP, and contract partner WP.

But during peak harvesting in SP, WP and UP territory, July to late September, even PFE’s fleet was inadequate. The table on page 450 in the PFE book shows this by year for virtually all of PFE’s history. In 1953, for example, PFE cars handled 73 percent of that year’s 307,000 perishable shipments in SP territory. 

To solve that problem, PFE borrowed from various other reefer fleets, heavily from American Refrigerator Transport (ART), but also from Fruit Growers Express, the BAR, and others. I’ve discussed this in more detail previously (see this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/08/foreign-reefers-in-pfe-territory.html ).

So whenever I host an operating session in the July–October period, you will see various foreign reefers being loaded at packing houses on my layout. Of course PFE cars are still the majority in that period, but the foreign cars seen then for loading are rare outside that peak harvest season. Below is a peak-season example, a loaded BAR reefer being picked up at Phelan & Taylor Produce in East Shumala on my layout.

There are other details in seasonal reefer visibility. In late February, through the end of March, strawberries are a sufficiently valuable crop to demand express reefers, and indeed such cars do show up at my Guadalupe Fruit Company for loading in that period. Shown below is an example, with 40-foot PFE Class BR-40-10 no. 909 (an upgraded InterMountain model) at left, and 50-foot Railway Express reefer REX 1227 (a Walthers wood-sheathed model) at right, both spotted for loading. The Ballard depot is behind them.

These cars are normally picked by mainline (non-streamlined) passenger trains at Shumala, and are iced before departure. In the photo below, PFE 928 (with correct Symington-Gould “XL” trucks for PFE 926–950 cars of Class BR-40-10) is being spotted by SP Alco switcher no. 1474 at the ice deck in Shumala, prior to pickup. 

These variations in the reefers that are seen on the layout during operating sessions during particular parts of the year reflect prototype information, and are aspects of layout operation that I enjoy.

Tony Thompson 

Modeling a PFE fleet

I have posted several times about this topic, and over the years have given a number of talks about it, but continue to get questions and comments on the subject. As the principal author of the 464-page PFE book (Thompson, Church and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Signature Press, 2000), I do have resources to try and answer questions like this. And of course the book remains your primary source of information.

Although I personally model 1953, I realize that many people model other parts of the PFE era, so in the material below, will try to cover a range of years. But almost any choice of era will lead to interesting photos, like the one below (Extra 4015 East, Green River, Wyo., Sept. 3, 1955: John E Shaw photo). Which cars are these? Or to rephrase: what mix of cars should I have? And perhaps strikingly, what mix of clean and variously dirty cars should I have?

Following PFE’s dramatic inception in 1906, when E.H. Harriman ordered 6600 new refrigerator cars to create the first PFE car fleet, cars continued to be of wood-sheathed construction, including wood board roofs, until 1920. 

In that year, outside metal roofs became standard for new and rebuilt car construction, but car bodies remained wood-framed and wood-sheathed. The first all-steel cars were built in 1936. But because of the immense number of wood cars in existence in 1936, the steel cars remained a relatively small fraction of the fleet until the middle 1950s. 

As additional classes of steel cars were built, the fleet slowly began to be dominated by cars of that type, though as late as 1960, wood-sheathed cars (by now all rebuilds) remained 60 percent of the fleet. The first mechanical reefers owned by PFE were built in 1953, but even by 1962, they ware only 9 percent of the fleet. But this rose quickly as ice cars were scrapped, and by 1970 mechanical cars were 64 percent of the fleet. All these relative fleet characteristics are well documented in the PFE book.

For a single example of the kind of information in that book, below is a chart made by Dick Harley and contributed to the book (pages 440 and 441). It shows graphically and clearly the evolution of the PFE wood-car fleet over time, including rebuilding. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.) 

 For modelers of any part of North America, the size of PFE’s fleet is worth pointing out. For quite a few years, it hovered just under 40,000 cars, bigger than most railroads’ entire fleet, as you see below. This graph also shows how many cars were washed every year, and you can see it’s a significant fraction of the fleet each year, except in the depth of the Depression and during World War II, until washing was discontinued in the early 1950s. 

 I show this graph because it has a consequence for car appearance. You can’t weather PFE cars before the 1950s just on the age of the paint scheme, because of this washing. For more about washing and all that, see my earlier post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/appearance-of-pfe-reefers-part-3.html . 

I have had modelers ask me about PFE underframes. After the first car classes with a heavy and complex underframe, PFE changed to the single-beam Bettendorf design, which they continued to use into the middle 1920s. They then changed to what they called a “built-up” underframe, which was assembled from plate and angles. 

Both are shown below (you can click to enlarge if you wish). The section at right is labeled as a “40-ton” underframe, but thousands of 30-ton cars received this kind of design also, just with a little lighter section. All cars with either underframe were wood-sheathed cars. 

I guess my point is that there are considerable resources to answer questions about the prototype and, by implication, many modeling issues too. But I am always available, via this blog or privately, to try and answer questions.

Tony Thompson

Making a silk purse . . . Part 2

Recently I posted about making a “scenery” version of an old Athearn reefer, lettered for Fruit Growers Express, by modeling it with its doors open (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/10/making-silk-purse.html ). I had only intended to describe broadly what I was going to do, and then show the final result. But I received an email asking if I would show more of the process. Luckily, I did take a few photos during the process.

First, having removed the old ice hatches that were shown previously, I also sliced off the “hinge” bulges and the bulge for the latch bar, along with removing the clunky running board. Then I cut off the Athearn locating posts under the running board, and glued them into their roof holes. This is shown in the photo below, at left. 

Then I used Tamiya putty to fill the hinge holes and scale 1 x 6-inch styrene strip to cover the latch bar hole. Some of the running board post holes also needed putty. This step is shown at right, below, with the roof also cleaned up. 

With those steps completed, I touched up the new areas with brown. I added a Walthers white metal Ajax brake wheel (no longer produced), and turned to the underframe. I used the Athearn coupler boxes, secured with 2-56 screws, to host new Kadee no. 158 couplers, and replaced the steel-axle wheelsets in the Athearn metal sprung trucks with InterMountain wheelsets. 

Next I reattached the Athearn ice hatches, replacing two that were damaged with new Athearn parts, and installed the Plano running board with canopy glue. Lastly, I represented latch bars with scale 1 x 3-inch styrene strip. This doesn’t really look much like a real latch bar, but will suffice for this “scenery” model, following Richard Hendrickson’s dictum that this is a place where “there should be something there.” 

Now I could mask the sides and ends with Tamiya tape, and spray paint the entire roof brown, to blend everything together.  And with a coat of protective flat overall, I proceeded to weathering, following my usual method using washes of acrylic tube paint (for more on that, see the “Reference pages” linked at the top right corner of this post). 

I now added the doors, using strips of ordinary Scotch tape as hinges. This allows a choice of how widely open the modeler wants the doors to be, dependent on how strongly creased are the pieces of tape. Here is my choice. And though I don’t plan to do it, the doors can be closed, too.

The purpose of this model, as mentioned at the outset of these two posts, was to model as “scenery” a reefer with open doors at a loading dock. It’s shown below alongside the dock at Guadalupe Fruit Co. in my layout town of Ballard.

This was an interesting project, because not many of my freight cars are intended as scenery; and I learned a few things in the process. Can’t beat that.

Tony Thompson 

The AAR publicity photos

 Back in the 1950s, the AAR (Association of American Railroads) issued a set of large-format photo prints (8.5 x 11 inches) on heavy paper to schools and to the general public. I’ve never seen a complete set, though many people seem to have a few or a handful. I am told there were 60 photos total, all numbered (highest number I’ve seen personally was 55). The great majority are in fact publicity photos contributed by individual railroads. They are interesting in a number of ways, and I thought I would show a few.

The lowest numbers are very early images of different kinds (no. 4 is the famous photo of the two engines nose to nose at Promontory in 1869, with people everywhere). What I have always found amusing is that to avoid  publicizing individual railroads, whenever lettering is visible, it was replaced (sometimes a little crudely) with the legend “East & West Railroad.” It is a particularly entertaining detail when the original railroad is blindingly obvious, like this one (you can click to enlarge): 

 Similarly, a steam photo, showing filling a tender, is quite obviously a Norfolk & Western Class A 2-6-6-4, with its engine number, 1203, visible on the cab, but of course with the “East & West” name on the tender. The locale certainly looks like Roanoke Shops. 

But in many ways the more interesting views to me include the ones showing aspects of freight service. A good example is this photo showing loading of a meat refrigerator car with hanging meat. The Swift Company label is on a couple of the visible carcasses.   

Another interesting example is this view (supplied by United Fruit Company) showing a banana ship alongside barges of refrigerator cars. Two of the reefers are visibly lettered “MDT,” so in this instance the AAR did not feel compelled to replace the initials with “E&W.” The same goes for the inset photo, showing banana handling, with a Northern Refrigerator car in the background. 

Lastly, I liked this photo of a railroad stores building, with material stored outdoors, under cover but open to the air, and on interior shelving (the inset photo). This is something rarely modeled but an interesting challenge, and an “industry” that can ship and receive a wide variety of cargo.  

These are just a few of the AAR photos in the set, but should serve to show the range of interesting views that were included. And school children and others who viewed them hopefully obtained some idea of what railroading was all about. 

Tony Thompson 

Making a silk purse . . .

Recently I was given a box of old HO toy trains and brass track from my neighbor, Andy Laird, who had passed away. Most of the models were ancient Athearn and Tyco locos and cars, many with missing or broken parts. But one model caught my attention. An Athearn reefer from the days when these cars had “operating” doors, it could perhaps be made into a “scenery” car, being loaded at a packing house with doors open. 

Here’s the model. It’s classic Athearn, and  has its original horn-hook couplers (in a coupler box with a screw lid, not the later Athearn steel clip) and the usual Athearn black running board, ice hatches, and crude brake wheel, all of which should be boxcar red. 

Similarly, the interlocking piece of the side over the door, which anchors the roof, is roof color, not side color. A couple of hatch covers are missing. But all that is easily fixed, and maybe I can do something with the doors. 

Note that the car is lettered FDEX, for the small number of double-deck cars rostered by Fruit Growers. Why Athearn chose this scheme is unknown, but maybe it could be kept. 

But how about those doors? The hinge representations are huge, and a couple are broken. One option would be to discard these doors and remove the “hinges,” then make new styrene doors. If the idea to model open doors is pursued, an alternative is to use the old door, but thicken the door to represent its insulation in the prototype.

To decide how to model these doors, we can begin with a notion of what an open steel reefer door looks like. The photo below, taken during lettuce crate loading at Salinas, California (PFE photo, CSRM), shows open doors clearly. You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.

Note that the insulated door thickness at the top tapers right to the outer edge of the door, and the inner surface is wood (varnished, as is the car interior). This would be easy to represent on replaced doors.

(By the way, these insulated doors form a “plug” in the insulation when closed. That’s why reefer terminology in the 1950s distinguished between “sliding” and “swinging” doors; all were plug doors.)

Now to the model. I began by working on the roof features. First, Athearn’s poor rendition of a steel grid running board is removed, as are the hatch covers and the hatch “hinge” areas. I showed this upgrade in a blog post long ago (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/08/ujpgrading-old-models-athearn-reefers.html ). 

Then small pieces of styrene strip were used to close the openings where the latch bar connections were, the hinge gap is puttied. Here’s a repeat photo of the earlier project, with one hatch cover still to be added, and prior to adding latch bars. The mo del shown below has an etched metal running board installed. The FDEX cars were built with wood running boards, but eventually received metal ones. I may do the same.

After consideration, it was evident that the old doors weren’t worth saving. So I simply made new doors using styrene sheet, 0.060-inch thick and two scale feet wide (like the prototype), then filed at a 45-degree angle at the top (see prototype photo above). Here’s such a door. Since only the inside will be shown, there is no need to add the outer door surface details. 

In  the prototype, the edges of doors were given a flexible canvas covering over a “spongy,” compressible material that would be compressed when the door was closed, minimizing air leakage. Color photos of this canvas show a dirty gray color and the inside surface a natural wood color. But painting and installation of my model doors will be covered in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

Layout operations in peak harvest season

In my most recent post, I described renovation of an old Athearn metal reefer, which happens to be an MDT car. In that post, I mentioned not only SP’s use of such “foreign” or off-road reefers for canned goods, effectively using them as insulated box cars in the days before such box cars were significant parts of the national car fleet, but also their use in peak harvest season (that post is at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/08/improving-that-athearn-steel-reefer.html ). 

Mere hours after that post went up, I received a question by email, asking if I would say more about the peak harvest issue. I am happy to do so, since it’s a topic I find interesting.

Some years ago, I posted a report of part of my analysis of an SP Coast Division conductor’s time book, which happened to include entire trains of empty reefers being moved to Salinas for loading, during 1948–52. This book showed that only 76 percent of the reefers were PFE cars, with the remaining cars to be loaded made up of foreign cars. (Here’s a link to that post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/02/modeling-freight-traffic-coast-line.html ). 

That value of 76 percent is in line with other records of PFE operations in peak harvest season. I commented on that in a later post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/08/foreign-reefers-in-pfe-territory.html ). 

Also, as mentioned in the post just cited, we know that the major sources of these foreign reefers were American Refrigerator Transit (ART), Fruit Growers Express (FGEX and associated fleets, such as BREX and WFEX), and Merchants Despatch (MDT), along with BAR cars borrowed in the non-potato-harvest months of the year.

Here’s one example: a photo (by Dallas Gilbertson) of the Guadalupe Local returning toward San Luis Obispo, with ten loaded reefers in vent service. Eight are PFE cars, but two are ART cars. Note also, by the way, the considerable range in dirtiness of these cars.

To choose just one additional example on the Guadalupe Subdivision, below is a detail from a Richard Steinheimer photo, showing either the Guadalupe local or the Surf Turn in February 1956, when Baldwin road-switchers had supplanted steam. The train today happens to be 10 cars, the rear 9 all reefers. Interestingly, the first two are a FGEX and a BREX, while there is an ART car third ahead of the caboose (barely visible at right).

For the reasons apparent in these prototype photos, I love to carry out an operating session on my layout set in the peak harvest season, because a bunch of foreign reefers need to be present. As some readers doubtless remember, on my layout, each operating session is conducted as though it was the current date, but in 1953. So if I were operating today, the idea would be that it’s August 25, 1953. 

I do plan an operating session in the next month or so, and among the models in that session will be the BREX car that I inherited in a partly completed state from Richard Hendrickson (completion of which was shown in an earlier post; see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/07/upgrading-accurail-reefer-part-3.html ). It’s shown below at the Coastal Citrus shipping warehouse in my layout town of Santa Rosalia.   

Another example would be an ART car, probably the most common foreign reefer used by PFE. This model is shown as a load being picked up by the Santa Rosalia Local at the Guadalupe Fruit shipping dock in Ballard on my layout.

And finally, a relatively new BAR reefer is about to be spotted by the local switch job as an empty for loading at the Phelan & Taylor packing house at Shumala on my layout.

This kind of inclusion of a real seasonal pattern for an operating session is fun for me, and I try to convey it to my operators so they can appreciate what they are seeing and doing.

Tony Thompson