Understandably, the most modern ice houses and icing platforms were built and operated by the packing companies. They did the most research and provided the
greatest innovation–undoubtably
because of the expense they incurred with their warm weather houses. Pack- ing house company research led, for ex- ample, to the use of insulating paper be- tween the ice layers to prevent the ice cakes from melting together. Early practice was to top off the ice in the house with about 12″ of sawdust or wheat straw as the final insulation blanket between walls and the ice or the ceiling and the ice. This proved highly unsatisfactory as the sawdust either melted into the ice or caused un- acceptable shrinkage when it was washed from the surface of the ice cakes prior to car icing. Careless or in- complete washing led to the plugging of ice bunker drains in the cars. Again, insulating paper came to the rescue as it had none of the drawbacks of sawdust. Ice was viewed differently by rail- road management from nearly any oth- er material that the companies dealt with. The demand for any given period almost always deviated from the aver- age demand and usually by a large margin. The peak demand from an ice house was huge. The demand from the off-peak periods was often non-exis- tent. Besides that, as discussed above, ice houses were nearly always filled
AUTHOR’S COLLECTION
This extraordinary photograph was taken by a U.S. Valuation Engineer assigned to do the valuations of Pittsburgh & Lake Erie structures. This compact little icehouse was somewhere in the vicinity of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is obviously a single platform facility, but it is unclear how the ice gets from the inbound ice cars to the platform. This is a very modelable structure with very interesting details.
during the winter. In terms of the number of cars
served, ice houses which were owned by packing houses and which primarily
Here we have a detailed plan of the UP’s standard ice elevator. Shown are the dimensions of the various structural members of this very important piece of ice house equipment. Also shown is a side
Union Pacific standard ice elevator RAILWAY AND ENGINEERING REVIEW,VOL.42, NO. 11; MARCH 15, 1902
serviced their cars enjoyed a nearly uniform traffic year-round.
Those
which serviced primarily fruit and pro- duce cars had almost no demand dur-
view of the icing galleries at the various levels of the ice house. With these detailed drawings a moderately-skilled structure modeler should be able to build a reasonable facsimile of a UP ice house.
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
71
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