Ice and the railroads: Pt. III–railroad ice houses Union Pacific icing platforms
Shown at left is the icing platform for all UP ice houses without their own ice source. The lower platform is the “winter platform” for off-loading inbound ice for filling the house. Notice the ice-slide blocks on the upper platform. At this early date (1902), the UP was not using continuous chains on its platforms to spot the ice for car icing. The side view of the double platform (center) shows the di-
ing some months during the year while almost the entire capacity was con- sumed during a few months. Produce and meat cars required quite different types of ice. Meat cars re- quired lower temperatures and hence consumed mostly crushed ice mixed with salt–in other words, a brine solu- tion. Produce cars consumed mostly chunk ice.26
mensions and the arrangement of the hand rails to the rear of the platform, etc. This would have been the icing platform configura- tion of the UP’s Evanston, Wyoming, ice house. Finally, we see the enhanced cross-bracing of the single icing platform (right). The brac- ing is more extensive on the single platform as there is no lower deck to strengthen the structure.
This difference, as we’ll see,
manifested itself in the ice house equip- ment and platform configurations. The platforms were typically built 14 feet (give-or-take) above the top of the rail. This usually was roughly half the height of the ice house itself. This meant that half the time the ice cakes were lowered to platform height and half the time they were raised to that height. On short platforms the ice moved in a trough on the platform deck and was prodded along by men with spiked poles. At the car side, it was man-handled out of the trough, broken into smaller chunks and skidded down a ramp into the car’s bunkers.27
Examples of large
versions of such icing facilities include Gate City Ice & Pre-Cooling Co. at San Bernardino, California, Santa Fe Icing Co. at Argentine, Kansas, and the PFE plants at Colton and Roseville, Califor- nia, and Carlin, Nevada. See Table 1 for typical ice house dimensions. Meat packer ice houses had another platform piggy-backed atop the first platform , usually eight feet or so above it for crushed ice service. Thus, many
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ice houses had three platforms–the winter platform, above which was the chunk ice platform above which was the crushed ice platform for meat cars. The uppermost platform could be 22 feet above the top of the rail. The plat- form length varied with the type of service the house performed. If the house was expected to service five- to ten-car blocks, short, narrow (eight to twelve feet wide) platforms served by a switch engine normally sufficed. When the ice house and platform were tasked with icing entire trains the platforms could be impressively long– more than 1,000 feet long in many cas- es.
the ice cakes) into the ice chute atop the crushing machine.28 Normally, the crushed ice was then
gravity fed to a separate crushed ice crusher room and loaded into two- wheeled carts. This room was extreme- ly well-insulated and tight. The Ar- mour ice houses could store crushed ice in such rooms for more than 24 hours with virtually no wastage. Normally, enough ice for two trains was crushed, loaded into carts and stored.
Such platforms were generally wider than their shorter cousins. Twelve to 16 feet was a typical range for the widths. The wider platform was partially to accommodate the larger workforce needed to service the cars and partially to handle the continuous chain used to convey the large ice cakes the length of such long platforms. Typically,
each ice room was
equipped with a “gig” or skip elevator ordinarily powered by a gasoline or steam engine. This elevator could nor- mally lift 600 to 2,000 pounds of ice per trip and some could make three trips per minute. On smaller houses, this el- evator was often raised by a horse, pul- ley and a rope. The ice crushing ma- chinery was fed from the other ice rooms by a gravity “slide” (moveable wooden slats with low sides to guide
Icing cars The Armour procedure (shamelessly copied by many railroads) was to begin staging ice from the crusher room about ¾ of an hour before the arrival of a train with meat cars to be re-iced. Si- multaneously, salt would be staged on the next lower level of the platform to add to the crushed ice.
When the train pulled up to the plat- form (normally on a run-through track to avoid fouling the main), the carts on the upper platform were dumped into long-spouted chutes attached to and moveable on a rail along the edge of the platform and into the open ice bunkers of the cars. At the same time, the prescribed amount of salt would be shoveled into the bunker from the plat- form below the crushed ice platform and at car-top level.
On long platforms like those de- scribed above with the ice and salt prop- erly staged and an experienced crew, a
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