So, how were the cars serviced at a typical railroad icing platform/ice house?
When the cars were spotted at the platforms, the first step for the crews was to tamp down the ice remaining in the bunkers with long-handled wooden tampers. This broke down the ice arches or “bridges” which formed when ice melted from the bottom up. The number of inches of ice required to fill the bunkers was then noted. Optimally, the ice had been pre-staged on the plat- forms and was slid over ramps onto the roofs of the cars and into the bunkers. The ice cake was split on the car roof immediately prior to dumping into the bunker and broken into even smaller chunks as it was worked into the emp- ty spaces always present therein. If needed, salt was shoveled in at this point.34
Sample prototype ice houses Let’s study a couple of prototype ice houses in a little more detail. First,
let’s look at the Chicago &
North Western’s house at Clinton, Iowa. Clinton is a Mississippi River town located where the railroad cross- es the river on a high bridge. Clinton was the heaviest icing point on the C&NW system. All fruit, dairy and packer cars were inspected and iced there as necessary. As many as 140 cars per day were iced at Clinton dur- ing the warm-weather months. The construction of the house was similar to the plans discussed earlier in this article, the rooms being 25 feet wide by 50 feet deep. A new house built in early 1912 at Green Bay was very similar to the Clinton house, but had ice rooms 32 feet by 63 feet, this size be- lieved by the railroad to be a more eco- nomical arrangement for handling ice. The platforms for both houses were ten feet wide. The lower (chunk ice) platform was 14 feet above the top of the rail while the upper (crushed ice) platform was 22 feet above the rails. A third, much narrower platform near the middle of the structure accommo- dated the ice crushing machinery and the hoppers for the crushed ice and bulk salt bins. The crushed ice hopper, of course, emptied to the floor below for loading two-wheeled crushed ice carts. The middle platform was made as nearly watertight as possible to pre- vent ice melt from dripping on the crews below. One need only imagine the sensation of near-freezing water down the back of one’s neck on a July day on the Mississippi River to see the wisdom of this extra expense. In both Green Bay and Clinton, the railroad was somewhat constrained by the workable width the houses could
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
This Paul Larson photo taken from the machinery house level (above) shows the wooden “grapple blocks” on the continuous chain from the storage level to the machinery house level. The blocks engage the ice cake from behind and push it up the incline. The ice slide used to unload ice cars is shown on the lower platform. This Larson photo (below) shows the entire ice elevator apparatus in a wider view. Note all the staircases here.
be. This was a particular problem when ice-hoisting machinery was being considered.
Installing traditional
moveable galleries on the front of the house was not practical and on the rear it was not possible. Therefore, the rail- road exercised its only option–it built the elevating equipment at one (or both, in the case of Clinton) end of the house, that is, beside the house. Otherwise, both houses were fitted with multiple gig elevators powered by a 30-h.p. electric motor on a clutch- equipped drive shaft to raise or lower ice within the ice rooms to the appro- priate platform level for use. The ice source for Clinton was a nar-
row estuary in the river from which the harvest was hauled upwards 40 feet from the river level to a 600-foot load- ing platform for transporting the ice in boxcars to the icehouse. Ten to 12 cars could be spotted and six could be loaded simultaneously. The size of the ice field was necessar- ily limited, containing only about 20 harvestable acres. With a thickness of 12″ (the minimum thickness deemed worth cutting), the field yielded a har- vest of about 20,000 tons. Fortunately, a large part of the field could be re-har- vested during a normal winter and only rarely did ice have to be hauled in from other sites.
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