Enhancing operations with waybills: Part 3

 Refrigerator Cars

Reefer operations have an enormous potential for enhancement with waybills.

A reefer comes out of staging and gets spotted at your packing house for loading. Next session you pull it and route it off layout.

Here’s a term vital to reefer operations, “Protective Services”.

A protective service is adding ice. Either by pre-icing the car before loading it, icing it after loading. Re-icing the car along its route, or adding top ice, a layer of crushed ice, over the top of several types of produce. Part of protective service is also adding salt to the brine tanks to enhance the cooling effects of the iced brine. It’s opening, OR closing, ventilator hatches. And it’s adding heaters to cars to keep the temperature of the car UP.

All of these protective services are GENERALLY performed at the ice dock. In the interests of play value, adding an action bill to a car card pocket to divert a reefer car, or reefer block, to the ice dock is about all you might accomplish here. I would suggest that most operators do not care WHY these reefers are going to the ice dock, and the fact that you are asking that the ventilator hatches must be opened 50% is lost on them. But on smaller layouts this added “flavor” MIGHT be of use.

The process of servicing a reefer car was much perfected on the railroads of the steam era, and an ice dock crew could fully ice a reefer in about five (5) minutes. Additionally in our era labor was cheap, so when those reefers arrive, you can be sure there are several crews on hand to get that block of cars serviced quickly.

Cleaning cars seems to be a common thread with my diatribes. Reefers are supposed to be cleaned by the receiver after unloading. Cars returned MTY, but dirty, were often a cause for back billing receivers. Detritus left over from a produce load, in a closed up, un-iced, refrigerator car must have yielded numerous unpleasant surprises to shipping crews opening them. Because OUR crews are all conscientious, our reefers must make a trip to the clean out track.

A customer on your layout requesting a reefer would thus be provided with a car that made trips to the clean out track AND the ice dock before spotting at his dock for loading.

I found a bulletin stating unloaded URTX reefers were to be impounded and held for beer shipments. I have a brewery on my layout. I own a large number of URTX reefers. I am issuing all my switch and yard crews with a bulletin instructing them to forward all URTX reefers to the clean-out track and then to forward them to Mountaineer Brewing for reloading. 

There has been a great deal of discussion in the hobby about reefers being used for back hauling clean loads. In general* only about 10% of PFE cars got reloaded. SFRD asked that its cars NOT be impounded for back hauls. Reefer doors were usually swing doors, they swing out to open, which made them troublesome to utilize at a freight house (Car doors needed to be pinned open BEFORE spotting, then the cars needed to be pulled in order to close and seal these doors). Reefer doors were not as wide as the typical boxcar door, and would often not fit the bridge plates. My suggestion here is, if you plan to use freight reefers for reloading clean lading, utilize them during rush periods (Christmas mail) and use them sparingly, or at specifically targeted shippers. Lastly Meat reefers (RSM) RARELY if ever get impounded for so called clean lading back hauls. The above URTX example is an exception. So after cleaning, send meat reefers home empty.

On the AIR I am building a fairly long ice dock on a main line siding. All eastbound through reefers coming out of west staging get re-iced at this dock.  The action bill in their card pack simply reads “ICE”. If you are adding an ice dock, consider placing it on the main track. The delay to ice a large block of reefers is actually not that great, and the time saved switching the block will pay dividends.

A quick note on “Pre-Cooling”. This term has been misunderstood and misapplied by hobbyists. Pre-cooling is USUALLY done to the LOAD. Produce picked and sitting out in the sun before loading obviously becomes heated. Loading all this hot produce into a car will lengthen the time it takes to cool the car to a desirable temperature. As a result produce loads were moved from fields to cold rooms in the packers plant where the produce ITSELF was cooled to the desirable shipping temperature BEFORE loading it into an iced refrigerator car. I am not saying refrigerator cars were not pre-cooled with air blown in from large A/C plants, but that was not commonly done, and is not the general meaning of the term, “Pre-Cooling”.

Finally produce reefers and meat reefers should not be used interchangeably. There were in fact rules against this use. How many layouts do you operator on where the meat packing house has PFE reefers spotted at it? No bueno. It would be absolutely reasonable to see meat reefers and produce reefers at a grocery wholesale warehouse, as you might expect to see these types of loads handled there. But not packing houses. Additionally meat was proprietary for lack of a better term. So while it’s very reasonable to see a Wilson reefer next to a Swift reefer at the Grocery warehouse, if the industry is a Wilson packing house, you would see no other companies reefer at that dock.

So to re-cap reefers operations can be enhanced with waybills and action bills in the following ways:

1) Protective services, which means: Icing the car, re-icing the car, top icing the load, adding salt to the bunkers, opening or closing ventilators, and adding or removing heaters.

2) Cleaning the car

3) A trip to the RIP track for repairs or fumigation

4) Impounding the car for reloading (Which might entail side trips listed above)

5) You can add a Pre-Cooling step. It’s another process. I don’t do it.

*According to Tony Thompson extant PFE and reefer guru