Last of the 50' Refrigerator cars?

I have an old Athearn model of a 50' refrigerator car(NOT the better know PFE 57' foot RP-20[?]), I believe other manufacturers make (or made) similar reefer models.
Now, I remember reading a RMC article years ago about early Mechanical Reefers (it was a very interesting two-parter, including a mention of the post WWII delimma of the RR industry caught between the desire of the produce industry for new 40' ice reefers against frozen food distributors desires for larger Mechanical Reefers) seem to indicat that rather few 50' reefers were ever built (at least for North American railroad/shippers), but instead the industry more or less transtitioned from 40' ice-reefers to larger mechs (57' and bigger - the article ends there, before the new lots of 1990s refrigerator cars and rebuilds arrive).

Is this true - were there very few "50" foot mech reefers in service (I realize 50ft is more or less an approximation), were their numbers dwarfed by the late 1960s larger reefers, and the usual question, when did the last group of 50 footers leave revenue service?

I'd recommend a concurrent question in the UP forum, asking about Pacific Fruit Express, and the BNSF Forum, asking about ATSF Fruit Growers Express and (I think) CB&Q's Western Fruit Express (though it might be NP, or even a creature of BN).

The challenge of your question is unlike tank cars, which have long had major leasing operations, reefers belonged mostly to their Roads under a refrigerator specific reporting mark. There were some for the Railway Express Agency (REAX), but I've not seen any postwar reefers for them. If someone has a pic, please post!

It took me a bit to parse your response - I then realized you meant POST a form of this question in the UP & BNSF forum, not that such threads already existed.
You're probably right, but I figured this general forum would be the best - after all, there were several reefer pools during the 1950s/1960s (which, I guess would have been the peak time of the 50ft reefers if there ever was one).

I can't provide a general answer, but can provide a link to a 50' mechanical refrigerator car at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, IL. IRM has about 20 refrigerator cars of varoius types acquired by donation thirty years ago and used as storerooms. The IRM roster lists dimensions and year built for all of the cars.

Here is a link to one of them: http://www.irm.org/cgi-bin/rsearch.cgi? ... ines=25004 Just click the links back to the frieght car roster to see the others.

I hope you do get a good response from our folks here...

I went digging and found some information for you on PFE reefers. According to Morning Sun's UP Color Guide to Freight & Passenger Equipment, PFE's received its first mechanical reefers in 1954. A photo is shown of an R-40-30 class car built in 1956, with a length of 45'-6". A 1958-built R-50-6 class is also shown, with a length of 55'-5". An R-70-13 is shown, one of 500 ordered in 1962 and delivered in early 1963; it is very similar to the classes the Athearn/Con-Cor 57' models represent except for the door. I think this was the first class of 57-footers. As you can see, the size of mechanical reefers increased very quickly. According to End of the Ice Age in the March '83 RMC (is this the article you were talking about?) PFE received its last ice-bunker reefers in 1957 and they remained in service until 1971-72, so they were slow to give up on ice and there were only a few years between the last ice-bunker reefers and the first 57-footers.

Here is a link to check out: http://www.railgoat.railfan.net/spcars/ ... /index.htm It lists most if not all classes of PFE reefer, with a short dicussion of each and pictures of many. It seems that many of the early PFE mechanical reefers had their refrigeration equipment removed in the early to mid 1970s. (The remaining ice-bunker reefers were retired in the same period.) They were used in service that required insulated but not refrigerated cars, but they probably didn't last long after that.

I don't know much about other reefer fleets. Western Fruit Express was Great Northern's reefer service before the merger. CB&Q (Burlington Refrigerator Express) and NP had their own fleets. After the merger, BN retained the WFE name for all its refrigerator service, and their early mechanical reefers may have lasted longer than PFE's. I thought Fruit Growers Express was run by eastern railroads. ATSF always had its own fleet of reefers (Santa Fe Refrigerator Dispatch), though there might have been an agreement between them.