O OTOE 40′ Woodside Reefer

The
coming of the railroad changed the way America ate and drank. Before
the iron horse connected every town of any importance to the outside
world, most food was grown or produced locally. The arrival of cheap,
fast, refrigerated transport – in the form of the woodsided reefer with
ice bunkers at each end – enabled local brewers, diaries, meat
processors, and other food businesses to become players on a national
scale. Among other things, the reefer enabled Chicago to become Hog
Butcher for the World; in pre-reefer days, livestock had been
transported to local markets and butchered as close as possible to the
final consumer.

In the 19th Century, ice for
reefers was harvested from frozen ponds each winter and stored as well
as possible in insulated icehouses. The advent of mechanical ice making
around 1900 greatly increased the capacity of the reefer fleet, which
at its height consumed over one million tons of ice annually. Since
loaded cars needed to be re-iced about once per day, icing stations
were erected around the country on shipping routes that could be as
long as coast-to-coast.

Famed railroad historian John
H. White referred to reefers as the most conservative of all American
freight cars, as reefers retained wood frames and sides long after
other types of cars had converted to steel construction. Steel reefers
became common only after 1940, and many wood reefers like our RailKing
model ran well into the 1960s. Mechanical reefers, with self-powered
refrigeration units in each car, became the norm in the second half of
the 20th century, and the practice of stopping a train to re-ice during
shipment gradually disappeared.

High quality, traditionally
sized RailKing Freight Cars provide detailed bodies and colorful paint
schemes for the O Gauge railroader. MTH makes an enormous variety of
RailKing Freight Cars, including many different car types and
roadnames. No matter what era or part of the country you are modeling,
RailKing is sure to have something for you.