reefers on ACL juice trains in the late 1950s

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I am trying to model the ACL juice train in the late 1950s but i need to know what reefers were typically used on theses trains. Any pictures i have seen were basically of FGE and WFE/GN reefers. What else was seen on them?

Did reefers from far away such as Canadian National turn up in Florida/ACL?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

MATT

-- matthew strickland (matthewjstrickland@yahoo.co.uk), February 02, 2005

Answers

Matt -

I'm an SAL guy, so I can't speak with certainty about the ACL, but my guess is, in this area, the two were very similiar.

The reason you see mainly FGEX is that is what primarily ran in the east coast. FGE was owned by its "member" railroads (much like Railbox is today) and those members were just about every railroad of size east of the Mississippi. If I remember, at one time about 20 railroads were member/owners of FGE, and this included ACL & SAL (the FGE corporation still exists today as a subsidiary of CSX).

FGE, in turn, had an ownership interest in WFE along with the GN, and BREX was owned by FGE, WFE, and CCB&Q. Part of the agreements between these 3 reefer companies is that they would "share" equipment as needed.

In the fall during the apples harvist, FGE would send excess cars to the northwest, in return WGE and BREX would send cars south during the winter for the citrus crops.

An excellent article about this is in the 1Qtr 2000 Lines South. Although it is about perischables on the SAL, a lot probably can be applied to the ACL. Near the end of the article, it mentions percentages that could be found on the SAL of about 60% FGEX cars, 20-25% BREX/WFE, and the rest everything else. The CN would fall in that the last category.

Hope this helps.

-- Bill Parks (bparks_43@yahoo.com), February 02, 2005.


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