PFE Colton Ice Plant
A post by Ronald G. Martin on the Facebook Sheila Steele's Inland Empire Calif. History/Culture group.
My Notes:
Undated photo.
Original plant purchased from Armour Meat Packing in1908. An entirely new plant with the pre-cooler was built in 1910. Within a few years there were three icing platforms
In 1952 over 24,000 reefers were iced. This plant served the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific and cars brought in from the Pacific Electric Railway. It also provided ice to other PFE icing stations and plants as needed.
Pre-cooling operations were shut down in the 1950s.
In 1973 the ICC permitted discontinuance of bunker icing for refrigerator cars. The railroads no longer were required to re-ice reefers in transit on their lines. This meant that large reefer fleet operators such as FGE, PFE and Santa Fe no longer could rely on other railroads to re-ice interchanged reefers.
Top-iced service (placing ice over the load) was offered after that date by some railroads that discontinued bunker icing. This service was used mainly for vegetables. Some of the ice bunker cars also continued to be used as insulated boxcars but the number of ice bunker reefers in revenue service declined rapidly after 1973.
Several other developments also caused a decline in overall perishable shipments. The continued development of the Interstate Highway System favored trucking as did new, more favorable trucking regulations related to agriculture. In addition, the rise of the large supermarket chains in the 1950s encourage direct truck shipment of perishables to distribution centers and retail stores, thus reducing business for the large metropolitan produce terminals that were destinations for refrigerator cars.
Bob Chaparro
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Bob Chaparro