I¡¯ve been told that a typical manufactured block of ice used to cool a refrigerator car load weighed about 300 pounds. That seems like a nice round number (too nice) so I did a little digging.
I know that some of the ice pans used to manufacture ice in Santa Fe ice plants were 11¡± x 22¡± x 44¡± so lets call this the dimension of the resulting ice block.? This is the equivalent of 6.16 cubic feet.
I know that a cubic foot of water weighs 62.43 pounds at 32 degrees Fahrenheit and water expands when it converted to ice, so an ice block should weigh less than 62.43 pounds.
Several sources I consulted say (without giving the temperature) that a cubic foot of ice weighs 57.4 pounds.? So 6.16 cubic feet of ice should weight 354 pounds coming out of the pan. Obviously, there would be a loss of volume (and thus weight) by the time a block made it to the icing platform.
Still, that nice even number of 300 pounds persists.
Tony Thompson stated, "I haven't checked all these calculations but this sounds generally right. In the various PFE documents I saw, the 300-lb. size was cited repeatedly for manufactured ice, so PFE must have largely standardized on that. Natural ice was different, in part because you harvested varying thicknesses depending on the freeze. PFE made its natural ice blocks 22 inches square and as thick as was naturally frozen. Those blocks were stored on edge, each layer thus 22 inches high, avoiding the irregularity that could result if they were stored on the broad face.
Private ice companies of course could cut any size they liked of natural ice (Pete Holst told me that Union Ice liked to cut 22 x 28 inch blocks), and private ice companies manufacturing ice could likewise produce any size they liked."
Charlie Schultz stated, "Everything I have read indicated that on the Santa Fe the blocks were 300 pounds and that the blocks measured as you indicated (11" x 22" x 44"). In shipping ice, as from one plant to another, or in loading ice in the bunkers of reefer cars, it was always measured in terms of tons.?
Regarding lake ice, the last superintendent of the Santa Fe's Bakersfield Ice Plant told me that they occasionally received shipments of lake ice.? According to him, the blocks were not always uniformly cut to the normal dimensions and, as a result, they often would not move well on the plant's conveyors and sometimes even caused jams that were difficult to undo."
Charlie also stated, "With one exception, everything I have ever found indicates that the Santa Fe ice plants produced 300- pound blocks of ice. (One article indicated that the Argentine Ice Plant, which was operated by the Railways Ice Company, produced both 300 and 400 pound blocks of ice.)? In fact, it appears that 300 pound blocks of ice were standard not only with the railroads, but also in non-railroad ice plants in the production ice for commercial (non residential) use.? I have never read anything which gave any indication that the 300-pound block of ice weighed anything other than 300 pounds.? At the same time, I have never read anything, or from my personal experiences seen anything, that indicated that the Santa Fe had any quality control measures to insure that a 300-pound block of ice was exactly that."
Bob Chaparro
Moderator
