There was a nice four page article, excerpted from a May 11, 1912 Railway and Engineering Review, which included a track plan plus interior and ice deck photos, in the 4th Quarter 1988 Santa Fe Modeler. Unfortunately this issue is long-OOP. Basically the large building was a huge refrigeration plant, utilizing brine tanks, which delivered cold air to the ice deck, where flexible ducts were fitted to each end of a car's hatches. Cold air was blown in one end and sucked out the other, thus quickly cooling the already-loaded car by a number of degrees. The idea was to remove the field heat and thus reduce ice melt, and consequently reduce the need for frequent re-icings on the journey east. The pre-cooling deck had a capacity of 32 cars--16 to a side. Originally icing was also done at the pre-cooling deck, but in later years the shed was expanded to include a standard icing deck of similar length, thus apparently accounting for the two additional tracks.
Another, probably later, track plan--this time with four tracks under the shed roof rather than the original two--was (is?) available from the SFRH&MS. Neither of these track charts are to scale.
For my HO San Bernardino B Yard I "guestimated" what the precooler building would look like, not having available the great photos that Jim Lancaster has just posted to the List. I have posted some photos of my MUCH reduced model--my precooling and icing decks hold 8 cars each, 4 to a side. Even at one-fourth the size of the prototype, my model is huge. I modeled the buildings as basically windowless, but now I see in Jim's photos that the "machinery end" has a lot of windows--I guess I'll have to make some modifications there. :-)
Tom Cockle
Fieldbrook CA
