How about all the salt they drop in the winter in the state of New York. I live some miles from where they mine it. What could be the difference?

Bernd

Yep, we can drop tons of salt on our roads, but drop just 1 gallon of deisel fuel and its call the hazmat team.

BTW  Calcium chloride is is bad for the ground water, But Calcium Magnesium Hydroxide is supposed to be safe for the enviroment. It just costs a WHOLE lot more.....Mike

Good points all.  While researching how to build a possible industry, I ran across a fed govt booklet on the building requirements that was published in 1940.  In it the builders were REQUIRED to use an asbestos layer as fireproofing.  Today you would be shot at sunrise for even thinking of using asbestos.

BUT you're still required to put in the fireproofing!!!

Asbestos worked great until it got uncovered.  Then, mayday...

I find Ice Reefer service fascinating, especially with the late steam era.  There near the end they'd load the reefers up with crushed ice, delivered by a Stegosaurus looking contraption cross with a conveyor belt.

It's be nice to see more layouts handle Ice service in a more serious manner, only because it seems in most places they're kicked around like boxcars with no thoughts towards extra care and consideration.

Folks,

Having completed extensive research into the Natural Ice Production in the Central Rocky Mountains one of the more interesting facets I found was the large bulk shipments of Natural Ice from the higher reaches in the Rockies, normally at elevations greater than 8000 feet ASL out to either ice houses in the Great Basin or out into the Plains and into New Mexico was in the 1880s accomplished in refrigerator cars as expected, but by the early 1890s the railroads realized that they were able to ship from Colorado into Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas with little or no loss of product.  So by the 1890s most of the natural ice was shipped in regular box cars because the refrigerator cars were needed to move the fruit and vegetable products from the west to the east.  In a time when my favorite railroad, the only Standard Gauge outfit in the Central Rockies was shipping 20 car trains of ice when the average size of the freight trains were only eight to ten cars long because of siding lengths, were going in twenty car long trains with special clearance because of the needs of their customers (in this case the Rock Island and Santa Fe.  Since the my favorite railway owned the ice pons and the ice storage houses it turns out that the shipment to distant icing facilities was a major source of income since the use of artificial ice production was still four years away.

Benny -

Actually, we do that already on a rather famous NKP layout here in NJ (I think you can guess which one!)

Having run the west end yard goat position (and that's where the dock is located), I do have some experience operating it. Basically, trains arriving eastbound will have special tickets attached to their waybills that state that said cars need to be pulled off and set out at the dock post haste. Sometimes it's only four, sometimes it's nine! And you have to take into consideration that there also might not be enough room to fit them all in one "sitting" (or is that "setting"?), too.

Now the clock begins to tick, since not only do these cares need to get back on the same train they just got pulled off of, but really, the clock does begin to tick! There is a kitchen timer marked out to equate the guesstimated time that it would roughly take to ice a set of reefers. So as soon as the cars are set, you crank the timer, and then when the timer dings (I think it's about 5 real minutes, I don't actually remember), and ONLY then, you remove the tickets, pull the cars, and get them back on the head end of that symbol freight bound for Buffalo! There is also a stub end track behind the dock that gets company ice cars as well, so that part of the simulation is also covered.

On my LVRR layout, I model an icing platform as well, and while the dock isn't as big and the traffic nearly as heavy as the model NKP action, I plan to model the LVRR company cars and their movements, since I have some good info on their operations out of Pennsylvania that's too good NOT to model.

Good points all. While researching how to build a possible industry, I ran across a fed govt booklet on the building requirements that was published in 1940. In it the builders were REQUIRED to use an asbestos layer as fireproofing. Today you would be shot at sunrise for even thinking of using asbestos.

I have an old model railroad how to do it book from Kalmbach that advises mixing asbestos shorts into the scenery plaster to make it stronger.