Atlas Reefer Ice Loading?

Found these Gooling around.  Draw your own conclusions...

Rusty

a 300lb block of ice is about 5 cuft.

these look a lot smaller, maybe 50lb blocks?

cheers...gary

Here's one way they loaded ice bunkers through the car side doors:

The ice bunkers are not being filled through the side door. That is top icing of the product. 

You won't find many pictures of men hauling around blocks of ice with hand trucks.  That would be too labor intensive, even by the standards of 75 years ago.  Conveyers were used to move blocks down the platforms where they were pushed by pike poles across planks to the hatches or fed to machines.  A 300 lb block could be broken into 75 pound chunks pretty quickly by hand.  The use of icing machines to make course or crushed ice at icing platforms became more common after WW II.

For more see:

http://modelingthesp.blogspot....ice-terminology.html

  Modelers sometimes develop odd ideas about how ice was placed in bunkers. In actuality, it was done with three possible sizes of the ice (again, from tariff rules). These were as follows: “chunk,” meaning not more than 75 pounds per piece (a standard PFE ice block weighed 300 pounds, so that is a quarter of a block); “coarse,” meaning about the size of a melon, 10- to 20-pound pieces; and “crushed,” meaning about the size of a man’s fist. Any smaller than that, and there would not be large enough air spaces among the ice pieces to permit good air circulation, which of course was essential so that cold air from the bunker could move freely into the load space and displace warm air. But full 300-pound blocks were not placed directly in bunkers.
     Other icing services included “top icing,” which involved blowing finely crushed ice across the top of the load inside the car, a good way to keep leafy vegetables moist in transit, and “body icing,” in which blocks of ice were placed among the boxes of produce. Some en-route icing stations could provide re-top-icing services.

http://www.whippanyrailwaymuse...ted-refrigerator-car

http://paulv99.zenfolio.com/p4...20/hDA91E85#hda91e85

Thanks...I found many of these photos and more after doing a search.  Found a photo

of hand top icing a car through the door by a guy lifting and heaving a block of ice

into a powered crusher for spraying through the door.  THAT looks labor intensive,

as does  breaking blocks up by hand  (many photos show those big 300 lb? blocks on the platform conveyoer (my kit and none I have seen provide for a conveyor, which looks like a simple addition down the center of the platform, UNLESS YOU WANT IT TO OPERATE ), nor have I seen a model of an ice crusher.  It does look like they are dropping blocks through the hatches, just not 300 lb. ones.  (one wonders why the photos show the conveyors moving those big blocks, and 75lb. ones for immediate loading weren't put on and moved by conveyor to the loaders?)  I need to figure out how to add the center platform conveyor, non operating, to my existing model.....

The Berkshire Vally reefer icing platform & ice house kit has that block conveyer down the platform. I have one of those platforms on the layout, it is 6 feet long. 

Maybe it is my imagination, but I thought there was a Lionel/Flyer? accessory that moved ice blocks..maybe not an icing platform.  With all the accessories, I'd be surprised there wasn't one to drop blocks into a special reefer's hatches....probably to be removed by hand, but.....I don't want an operating one, but what I just described,

which doesn't sound very different from other accessories, and "banjoflyer's" suggestion above sound doable....I just want my static one to LOOK realistic...

Lionel 352 Icing Station and 6352 PFE Reefer