Northern Refrigerator Car Company
Northern Refrigerator Line
1922-1938

Formation

The Northern Refrigerator Car Company had its roots in Cudahy's Milwaukee Refrigerator Line (CMRL.)  While related to the 'other Cudahy'¹, this latter enterprise was based in Cudahy, WI, and controlled by Patrick Cudahy in support of his meat packing business, Cudahy Brothers Packing Company.  This car line had been started in 1893 with just 50 cars, but by Patrick's death in 1919, had grown to approximately 300 34' and 36' wood underframe refrigerator cars, with some constructed as recently as 1917.  The founder's death brought his son, Michael Cudahy, to the helm, and changes were soon to follow.

At the outset of 1922, the formation of a new company, The Northern Refrigerator Car Company (NRCC) was announced with a capitalization of $425,000.  The 300 existing CMRL cars were shifted to the new company, and plans were immediately announced to purchase additional cars and operate a car repair facility.

The Old Cars

Of the 300 cars inherited from CMRL, they came in two outside lengths, 33'9" and 36', and were used in two services, beef and provisions, distinquished by the presence or lack of overhead beef rails.  Table 1 shows the series, services, and quantities below, as well as some groups that were renumbered.  While many of these persisted to the end of point of this study, they would gradually be overshadowed in the NRCC fleet as it grew substantially during the period.

Table 1: Former CMRL cars

While the bulk of these cars may have remained primarily in service for Cudahy Bros shipments², the 2900 series appears to have been reserved for cars leased to and lettered for a variety of businesses beginning as early as 1927.⁴  At least some portion of the cars were assigned to Chicago & Northwestern (CNW) service, while others were assigned to Green Bay & Western service.  Because of the well known 'billboard reefer ban', no further cars would have been relettered such after Aug 1934, and the cars would have been required to be repainted to remove such lettering by the end of 1936.  Also note that the 33'9" cars renumbered into the 2650 series in 1927 were incorrectly listed as 36' cars until that series was broken out in the 7/35 ORER listing.  Furthermore, these cars had their beef rails removed and were renumbered in the 2625 series, perhaps as they were repainted before the Jan 1937 ban came into effect.

New Cars from Pullman

With the additional capitalization in 1922, the new company placed an initial order for 500 new 40' steel underframe refrigerator cars with the Pullman Company, and followed up very shortly thereafter with a second order.  The first cars were numbered 3000-3499, while the second group claimed 4000-4499.

NRCC 3001, New 1922, Pullman Company

It must be noted that despite the builder's photo above, the first group of 500 cars was constructed slightly differently from all subsequent cars, with a lower 5' 11 1/8" door height and shorter 33' 1/4" inside length.  While the latter dimension was used throughout the cars' service life in the Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER) listings, the former number was incorrectly used for many years for the subsequent series as well.  However, the photographic record establishes this important difference, and it can be used to assist in sorting out later assignments, as will be explained further below.

NRCC 3224, repainted ca. 1927, NRCC

The first 500 cars appear to have been intially in an unassigned service, but may have also been lettered for Chicago & Northwestern service and/or assigned to the Illinois Central (IC.)  No photographs of billboard leases are known until after Oct 1926.

The 4000 series however, appears to have been built and lettered for the first of NRCC's banana leases.  Fruit Dispatch Company was a North American distribution arm of United Fruit Company, the largest of the banana oligopolies.  The banana industry was growing rapidly at the time, and NRCC would receive an additional 500 cars in 1924, 5000-5499, and 500 in 1926, 6000-6499, all seemingly leased to Fruit Dispatch, with the car side featuring the large banana bunch graphic.

NRCC 4000, New 1922, Pullman Company

By the summer of 1926, both of these series' number ranges were expanded, becoming 3000-3999 and 4000-4999, respectively.  This change is important, as it also signals the beginning of the well documented practice of NRCC billboard leases in, in particular, the 3000 series.  From 1926 through 1930, the practice involved selecting cars from the series, and repainting and renumbering them in small groups from 3500-3999.⁵  From 1932 until the 1934 ban, however, new leases were also lettered using the intial car numbers, 3000-3499⁶, while beginning in as early as Aug 1933, additional cars from later Pullman series were renumbered into the 3000 series to provide more cars for these leases.⁷

During 1927, another important banana lease was entered into with Standard Fruit and Steamship Company's Banana Distributing Company, a direct competitor to Fruit Dispatch.  For this new business, NRCC ordered an additional 201 cars to the same design from Pullman, and renumbered another 150 cars out of the 5000 series.  250 of that total was numbered into the 7000 series; the unknown quantity assigned to BDC was painted with green sides, but maintained the large banana graphic.  The remaining 100 cars saw 8000 series numbers applied.  Which service or lease this final group was assigned to is yet unknown, as no photographs of the series have come to light (a grainy 1941 image, thus postdating the banana leases, of NRC 807x, Ted Schnepf collection, shows a substantially similar paint scheme as 7084 seen below, although with lines above and below the reporting marks.)

NRCC 7084, ca 1938, Chicago Historical Society

Within a year and a half, NRCC saw the need to shift additional cars into the 6000 series.  Fifteen were drawn from the 3000 series and another 30 from the cumulative 7000-8999 series.  At approximately the same time, an additional 150 cars were also withdrawn from the 5000 series and moved into the cumulative 7000-8999 series.  The next changes to this portion of NRCC's fleet would occur during the first part of 1931, with 175 cars being pulled back out of the cumulative 7000-8999 series and being shifted to the 5000 series; whether those cars were from the group built in 1927 or original 5000 series cars built 1924 cannot be determined.

Table 2: Pullman built cars

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Leased Refrigerator Cars

Around the same time that NRCC began shifting their Pullman built cars around between series, they also began to lease additional cars from associated railroads with whom they had leased cars to beginning in 1922.⁸  These roads had substantial fleets of their own refrigerator cars but yet were not involved with the numerous railroad owned private car lines (such as American Refrigerator Transit, Fruit Growers Express, Merchants Despatch, and Pacific Fruit Express.)  The first such lease appears to have come NRCC around the end of 1927 from the Illinois Central Railroad.  

IC 55001-56000 had been built in 1921, with the series split between 650 cars from Haskell & Barker and 350 cars from General American Car Co.  Just prior to the lease, the IC had nearly 5700 40' refrigerator cars in numerous series that had been constructed in many lots and to a variety of designs since the teens.  New Orleans was the leading port for the importation of central American bananas, and the IC enjoyed a dominant share of that traffic.  Few photographs of these cars in NRCX lettering exist, but in all likelihood, these were acquired primarily for banana service, and while under NRCC lease, they appeared in the new "All Food Fruit" scheme without a specific corporate lessor.

NRCC 10395, Richard Burg collection, Terry Link scan here

Following the IC lease, NRCC would turn to another partnering railroad for additional cars for a different sort of traffic.  The Northern Pacific had acquired 1000 cars from AC&F (Lot 9310) in 1922, and the cars NRCC received and placed in the 9000 series were identical in features and dimensions.  However, ORER continued to list nearly 1000 cars in the NP series, even as the NRCC listing showed 500 cars beginning in 1928.

NRCC 9306, ca. 1934, Minnesota Historical Society collection

NP 93000-93999 diagram, NPRHA collection, here

Table 3: Cars leased from IC, NP

Merchants Despatch Takes Over

In January 1929, Merchants Despatch, affiliated closely with the New York Central System, purchased NRCC, rolling its assets into a new corporation, Northern Refrigerator Line.  This brought NRCC's dominant west-of and south-of Chicago traffic into the fold of an operation predominately operating in the northeast.  Consequently, this new relationship saw MDT augmenting the NRL fleet beginning in 1930, with the transfer of 200 nearly new refrigerator cars built by the company to the NRL 7500 series.  The following year, MDT also transferred 50 older 36' cars from their Eastern Refrigerator Despatch (ERDX) subsidiary to NRL; these cars appear to have been leased immediately to the A&P grocery concern.

Table 4: Cars leased from MDT, ERDX

Corrections

As is so frequently the case, small errors creep into published documents, or new material turns up that changes our understanding of history.  With all due respect to the authors whose work has contributed to this article, I offer a few small corrections:

In Billboard Refrigerator Cars by Hendrickson & Kaminski, page 112, CBRX 147 is not an former CMRL acquired by NRCC/NRL, but rather a former MDT/ERDX reefer.  Note the Ureco door hinges, ladders, and strap end braces, all indicative of the latter fleet.  Also, numerous captions in Chapter 6 of NRCC cars state the view is as new or as delivered; refer to the charts above for the build dates of the various cars.  The captions, in most circumstances, reflect when the car was repainted and leased.

In "The Postwar Freight Car Fleet" by Kline & Culotta, page 103, NRC 10210 was not constructed by AC&F in 1928, but rather a former IC car as explained above, built by either H&B or GACC in 1921.

Notes

1: Relatives owned The Cudahy Packing Company and its associated Cudahy Car Line, both based in Chicago.

2: See NRCC 2573, Billboard Refrigerator Cars by Hendrickson & Kaminski, or The Great Yellow Fleet by White.

3: See NRCC 2875, Billboard Refrigerator Cars by Hendrickson & Kaminski.

4: See NRCC 2900, 2907, 2930, & 2951, Billboard Refrigerator Cars by Hendrickson & Kaminski.

5: See NRCC 3509, 3559, 3575, 3604, 3607, 3611, 3647, 3655, 3665, 3763, 3772, 3803, 3804, 3833, 3837, & 3900, Billboard Refrigerator Cars by Hendrickson & Kaminski.

6: See NRCC 3410, 3485, 3634, 3665, 3745, 3502, 3504, & 3751, Billboard Refrigerator Cars by Hendrickson & Kaminski.

7: See NRCC 3100, 3200, 3300, 3325, 3424, 3630, 3670, 3692, & 3694, Billboard Refrigerator Cars by Hendrickson & Kaminski.

8: Lambert (1990) states that all 1000 of the 3000 and 4000 series were leased to IC beginning in 1922, from Mar 1 to Aug 1, while 300 of the cars were leased to NP from Aug 1 to Mar 1.  He states that the NP contract was modified in 1928 to include NRCC leasing the 500 cars from the railroad during the spring and summer months, and NP leasing 1500 cars from NRCC during the peak northwestern shipping season, Aug-Mar.

8:

9:

Sources

Official Railway Equipment Register (6/1912, 2/1913, 12/1914, 2/1916, 1/1917, 10/1917, 10/1919, 4/1923, 1/1925, 5/1925, 4/1926, 10/1926, 2/1928, 11/1929, 12/1930, 7/1931, 4/1932, 7/1934, 7/1935, 1/1938). New York: The Railway Equipment and Publication Co..

Railway Age (various years).

Hendrickson, Richard and Edward Kaminski (2008). Billboard Refrigerator Cars. Berkley and Wilton, CA: Signature Press.

Kline, Larry and Ted Culotta (2006). The Postwar Freight Car Fleet. Chattanooga, TN: NMRA.

Lambert, David (1990). MDT Metamorphosis, Part 1. Railroad Model Craftsman, January 1990. Carstens Publications.

White, John H. (1986). The Great Yellow Fleet. San Marino, CA: Golden West Books.

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Posted 11/12/22.  Updated 8/4/23.  Maintained by Earl Tuson