Western Railroad Discussion > First Of It's Kind In San Francisco

Spotted this hi-cube UPFE reefer at South San Francisco two days ago, here it's spotted in San Francisco at a local cold storage warehouse, quite the comparism next to the standard reefer.

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Interesting. I'll have to keep an eye for this type of UPFE reefer.

Thanks for the photo.


George,
Fontana,Cal.

I did a double take when I saw that same car roll thru Martinez the other day. A huge box.

Are you sure it's not a MX missle launcher car?

Is that thing significantly larger than the big CRYX boxes? My memory is failing me at the moment. Massive either way.

These cars are very common in Seattle. I see about 10-30 cars or up here.

Brian E. Bundridge
Seattle, Washington

I am really surprised you all haven't seen these before. They have been around since late 1997 and early 1998. I am not sure how many of them are around but they are quite frequent here in Illinois.

Ken Larson
UP Chicago

I have seen them before in other parts, but never this far north up the Peninsula, and not into San Francisco until now. There are clearance issues on this line from four tunnels on the Caltrain route, an item in the special instructions speaks of it. I personally have never seen any high cube cars come into the city since I've been following the activities here, especially this type as it truely is the first of it's kind to visit the area. I'm told though that auto racks were quite common at Mission Bay, and old heads will say if you look closely in some of the tunnels you can see scrape marks from the cars rocking back and forth.

Frank

ball-n-bar wrote:

> I am really surprised you all haven't seen these before. They
> have been around since late 1997 and early 1998. I am not sure
> how many of them are around but they are quite frequent here in
> Illinois.
>
> Ken Larson
> UP Chicago
>
> [%sig%]

I was related the story behind these cars some time ago, and it ain't pretty. They were built by Trinity and a resin ploymer corp on spec, some 50 or 100 cars. But they didn't live up to the expectations and UP picked them up on the cheap. They have a habit of cracking along the frame thus losing some of their insulating value (I've seen this), plus the resin is very heavy and they cannot carry as much weight as the newer Trinity all-steel cars. Basiclly those cars were a huge finacial loss for Trinity.

Ted Curphey
funnelfan@icehouse.net

Isn't that the same type of reefer that BNSF owns?
If I'm not mistaken the BNSF reefers are white with blue isicles along the roofline.




BNSF9999-Ducks in six, over Minnesota Wild!

See them back East all the time, I thought they came from California?

Gonut

So how tall are they?

We get them in GA all the time too.
Larry