Western Railroad Discussion > Preserving a PFE Reefer (Almost!)

The Promontory Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society(NRHS) has been working with the Utah Transit Authority(UTA) for several months to help find them an old reefer boxcar with the ice hatch to be painted and be on display at the new light rail stations in Draper Utah. My brother (Derrick Klarr) and I have been the members involved to give UTA the information and pictures. We had already had the pictures of the boxcars that have been sitting in Kanab Utah. There was 2 of the Pacific Fruit Express boxcars so UTA planned on taking one for their display and the Promontory Chapter was going to help preserve and restore the other PFE back to operational on the Heber Valley Railroad for their photo freight's.

We received the information late last week that everything would be in place at Kanab to pick up the 2 PFE boxcars on Monday Nov. 19th so we scrambled to get everything setup to be able to get our boxcar we finally were able to get all the semi-trucks setup over the weekend with much frustration I might add. Kanab is around 5 hours from home in Salt Lake City so we started getting everything ready to take down with us Sunday after I got off work and we drove part of the way and stayed the night at a hotel and finished the drive Monday morning. My brother and I have been raising money for the Promontory Chapter to help preserve and restore railroad equipment like these PFE boxcars.

Monday morning we started working on getting the boxcars ready, the boxcars had a walkway from the building into the cars so we had to tear down the walkways and board them back up after we were done. UTA had Rocky Mountain Railcar from Tooele Utah help with the boxcar that they were going to be taking.

UTA's car was the first one to be removed from next to the building, the truck frames was welded to the boxcar with 2 metal plates on each side so they had to be torched off, the crane had to set the car on the ground to be able to torch the plates then lift it back up to load it onto the truck.

While the crane had the boxcar in the air after the truck frames was removed the boxcar weighed around 10,000 pounds more than what was expected and the driver we had setup for our boxcar said that his truck can't handle that much weight. So for the next few hours while they were loading and chaining down the first boxcar the truck driver and my brother tried calling everyone that could possibly be able to handle that much weight and could be there that day while the crane was there on site, we didn't have good cell phone service there so we drove closer to town. No luck on finding an other truck so we had to call it off and just keep the other PFE boxcar there, we still had to take money from our funding to pay for the trucks that were there waiting to help us and at this time we still had to go back inside and board up the opening for walkway that we had already removed. So it turned out to be a BIG LOSS for us.
Maybe next time!

Here are some of the pictures I took of UTA's boxcar

Kerry Klarr



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/12 09:24 by kklarr.

---

---

---

That is not a happy ending....so sorry! B

These a reefers, not boxcars.

Thanks for your good efforts to preserve a piece of Pacific Fruit Express history. I hope you eventually get the other one.

Much appreciated.

Have fun, be safe,
Bruce "Doc" Jones - co-author, "Pacific Fruit Express" 1992; Central Valley Railroad Publications
2nd ed. 2000; Signature Press

Readers,
I went to the Utah Industrial Depot yesterday and work was under way. The reefer was unloaded, trucks sand blasted and put underneath the body and today around noon they had all but a little paint off, I'll post my pictures at a later date.

MrOGDEN