Railroaders' Nostalgia > Hi-jinx at the ice house, 1960.

Back in the early 1960's, the ice house beside the main line in the community where I worked was a busy place. During the summer, there were several passenger trains which called which still had ice air conditioning, and at least two perishable merchandise trains with many ice actuated refrigerator cars.

It was so busy that high school students were hired to move the ice out of storage to ramps that delivered it either to the icing stage for the freight cars, or down to platform level for the passenger trains.

The ice for the passenger trains was in large blocks. If ice was required for the reefers, the blocks were crushed into smaller pieces to fit into the roof hatches of the reefer cars.

There was a crusher which consisted of two grinding wheels on the ramp to the icing stage. This was a terrifying looking machine, without some of the safeguards that would be required today to avoid injury to persons loading ice.

The foreman would always advise the casual workers loading the ice into the crusher of the dangers this machine imposed. Because the mix of students hired for the day was constantly changing, every shift included the safety briefing.

One day, a group of students heading to work at the ice house were wandering through the alley behind a butchers shop, and spotted a quantity of meat discarded behind the shop. They gathered up the rotting meat and placed it in a sack.

As usual, the foreman at the icehouse delivered his safety speech and left the students to carry out their duties, which included running the crusher.

After running a few blocks through the crusher, they dumped the sack of rotten meat down the chute too, and let out blood curdling cries. Below on the icing stage, blood and meat came out with the crushed ice. The foreman and the workers below feared the worst and raced upstairs to the storage area. By that time, the students were seen running away laughing and a quick head count showed that they were all intact. Needless to say, they didn't get to work at the ice house ever again.

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/23/20 02:21 by eminence_grise.

I love stories like this! Thank you for the laugh!

Posted from iPhone

What goes around, comes around.

Heard a similar story but the prankster put rags soaked in red transmission fluid in a snowbank so it would freak out the poor snow blower type of plow operator when he hit it.

Reminds me of the beer comerical.Remember
two guys in the snow? One was eating the snow
that looked like someone had peeed on it.The
other guy has a puzzled look,Actually it
was spilled beer.

Uncle Joe
Seffner,Fl.

'Yellow Snow' -
Clean snow with a splash of Cuervo Gold tequila.
...Lorenzo

On the SP, this Hi-jinx, which I previously posted, cost a human life:

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?18,3405194,3405194#msg-3405194