The Refrigerator Car: The Ice-Cooled Boxcar That Rewrote the Beef Trade

Why did beef need a refrigerated car?

After the Civil War, Chicago emerged as a major railway center for distributing livestock raised on the Great Plains to eastern markets. Cattle from Texas ranches had to be driven up to 1,200 miles (1,900 km) to railheads in Kansas City or to Abilene (1867) and Dodge City (1872), where they were loaded into stock cars and shipped live. The Wikipedia article on the refrigerator car describes the costs: trail drives caused weight loss and deaths, and about 60 percent of a live animal's mass is inedible.

Packers wanted to ship dressed meat from Chicago plants to eastern cities instead. Cutting the waste of moving bones, hide and live weight, and the losses of animals that died in transit, was the commercial case for a refrigerated car.

Early attempts before 1878

Refrigerated shipping began with butter and other goods. The first refrigerated boxcar entered service in June 1851 on the Northern Railroad in New York, an 'icebox on wheels' that worked only in cold weather. The first dressed beef left the Chicago stock yards in 1857 in ordinary boxcars with ice bins, but putting meat directly against ice discolored it and changed the taste.

Gustavus Swift tried a string of ten boxcars with the doors removed for winter test shipments to New York. William Davis of Detroit patented a car that hung carcasses over an ice and salt mixture, and sold the design in 1868 to George H. Hammond, who built cars to carry meat to Boston. The load swung to one side in curves, and the cars were dropped after several derailments.

Swift, Chase and the railroads that said no

In 1878 Swift hired engineer Andrew Chase to design a ventilated, well-insulated car. Ice sat in a compartment at the top so chilled air flowed down, and the meat was packed low to keep the center of gravity down and stop the cargo shifting. Chase's design proved practical, and it let Swift and Company ship dressed meat across the United States and abroad.

Major American railroads refused to buy it. They had large investments in stock cars, animal pens and feedlots, and feared dressed beef would hurt them. Swift paid for the first production run himself and contracted with the Grand Trunk Railway, which earned little from live cattle, to haul the cars into Michigan and east through Canada.

Swift Refrigerator Line and the packers' rise

The Peninsular Car Company, later bought by ACF, delivered the first units to Swift in 1880, and the Swift Refrigerator Line was created. Within a year its roster was nearly 200 cars, and Swift was moving an average of 3,000 carcasses a week to Boston. Armour and Company and other firms followed quickly. By 1920 the line owned and operated 7,000 ice-cooled cars, and the General American Transportation Corporation took over ownership in 1930.

The same article records that fruit shippers built large fleets of their own, including the Pacific Fruit Express, and that icing for refrigerator cars reached 1.3 million short tons a year at the industry's peak. Beef was only one of many cargoes.

How an ice-cooled reefer worked

For most of the nineteenth century the ice was natural, harvested from ponds and lakes, cut into blocks in winter and stored in insulated warehouses with sawdust and hay. A late nineteenth-century wood-bodied reefer needed re-icing every 250 to 400 miles. Later cars used manufactured ice, and eventually mechanical refrigeration, dry ice or liquid nitrogen.

These cars differed from simple insulated boxcars and ventilated boxcars, which have no cooling equipment. Chase's design details, ice at the top and meat packed low, were meant to give steady temperature and a stable load on long trips.

Where to read more

The history of the car is also covered in the stock car article, which describes the live-animal side of the trade. For the cattle trails that fed the rail system, see the ranching section on farm.FM or a farm.FM story about Chicago meatpacking. The ocean version of the same idea is described in the refrigerator ship article.