Micro-Trains - 049 00 780 - Reefer, Ice, 40 Foot, Wood - Northern Refrigerator - 6399

Specific Item Information: These 40’ double-sheathed wood reefers with vertical brake wheel are brown with green or yellow sides and run on Bettendorf trucks. The Northern Refrigerator Car Company was founded by the Cudahy brothers in Milwaukee, WI. In 1928 the company was purchased by Merchants Despatch Transportation Company, but retained the NRCC reporting mark on all 3,700 reefers. Refrigerator cars like this were used to transport bananas from the deep south to more northern states.

Model Information: Micro-Trains introduced this body style in July of 1982. It features opening roof hatches - an innovation for N Scale at the time. The detail of the body combined with the high quality printing makes this tooling an excellent choice for modeling early-20th century billboard reefers. It is particularly well suited for modeling the cars used by pre-war meat packers. The prototype is a 40 Foot Wood-Sheathed Ice Reefer with vertical brake wheel (the wheel itself is horizontal).

Prototype History: In 1924 and 1926, the D&RGW shops in Alamosa built one last class of refrigerator cars, still made mostly of wood: twenty "long" reefers, with a length of 40ft and a capacity of 25 tons (#150 to 169). They rode on Andrews trucks and were designed to have the same capacity as a small standard gauge refrigerator car, to facilitate transhipments at the gauge changing points. In 1967, 12 of these refrigerator cars were still active on the Rio Grande. Today, four long reefers are conserved on the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad (#157, 163, 166 and 169), two at the Colorado Railroad Museum (#159 and 167), one on the Georgetown Loop Railroad (#153) and #168 is part of the Sumpter Valley Railway collection.

Road Name History: Northern Refrigerator Line (reporting mark NRC) began as a subsidiary of the Cudahy Packing Co. and was spun off in 1922 as Northern Refrigerator Car Company. In 1928, NRC was purchased by Merchants Despatch but continue operating as a separate entity. Merchants Despatch formally absorbed NRC in 1962, but cars retained their NRC reporting marks.
The bulk of the fleet was Pullman 40' Wood Reefers following the USRA design with steel fishbelly underframes, built in the 1920s.

Brand/Importer Information: Micro-Trains is the brand name used by both Kadee Quality Products and Micro-Trains Line. For a history of the relationship between the brand and the two companies, please consult our Micro-Trains Collector's Guide.

Manufacturer Information: Micro-Trains Line split off from Kadee Quality Products in 1990. Kadee Quality Products originally got involved in N-Scale by producing a scaled-down version of their successful HO Magne-Matic knuckle coupler system. This coupler was superior to the ubiquitous 'Rapido' style coupler due to two primary factors: superior realistic appearance and the ability to automatically uncouple when stopped over a magnet embedded in a section of track. The success of these couplers in N-Scale quickly translated to the production of trucks, wheels and in 1972 a release of ready-to-run box cars.

Micro-Trains Line Co. split off from Kadee in 1990 to form a completely independent company. For this reason, products from this company can appear with labels from both enterprises. Due to the nature of production idiosyncrasies and various random factors, the rolling stock from Micro-Trains can have all sorts of interesting variations in both their packaging as well as the products themselves. When acquiring an MTL product it is very important to understand these important production variations that can greatly enhance (or decrease) the value of your purchase.

Please consult our Micro-Trains Collector's Guide