The Freight Yard - 2240B - Reefer, Ice, Steel - Kraft - 67058

Specific Item Information: Micro-Trains Line model decorated by The Freight Yard.

Model Information: The prototype for this model is the PFE R-40-10 ice reefer built in 1936 and 1937.
MTL released this model with various road names, for which the actual prototype might in fact be different.

Prototype History: Not all steel reefers contained mechanical refrigeration units. Although today we expect that a modern reefer contain an air conditioning unit to be integral to the car design, this was not always true. There was a period following the second world war when the cost of steel was cheap but the cost of a refrigeration unit was high. Early mechanical refrigeration units were unreliable, noisy, expensive and costly to maintain, and for the early post-war years many railroads continued to use ice for refrigeration even though the technology for mechanical refrigeration was possible.

In the post-WWII period, steel once again became readily available and the railroads rapidly replaced their aging fleets of wood reefers with newly constructed steel cars. Among the more common steel reefers for meat and other perishable commodities were those built by URTX. These cars had a horizontal rivet strip along the middle of each side, improved Dreadnaught ends and diagonal-panel roofs.

From Wikipedia and other sources

Road Name History: Kraft Foods Group, Inc. is an American manufacturing and processing conglomerate headquartered in the Chicago suburb of Northfield, Illinois.

The company was restructured in 2012 as a spin off from Kraft Foods Inc., which in turn was renamed Mondelez International. The new Kraft Foods Group was focused mainly on grocery products for the North American market, while Mondelez is focused on international confectionery and snack brands. Until the merger with Heinz, Kraft Foods Group was an independent public company listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

On July 2, 2015, Kraft completed its merger with Heinz, arranged by Heinz owners Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital, creating the fifth largest food and beverage company in the world, Kraft Heinz Company.

From Wikipedia

Brand/Importer Information: The Freight Yard was a hobby shop that did custom decoration and special runs of other manufacturers' N Scale products. It sold its custom products under several brands or collections: Premiere Editions, by The Freight Yard and Dreams Design.
It was located in Anaheim, California and then moved to 2006 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Established in the late 1980s, it stopped business under this name by the end of the 2000s.
The Freight Yard was owned and operated by Darren J. Cohen. Darren is now operating North Valley Trains.
The Freight Yard / Premiere Editions runs are usually available in series of two to twelve different numbers (suffixed A to M, with I not used).
The first two digits of the stock number correspond to the release year (9x being 199x, and 2x being 200x).

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