The Freight Yard - CHC-040103 - Reefer, 40 Foot, Wood Sheathed - Anaheim, Azusa & Cucamonga - 4-pack

Specific Item Information: Micro-Trains Line model decorated by The Freight Yard / Premiere Editions.
Special run - only 10 produced.

Slogan and Road numbers :
- Cucamongan, AACR #12611
- Pomonan, AACR #12908
- Barstownian, AACR #13050
- City of Perris, AACR #13192

The A.A.C. R.R. CO was founded in 1903 by Ebinezer Phiney after acquiring a narrow gauge line running from Anaheim to Cucamonga via Pasadena in an all night poker game with Cyrus Holiday. The line became a household name due to its sponsorship of syndicated radio shows during the Golden Age of radio.
Service to Cucamonga and the Inland Empire was added in 1934 with joint operations along Santa Fe trackage. A fifth train, the Zzyzzx Zephyr, was soon discontinued after the Great Mojave Land Boom failed to materialized.

Series Information: California Heritage Collection, created by The Freight Yard / Premiere Editions.
The sets of "California Heritage Collection" cars are a series of N-scale reproductions evoking the memory of California's railroad history.

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: Anaheim, Azusa & Cucamonga is a fictitious railroad line connecting the three Californian cities, though they were located on different lines of the Atchison, Santa Fe and Topeka railroad.

The name is after a running gag used in The Jack Benny Program for years: “Train leaving on Track 5 for Anaheim, Azusa and Cuc---amonga.. This was started by Jack Benny on his old radio show. The announcer’s voice was that of Mel Blanc, who also voiced Bugs Bunny (“What’s up, doc?”) and other Looney Tunes characters. Blanc first called the stations on January 7, 1945 and the gag kept right on going into the TV years.

Hear it on YouTube.

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