AHM-Roco ThermIce Car

I was always vaugely aware of an AHM product from the 1960s, a ThermIce plugdoor style car made by Roco in Austria. Like many of the colorful schemes on AHM cars of the period, I wasn't sure if it was prototypical. But I recently got the Green Frog video Fallen Flags of the Northeast, which has a great deal of footage taken mostly on the Pennsylvania, New Haven, Boston and Maine, and Central Vermont about 1962, which is the time and region where I started serious railfanning.

One short scene bowled me over: it was a New Haven freight passing through Cedar Hill yard with the camera lingering on a ThermIce plug door car. It was perfect evidence that the AHM car had a prototype, and it was in fact part of the rail environment I started railfanning in. I looked on eBay and found one pretty inexpensively, at least for eBay. I think Roco did a pretty good job with it, and remember, this model is 60 years old.

I did what I normally do with AHM cars, which is toss the trucks with their horn-hook couplers and pizza cutter wheels. I found a pair of AAR style trucks in my scrap box and added Kadee wheels. I filled the truck mounting holes with plastic sprue, drilled them #50, and attached the trucks with 2-56 screws. I mounted Kadee 148 couplers in the Kadee boxes and attached them to the floor with 2-56 screws as well. I would have added weight, but the previous owner had glued the floor to the body. I also painted the bare black plastic roofwalk silver.

I haven't been able to find a prototype photo of such a car anywhere outside of the Green Frog video. The view on the video isn't clear enough to give many details on the car outside of its general type and the paint scheme.

I was able to find TICX cars in the July 1968 Official Railway Equipment Register under National Car Company. There were two series, 8900 to 8920 and 8921 to 8941. Both are listed as type LRC, for which I haven't been able to find an identifier other than "L", which is a general type for a specially equipped car. The "R" probably also means it is some type of refrigerator. All were basically 40-foot cars, and the video indicates they had external plug dioors, but what was inside those doors is anyone's guess.

ThermIce was a subsidiary of Publicker Chemical, which was headquartered in Philadelphia, and the car is stenciled "When empty return to Pennsylvania RR So Phi terminal yards Philadelphia, PA". The presence of the car running through New Haven suggests it supplied customers in Boston, but beyond that, I know little.

A number of AHM products are salvageable for use on contemporary layouts. This is certainly one of them. I wish there was an easy way to rescue their Krauss-Maffei diesel!