Trucking lore: Icing stations

Now, this was just dying out when I started driving, and I personally never drove such a load, but I DID see a few guys still doing this in the mid-late 80's. Maybe a few real old-timers can add more info...

So, there is a lot of citrus that ships from Florida up to New York, especially along the I-95 corridor (and years before, up US 1) that needs to be kept cool. Reefer units have been around since probably the late 1930's, but they were expensive and unreliable, not to mention heavy. A cheaper and more flexible alternative was to buy an insulated trailer, so that when you DID haul a produce load, you could just ICE it; cover the tops of the bins with clean burlap, and spray ground ice all over the top.

Of course, ice melts, and even the best insulated truck needs new ice at least once every day, so there were truckstops along the route where (for a price), they would have ice-sprayer machines to re-ice your load. Put a 100 lb block into the machine, turn the blower and the grinder on, and spray it allover the tops of the bins. Several large blocks were needed for each trailer.

Places like these probably existed up to maybe 1990. Only a few non-reefers still were carrying such loads, and they probably mostly were used by guys who had broken-down reefer units by the end.