Untitled Document
out of print, not available
Pacific Fruit Express
Second Edition
By Anthony W. Thompson, Robert J. Church and Bruce H. Jones.
Cloth with dust jacket, 472 pages, 8.5x11"; 52 maps and drawings, 744 photographs, index, bibliography. 2000.
"First edition published, June, 1992; out of print since January, 1997. Widely acclaimed in its first edition, not only for its complete and detailed coverage of the PFE car fleet, but also for its corporate history and extensive description of harvesting and shipping of Western perishables, the book has in recent years brought $200 and more per copy on the used book market.
"The product of six years of research by each of the authors, this book is a must for the historian and serious modeler. Covered in detail are company history, management organization, turn of the century predecessor refrigerator cars, all classes of wood and steel ice refrigerator cars, mechanical refrigerators, trailers, flat cars and containers, car repair shops, natural ice and manufactured ice plants, western agricultural development and produce shipping, and an album of PFE in action across America, along with an Appendix of 34 pages, a fully detailed bibliography, and an index.
"In the second edition, a number of corrections and additions were made in the text, and improved photographs were included in some cases; the total number of corrected pages is about 100. Furthermore, 56 new color images, as well as tabular equipment summaries, were also added, bringing 32 new pages to the book. In all, about a third of the pages in the new edition are new or revised. There are now 744 total photographs in the book (64 in color), along with 52 drawings, maps, and other graphics. A triple-width foldout map of the PFE system by cartographer John Signor is retained."
