OK, let's play 'pretend'...
Pretend the small town on your layout doesn't have a BIG ice-making facility to dispense cubes directly onto a l-o-n-g platform at refrigerator car roof height, from which workers load several mechanical reefer bins simultaneously...as might have happened in a large midwest metropolis railroad yard servicing your UP Big Boy pulling a coast-to-coast perishables manifest of, oh say, 100 cars...a facility patterned after Atlas's Ice House and Loading Platform kits.
So, let's say this small town wants to provide refrigerator car icing service for emergencies, ...or the pride of your town, a craft beer brewery that's just been discovered by the rest of the country, demand growing daily. But to ice the reefer or two, we need to use the ice made by...Union Ice Company...in the neighboring town, not trackside (off the layout, down the road, two left turns of the imagination).
So the town erects this minimal icing station...by Lionel...conveniently placed on a siding or on the mainline at the edge of town. Every so often the Union Ice truck...
...pulls up to the side of the loading station (the bottom chute), delivers its load of large cubes for the reefers, the imaginary conveyer (Aided by the Huge Hand of Heaven!) lifts the cubies up the chute and into the dispensary house atop the platform, and stoic Steve, the cube pusher, rhythmically starts to load the awaiting reefer...of beer...or kumquats...or whatever the imagination warrants.
A
Who would've thought that such an amazing toy could create so much excitement in Yourville!?!?!
KD
