Hot Water posted:In my experiences, I have never seen a "mail train" or "express train", that did not have the rider coach/combine attached to the rear (the exception of course would have been the PRR, that had so many mail & express trains that they finally outfitted N5 cabin cars with higher speed trucks and steam train lines for steam heat inside the car, and those cabin cars were lettered & assigned to "Assigned to Railway Express Agency).
As added information, the Southern Pacific operated an over night PFE reefer train with a three digit, low number, train number (being a second class passenger train) usually pulled by a GS class 4-8-4, with a coach in the rear. Even though the entire train was made up of all ice refrigerator cars, passenger could still purchase a ticket to ride the rear coach, in the middle of the night.
Were the PFE reefers used on that train equipped with steam and signal lines or were they just from the regular PFE pool? I thought the orange PFE reefers weren't equipped for passenger train duty, but I could be wrong.
