1 66 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
later. You have had to stand for using 
poor and worn out cars which no other 
section of the country will consent to use. 
It is the belief of some railroad men that 
winter shipments do not require as good 
equipment as do summer crops, so you 
are asked to use up the old cars. I saw 
one last week that had a hole in the door 
large enough to throw a base ball through 
it. Whatever your needs, these cars are 
not right and are the cause of grave los¬ 
ses. They make uncertain the benefits of 
one of the greatest savings you can make 
today, the saving in ice. And they undo 
all fine work in refrigeration. 
There are today enough refrigerator 
cars built to the so-called United States 
standard, and enough more building, to 
scrap some thousands of these cars that 
are not only worn out, but never were 
refrigerator cars in the right sense of the 
word. I believe it lies within your power 
to do this thing now. The railroads have 
taught you how to do it. They tell you 
how many nails you must put in your 
orange boxes before they can be used as 
standard and take the rate applying to 
oranges properly packed. Why do you 
not petition the. Interstate Commerce 
Commission for a tariff defining what is 
a standard refrigerator car, how it must 
be built and in what condition it must be 
before the railroad can charge you for 
refrigerator service? How can the Inter¬ 
state Commerce Commission refuse this 
demand for your protection with all the 
definitions now in the tariff put there on 
petition of the railroads for their protec¬ 
tion ? Why not outlaw these old cars and 
do it now? 
Then there is the, saving in ice on fruit 
that has been pre-cooled. Ice will not be 
cheap for some years to come. That is 
one reason why your freight bills are 
high. The railroads rightly charge you 
for the ice, for the cost of icing the cars 
and for the interference to their sched¬ 
ules for frequent icing in transit. Pre¬ 
cooled fruit is not iced in transit. The 
cars are iced once before shipment. When 
pre.-cooling has become general, train 
schedules can be shortened and further 
savings made. 
Fruit and vegetables that have been 
well pre-cooled enjoy all the benefits of 
full icing in transit at the cost of once 
icing before shipment. In dollars this 
means that five hundred cars of pre- 
cooled fruit will save sixty dollars a car 
in cost for ice. or thirty thousand dollars. 
And one of the pre-coolers completed last 
fall has done just that. And the pre¬ 
cooler is already paid for out of this sav¬ 
ing among others. 
Another saving is in the price of the 
fruit and the prevention of decay. All 
citrus fruit is not equally perishable and 
some of it is quite hardy. But seedlings 
and late varieties that are shipped in 
warm weather are greatly benefited by 
pre-cooling. Some localities will never 
be able to solve their losses from decay in 
any other way. It is not possible to re¬ 
duce savings from benefits of this kind 
to dollars as we can in the case of ice be¬ 
cause such a figure would be mere guess 
work, but the savings are very great nev¬ 
ertheless and they are greater in some dis¬ 
tricts and for some fruit than in other 
districts and for other and hardier fruit. 
