04/24/2026
Hello Everyone! It is with enthusiasm that AHSOME announces our upcoming eighth annual custom-decorated club car. For 2026, AHSOME presents our upcoming billboard re**er for the Peter Schoenhofen Brewing Company of Chicago, Illinois.
The billboard re**er era of railroading is a period of time that is largely misunderstood, and even today myths and misinformation continue to be circulated as overly-simplistic facts. There is no defined start date for what constitutes the billboard era. The earliest refrigerator cars to appear on American railroads were privately owned by default. Railroads were reluctant to invest in refrigerated rolling stock, both due to their high initial cost of construction, and then the seasonal nature of their usage. However that situation changed in the early 1900s when the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that the railroads, as common carriers, had to supply cars for all traffic generated on their lines. The ruling did not say that the cars had to be railroad-owned, only that the railroad had to supply them. The railroads were still not interested in rostering refrigerator cars that sat idle for periods of the year and that required specialized maintenance and in-transit servicing, so companies such as Pacific Fruit Express, Fruit Growers Express, Western Fruit Express, Burlington Refrigerator Express, and a whole host of others were formed specifically to own and deal with refrigerator cars that would be leased to the railroads when traffic required their use.
Although many of the refrigerator car companies were heavily affiliated with one or more railroads, they were legally separate companies, and thus free to lease their cars to whomever they chose. It was this situation that lead to what is commonly accepted as being the Golden Age of the billboard re**er, which kicked off following World War I. Prior to the war, billboard re**ers were primarily the domain of meat packers and breweries, companies that owned large fleets of their own cars and had national distribution. After the war, the ability to lease a car made it much more affordable to smaller companies, and in a way it became a bandwagon that everyone started jumping on. The refrigerator car leasing companies actively encouraged this business and offered incentives to do so. The most obvious was the lessee’s right to paint the car however they chose to. But behind the scenes, an even bigger incentive involved the per diem charges a car acquired. The railroads paid the car’s owner, the leasing company, the charges a car acquired while offline, but some of the leasing companies were then kicking back some of that money to the shipper who had leased the car. There were a couple extreme cases where a shipper was actually receiving more money back in per diem rebates than they were paying out to lease the car in the first place!
Eventually the proliferation of private owner re**ers reached a point that the railroads felt was intolerable and they complained to the ICC. Their complaints were primarily about the per diem kickbacks, that private owner re**ers had to be returned empty to the owner rather than carrying another load back, that some shippers were purposely specifying indirect routings in order to rack up the per diem payments, and that they were still required to have a supply of railroad re**ers on hand even though the shippers were using their own cars. The flashy billboard paint schemes and the free advertising value that they represented was not among the railroads main complaints, but rather was a case of “let’s complain about this too while we’re at it”.
The ICC opened hearings into the railroads complaints in 1933. One year later, they issued a ruling in the railroads favor. The per diem kickbacks were outlawed, which eliminated most shippers primary reason for having leased cars, and railroads were allowed to load private owner cars for the return trip. As for the billboard advertising on leased cars, no new billboard paint schemes could be applied after August 1, 1934, and all existing billboard cars had to be repainted by January 1, 1937, though this was later extended for another year. But the common belief that billboard paint schemes were outlawed is a myth. The ban on them applied to leased cars. A company that truly owned its own cars could still advertise itself, but could not advertise specific products if that product was not actually being shipped in the car. Likewise, though this is a minor point, the ICC ruling stated that railroads were not required to accept billboard cars in interchange, but it didn’t say that they couldn’t accept them.
But for all practical purposes, the golden age of the billboard re**er came to an abrupt end by government decree. There was a bit of a renaissance in the 1960s and early 1970s as some large meatpackers and brewers resumed placing their company names on their owned equipment, but as eye catching as they sometimes were, they paled in comparison to the golden age. In a bit of a postscript, the Wisconsin & Southern railroad operates an annual Santa Claus train. One of the large sponsors has been Sargento Cheese, so in 2008, W&S painted one of their boxcars into a Sargento Cheese paint scheme and ran it with the Santa train. The car contained all the required lettering and data for interchange, so after the Santa train, W&S released it into general service. Well it wasn’t long before the W&S was notified that the car violated the old billboard rules from 1934, and the car received large black rectangles painted over any lettering that referred to Sargento or its products.
Now that the artwork for the club’s upcoming Schoenhofen Brewing billboard re**er has been created and approved, we’re hopeful to have the cars available for sale within a couple months. At that time, I’ll feature the history of the Schoenhofen Brewing Company. Stay tuned!
