Rolling Stock

Fruit Growers Express (FGE) was a railroad refrigerator car leasing company that began as a produce-hauling subsidiary of Armour and Company's private refrigerator car line. Armour controlled both the packing operations and the transport insulated railroad car line, and its customers had complained they were overcharged. In 1919 the Federal Trade Commission ordered the company's spinoff of Fruit Growers Express for antitrust reasons, which was accomplished by 1920.

Fruit Growers Express received ownership of 4,280 railroad cars, rolling stock repair operations in Alexandria, Virginia and Jacksonville, Florida, and a number of ice houses and railcar servicing facilities on the east coast of the United States, which it served. Fruit Growers Express was owned by a consortium of major railroads, in which the Chicago and Eastern Illinois, Norfolk & Western, and the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad (known simply as the New Haven) were major stockholders. The Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad also held a small (4.5%) ownership position, but sold out by 1982. Other railroads with an interest in FGE were the Atlantic Coast Line, Baltimore & Ohio, Pennsylvania Railroad, Chesapeake & Ohio and the Southern Railway.

Hauling produce and servicing it along the route of railroad lines was a very specialized and exacting business segment. Having Fruit Growers Express as a nominally independent company, owned by a consortium of railroads and focused on specific operation and construction of iced and insulated boxcars, freed the major railroads from each bearing the heavy capital costs associated with refrigerated produce operations and the seasonal surges that accompanied it.

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