New Packing House Arrives in Holden

A California Fruit Express refrigerator car awaits loading at the new San Joaquin Fruit Growers' Association packing plant.

The San Joaquin Fruit Growers' Association packing house in Holden is now complete and occupied in Holden. Refrigerator cars ship daily with apples, grapefruit and other produce. In other words, I have completed another structure for this town.
    It started life as a Walthers packing house kit. Usually, I don't use standard kits, not because they are not good, but because they seldom look like structures in the part of the country I am modeling. In this case, the Walthers kit looked like a frame packing house would like in the 1890s. The kit was assembled per the instructions with little being done. The signs for the building were custom printed.
     The stacks of fruit crates were constructed by wrapping wooden blocks with a printed wrapper showing stacks of fruit crates. This was done by first selecting end labels which appealed to me (there are numerous photos of these labels on line) and then reducing the image to HO scale. The label was then duplicated in a stack-like formation. The same thing was done for the sides of the crates and the top. These images were organized to form a wrapper which glued to the wood block. The individual crates were obtained from Shapeways (https://www.shapeways.com/product/X7NBJNAAQ/orange-shipping-crate-set-ho-no-lids?optionId=59187209&li=user-wishlist). They come in both open top and closed top configurations.