It surprised me to see ice harvests this late, so i found an article here:

1. Until the invention of mechanical ice makers, ice was the second-largest export from the US (after cotton).
2. Ice harvesting continued on into the 1950s.

For sure, the railroads used ice for their own purposes. Creameries also usually had their own ice house attached for icing down the milk in season. In the days before mechanical refrigeration, private homes needed natural ice for their "ice boxes", and that ice came from natural sources.

In some sections of the country, the railroads ran solid trains of ice from the collection points to city ice houses. They used reefers and even boxcars for the service.

If an ice house burned to the ground (not such a rare event), the resulting mound of remaining ice that survived might take a full year to melt.

Some of the 'heavyweight' passenger cars of the era were cooled by recirculating the chilled ice water through coils in the air conditioning system. PRR photo.

Wonder what one of those slabs weighs -- 300 pounds? Or more?

The reason that a railroad needed "icing" facilities was that refrigerator cars - "reefers" (before those became something you smoked) used ice for cooling. That particular railroad connected to the Chicago stockyards and so probably shipped a lot of refrigerated loads.

I've always wondered what it was like inside those giant cold storage ice warehouses you see in so many old warehouse districts in the USA. I assume all of this ice shown in the pic was sawn out of Lake Michigan.