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[quote user="orsonroy"]<p>[quote user="1435mm"]Chickens? By rail? Only chicks in the express car. Not in stock cars. Chickens simply don't tolerate transportation[/quote]</p> <p>Not true. See my previous post. And apparently, you've never been stuck on the interstate behind a semi full of turkeys!</p> <p>[quote]and they're so cheap and easy to raise that there's no economic value in moving the live bird more than a few miles to a processing plant.[/quote]</p> <p>Actually, quite the opposite is true. Until the advent of mechanical freezing, chickens were EXPENSIVE. The "Sunday chicken dinner" was a big deal until the 1960s, simply because chicken was so expensive, due to the high shipping costs. Rail shipping of chickens was mostly from rural areas to large cities, and was economically feasable because of the high per pound costs of the birds.</p> <p>[quote]Chickens were a home and small-farm sideline industry until the 1960s with the advent of combined feeder/processing plant operations, which postdates the stock car.[/quote]</p> <p>My grandfather had chickens in Chicago, well into the 1960s. They raised them because of the high cost of the birds otherwise, and gramps had a shotgun loaded with rock salt to deter chicken rustlers.</p> <p>It was the advent of Purdue's flash freezing process in the late 1950s, coupled with mechanical refrigerator trucks that made chickens easier to transport, more attractive to raise, and the main meat potein source on the planet today.</p>[/quote]<br><br>I realize that my railroading career, which is only 30 years so far, began after many interesting practices died out. I have never heard anyone at the railroads I've worked for talk about moving poultry by rail, although several of the railroads I've worked for move a very large quantity of poultry feed by rail. My answers I should perhaps preface by stating "these are general rules of thumb" and "typical practices" as the more I look in on this forum, the more I understand that while us railroaders try to find best practices and weed out the idiosyncratic because it rarely makes money, model railroaders are the opposite and tend to celebrate and embrace the unusual (and why not?) because their railroads don't have to make money like ours do. <br><br>All that said, moving live poultry by rail, while it did happen, was of such small volume in the whole scheme of railroading as to barely exist. In 1941, using the ICC statistics for Class I line-hauls, live poultry moved by rail in the U.S. totaled 17,503 tons against a total tonnage that year of 1,227,650,428, or 1/1000th of 1 percent of all tonnage. By comparison, cattle and calves were 3,529,039 tons; sheep and goats 947,325 tons; hogs 2,054,557 tons, and horses, mules, ponies and asses 128,539 tons. And dressed poultry accounted for 266,431 tons, or more than 15 times the tonnage moved live. Assuming the chicken net weight per car was around 5 tons, that means nationwide in 1941 there were 9 carloads of chickens loaded per day. This was not a common commodity by any measure.<br><br>Oh, by the way, I've seen plenty of poultry move by truck, including the one that got struck at a grade crossing at 45 mph on one of the railroads I worked for. Talk about feathers everywhere! <br><br>The wonderful thing about model railroading is you can do anything you want. Prototype fidelity is whatever you want it to be.<br><br>S. Hadid<br>
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