Pallet mill in Willis, Texas, photographed December 2009.
WW2 was when they were used on such a large scale. It made the transfer of war supplies much faster from manufacturer to ship, then to the front. I don't remember where I read this but I was looking for an answer to the same question.
Found a short but informative look at the history of pallets today:
http://boingboing.net/2012/08/20/the-secret-history-of-shipping.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+%28Boing+Boing%29
It's a short piece on a longer article at Slate:
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/transport/2012/08/pallets_the_single_most_important_object_in_the_global_economy_.single.html
Hope these are helpful. The lowly pallet is actually a pretty big deal.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
Indeed a 53' box trailer usually is 102" wide and 110" tall. IIRC the floor space was around 96" ?
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
Doug,
It's been 20 years since I loaded one of those trailers, so the memory isn't as sharp as it used to be. They were, in fact, 102" wide.
Another big factor was the width of trailers. It was in the late 70s that 108" wide trailer were first permitted in national use.
A 108" wide trailer, especially a box van or refer, would be a very rare cat. 102" is the now standard trailer width.
Real close to 24 years, and over 2 Million miles experience, I don't think that I have ever seen a 108" wide trailer. Maybe some in wide load, or equipment trailers, or other specialized use, but not common in daily use.
Doug
May your flanges always stay BETWEEN the rails
Although standardized wood pallets designed to fit forklifts are relatively new, I suspect a little research would show that pallets of different types have been used for hundreds of years. The fact that it comes from a French word ("palette") would also suggest that.
Bob,
Great tip. I was just wondering the other day what I'd do with those left-over CV picket fences.
Best pallet material ever.........
Find a bunch of Central Valley black plastic castings of fences. In that assortment is a bunch of picket fence stuff. Cut the decorative tops off of the pickets and you have the base boards and the slats all done. Just cut them up to the length you want.
see ya
Bob
Larry,
Towmotors, I remember them -- not so fondly. We mostly didn't use them in grocery, but they used them for milk and a few other things over in perishables. The towmotors on our side were mostly for the shop guys, as they didn't take up much space.
The sole exception was one store that still received their groceries on carts. There were a couple of others that did also right when I started in '76, because they had to use one of the few liftgate trailers to roll down an alley to get in the store or something. The whole system was pretty much junk at that point.
To go with it was the one ol' feller who picked the store that didn't or wouldn't convert from carts. The reason we made him pick the last cart store was the fact that the guy never could stack a pallet to save his life. At least with carts, he could keep most of his junk from falling off before he hit the dock.
I'm sure you know this, but no one should be fooled into thinking that only dumb people work in the warehouse. Yeah, we had a few, but it takes a lot of smarts to stack a mixed pallet of groceries or anything else so that it'll survive the ride to the customer and do it well. I was a trainer, so had my fair share of successes and failures in teaching, long before I went back to school to finish my PhD in history.
The only thing I regret not getting a crack at was unloading rail cars before they took out the siding about 1990. Never had enough seniority
But as I worked nights a lot, I did "inspect" my fair share of boxcars and RBLs.
Mike,I'll take a Clark any day over a back breaking jack..
The first lift I ever operated was a 25 year old Payloader that we used to stack concrete burial vaults with..My first job after being laid off from the Chessie(C&O) in '84 was working in a burial vault company as a concrete mixer operator and general plant laborer.The pay was good.
The only thing I was saying was you don't need a towmotor to move pallets.
Well, I'll put my 15 years in the warehouse (23 years total in groceries) on the line and see you out back..
Just kidding.
My experience with pallet jacks is two-fold. I've used old timey ones where the jacks and the pallet are designed as a system, both with and without wheels. There the pallets a pretty much proprietary and generally not interchangeable. I know there were multiple systems, so some may have been able to work with a limited range of other mfg's gear, not sure. I do know that your warehouse can't be very big if you're trying to move or pick stuff on a hand jack . I'd even argue that the forklift helped win WWII, as it was as essential by the end of the war to moving material as the RRs were at the beginning. My reference was to the relationship between forklifts and the modern, standardized pallets most of us are familiar with today.
There is also a whole class of powered low-lift pallet trucks used for picking and transport, just not lifting into racks. The modern ones work with 40x48 pallets, but like the handjacks, many older ones were mated with a proprietary pallet system, too.
Then there are the modern pallet jacks, most of which are optimized for use with the standard 40x48 pallets. I'm pretty sure that these pallets came first, then the pallet jacks most are familiar with. My memory is that the modern pallet jacks didn't come into wide use until the 1970s. We had none in Europe in the early 70s IIRC, although we did have 40x48 pallets when I worked in the commissary there. It was in the early 1980s that we (@ Supervalu) experimented with adding handjacks to a few loads to assist the driver, but then just decided to leave it to stores to supply their own because everyone was buying them for their own use in-store.
So in a sense, yeah, pallet jacks probably came into use first, but not in the modern way people often think of them. In any case, it's a matter of ongoing modernization and improvements in shipping technologies where there was considerable overlap in old and new ways of doing things. You can justify just about anything in a one-off situation, but if you're looking to depict general era or trends in modelling, then you need to consider the usual scene, rather than setting up an unusual scene, era-wise.
cacole and Dave got it. You can't have pallets without forklifts. Standardization made widespread use of pallets possible.
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Really? Having worked in a warehouse I must disagree..You can also use pallet jacks/trucks to move pallets.
I believe these may predate the forklift(aka tow motor).
Forklifts were around after WWI, but it took WWII to really expand their use. It was the need to move mountainous quantities of stuff long distances and on different transport means that caused the government to go with pallets in a big way during WWII. That buying power and the critical mass of equipment, pallets, and established facilities was built upon during the postwar expansion of the economy (remember, the one where the gains in productivity were somewhat equally shared, giving us the most powerful, economy in the world?)
Another big factor was the width of trailers. It was in the late 70s that 108" wide trailer were first permitted in national use. Before that, 96" was the max width, so in most trailers you could only get two pallets next to each other, one turned so the long measurement of the pallet was parallel with the road and the other turned 90 degrees to its companion. Not sure if there was a narrower standard before that, I'm not that old !
The role of the truck in taking RR biz also facilitated the spread of pallets, because they provided a quick way to unload freight and get the truck back on the road. Most freight in railcars was stacked on the floor or, later, loaded on slip-sheets (starting in widespread use in the 1980s). The consignee then unloaded the car, stacking the freight on the pallets in use at the destination. You will see a few cars unloaded with the cargo palletized from the shipper, but since most cars are free-ranging, the return of pallets to the shipper is not real common except for equipment in dedicated service.
To sum up, there was limited use of non-standardized pallets before WWII. After the war, pallet use spread quickly and was in widespread use by 1960, with the 40x48 being the pallet size in most common use.
Any serious student of pallet history and forklift technique has either seen, or should see, this instructive video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTnGZ37sZqM
But to return to the topic at hand, it seems to me based purely on recollection that I started to notice pallets really being uniform and common and stacked up in the late 1960s early 1970s. Before then they seemed improvised to the load -- there were definitely fork lift trucks going way back but it just seems to me that sometime around that time frame, an attempt at uniformity was made.
Dave Nelson
When was the fork lift invented? A Wikipedia entry indicates that Clark Industries developed the fork lift in the 1920's, so pallets were probably invented at about the same time.
I have some videos (Victory at Sea and The World at War) showing fork lifts loading and unloading pallets to/from railroad boxcars during World War 2.
The Wikipedia entry for 'pallets' even explains the various organizations that have established standard sizes for various types of pallets around the world.
In the "industrial history" section of my railroad and modeling research library, I just "happen" to have a copy of Directory of Wood-Using and Related Industries in East Texas-1966
by Nelson T. Samon, published by Bureau of Business Research, The University of Texas.
It lists Pallets and skids as commodity classification #24992
with 36 manufacturers in the East Texas and Houston area.
I also have some photos of a pallet mill in Willis, Texas, taken 2009.
I used to model East Texas on my last layout. On the new layout under construction based on the port of Galveston in 1957, I want a nostalgic connection to the old layout. I will have an occasional boxcar full of pallets delivered to the port from a plant I didn't model buit represented by staging on the old layout.
Will
Thanks a lot for that!
Just what I wanted
Steve
You might want to look at this article.
http://packagingrevolution.net/pallet-or-forklift/
There is no standard for a pallet. They can be different sizes. I have worked at several warehousing places and have seen pallets of all sizes and shapes. The US postal has a standard size they use and is made of plastic. It ensures a specific weight. Wooden pallets can vary in weight.
The most common size is 40 by 48 inches.
Anyone know when pallets came into general use in the States?
I'd like to put a few around some of my industries,I model the transistion period .
Thanks