Packing Plant

[trainsarecool]

What types of train cars were switched at meat packing plants other than reefers and stock cars?

[BigDaddy]

Wonder what they did with the offal?  Brains, skulls, ears and tails, stuff that would make the hotdogs taste bad   

Looks like you have a good excuse for a box cab diesel

[mlehman]

Boxcars play important roles. They bring in glass and tin containers, plus cardboard or other packaging. If the plant makes canned chili, the beans likely also came in a boxcar (more recently, this would be a covered hoppeer, though.) Boxcars also hauled away canned goods and other products that didn't require refrigeration.

Designated boxcars also hauiled away hides. Bones sometimes left in gons. Other offal would also be shipped out, but some plants had associated "tankage" plants where it all was boiled down to a dry, protein-rich product called "tankage." Visting a tankage plant was one of my least favorite things to do on the farm...but beats digging graves for big dead hogs in the summer heat.

Sometimes tank cars also hauled away fat, etc.

[Deane Johnson]

I'm wondering if they made food at the packing plants, or simply processed the carcases and other materials for shipment elsewhere for the manufacture of the consumer items.

I don't know, just wondering.  It seems to me it would be unlikely they would make food products in the same plant where they killed the animals and prepared the carcases.

[BRAKIE]

Add a gon for hauling manure and dirty hay. I recall seeing gons loaded with this stuff in the 50s on the PRR..I'll never forget the smell.

I suspect it was going to a fertilizer plant.

[ACY Tom]

Boxcars in hide service were invariably the oldest cars, getting close to retirement. Once a car was used to carry "green" hides, it couldn't be used in any other service because you could never get rid of the odor. Designated cars were often stenciled with small lettering "Hide service only" on or near the door, to prevent their use for other cmmodities. In the 1950's, old single sheath Rock Island boxcars were often seen bringing hides from packing plants out West to a tannery in Mercersburg, PA. Wellsville Addison & Galeton bought old B&M single sheath boxcars to serve tanneries in Elkland, PA. We often saw them operating on the E-L, carrying hides to the WAG from Western points. The Akron Canton & Youngstown had a small designated group of 2000 series single sheath boxcars that routinely carried hides from a small rendering plant in New Washington, Ohio to leather tanneries in New England for shoe manufacturing. The routing was usually AC&Y from New Washington to Akron, then Erie to Maybrook, then whatever route made the most sense to the final destination.

Those cars had to return empty because they couldn't be used to carry anything else.  

Tom

[Yannis]

I am far from knowledgeable on packing plants, i just have the Walthers packing plant, and seeing a boiler and a big smoke stack, wouldn't hoppers come into play to provide coal for the plant?

[Heartland Division CB&Q]

Hides and other biproducts were sometimes shipped in boxcars to rendering plants where the resulting products such as leather, lard, soaps, toothpaste, and so on were made. 

[ACY Tom]

Yes, the plant needed power from some source. Coal was the traditional fuel, and the Walthers plant reflects that. I'm not clear about your railroad's geographical location, but the coal would probably come from the closest source possible, to minimize transportation costs. That means a plant in Baltimore would prpobably receive most of its coal from WV, Western MD, or PA in B&O, PRR, or WM hoppers. One in California would likely get coal from Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, or New Mexico in UP, Santa Fe, or D&RGW cars. Those Western roads often used gondolas for coal service.

Mant plants were eventually converted to oil or natural gas, and the Western plants probably made the conversion at a very early date. Don't forget to install power lines for the refrigeration units.

Tom 

[dknelson]

The old saying was that when it came to slaughtering cows, they used everything but the moo. 

The blood was dried and used for fertilizer; I do not find blood as a recognized tank car load so I assume the drying was done at the slaughter house.  The dried product could have gone by boxcar.  Certain body parts such as brains and tongue might have been shipped (reefers) to a more specialized food processing plant.  The hair was scraped off and sent to felt plants perhaps by boxcar in the old days. 

Bone oil and bone phosphate of lime are both recognized tank car loads even today.   Edible and inedible tallows were shipped by tank car.

Yes the green hides went out in old boxcars and I can recall single sheathed wood boxcars in that service even into the late 1960s.  What is interesting is that hides from slaughter house to tannery are amoung the rare examples of shipping and receiving within really short distances, of the kind we have on our layouts.  I lived not far from two tanneries that were maybe two miles away from the Cudahy packing plant/slaughter house.  And the glue factory and the fertilizer/chicken feed plants were only a few miles further south than that.  And a shoe factory was only two miles from the tannery.

Scraps of green hide, scraps of tanned hide, and hide that had "fleshings" stuck to it were sent out in gons to fertilizer and, shockingly, chicken feed plants.  The offal including the bones (and horns?) was also sent out in gondolas, which the local C&NW crews called "gut cars." The smell -- can't describe it.  And the flies!   And on hot days, the guts would get to cooking in the sun and sometimes miniature volcanic gas eruptions would send the guts cascading over the sides, hopefully not when a crewman was riding the car to a siding.  There were also sloshings when the brakes took too quickly.  The siding that served a fertilizer/chicken feed plant AND the glue factory where bones and offal were sent had been sloshed so often that the ground beneath the ties became soft and derailments were common.  When the ties were lifted out, that horrid smell would be released all over again even if there were no gut cars nearby.

That siding had its own scale track by the way.  I wonder if they banged on the cars before weighing so that the weight of the flies would not be added to the tare weight. 

Again the interesting feature of animal slaughter is that so many elements of the by-products industries could be nearby yet be rail-served, all perhaps by the same local switch crew.  The perfect prototype for situations that occur on our model railroads.

Dave Nelson 

[DS4-4-1000]

BigDaddy

Wonder what they did with the offal?  Brains, skulls, ears and tails, stuff that would make the hotdogs taste bad   

Looks like you have a good excuse for a box cab diesel

Look again, that is a Shay locomotive inside a housing.  That was done to not frighten the horses.  Since the locomotive did not look like a "normal" locomotive the rider was required to warn people that a train was coming.

 

Here is a photo of a NYC Shay

 

[Lone Wolf and Santa Fe]

Deane Johnson

I'm wondering if they made food at the packing plants

In the old days slaughter houses skinned and gutted the livestock then cut the meat into large parts or sometimes left it whole. A side of beef would be shipped out and the local butcher shop would cut it into steaks and ribs and use the leftovers for hamburger, hot dogs or sausage.

Modern packing plants do it all down to shrink-wrapping the package of boneless chicken breasts, printing the price sticker and applying it.

In some stores the local butcher still cuts the meat in the store.

[chutton01]

Well, looks like the OP was answered and more so, in Jeff Wilson's Livestock and Meatpacking book (which mentions many of the items covered in the post above) he does cover an aspect of the meat packing industry pre-1960s. (By the 1960s companies like Iowa Beef Packers were accelerating the trend of siting packing plants closer to the beef/pork producing areas - hence less need for moving livestock by rail - by the early 1970s it seems most urban union stockyards had closed).

Anyway, in the pre-60s period, you had packing plants, which did the slaughtering of livestock, initially dressing of carcasses, and some additional processing of meat cuts if needed. Then, the packing plants would ship out the meats to branch houses (usually by meat-reefers - reefers with meat rails installed), which worked as distribution warehouses for towns and regions, supplying the area's grocers, butchers, and other retail outlets. The branch houses could perform additional processing, perhaps slicing up cold cuts, grinding out ground beef, packaging and wrapping, etc.. Each packing company would have a network of branch houses (so a town could have 2 or more competing branches houses), and since they were in general much smaller than packing plants, they are much easier to model. OK, you lose the stock-cars, but you retain the colorful meat-reefers which is cool...and maybe you can actually fit the branch house on your module or layout without it completely dominating the scene (they were moderate sized buildings).

[dknelson]

Should you find yourself in Galesburg IL watching trains on the BNSF (and Galesburg was a hub for the CB&Q and BN, and was also on the Santa Fe main line), the Packinghouse restaurant across from the Amtrak depot is a former Swift branch house, with minimal changes to the exterior.  You can clearly make out where the rail service existed to the rear of the structure, and the interior is surprisingly intact - they have kept the meat rails and other refrigeration details as decorative items.  There are also historic photos on the walls. 

http://www.packinghousedining.com/About/

If you eat there ya gotta try the cinnamon rolls. 

Dave Nelson

[doctorwayne]

dknelson

....If you eat there ya gotta try the cinnamon rolls. 

I'd guess them to definitely be better than their "cow pies" or "horse buns". 

Wayne

[Thecitrusbelt]

In the era before the widespread use of trucks, freight cars switched at slaughter houses would include tank cars for tallow, gondolas for bones and offal, hopper cars for ground bones, and boxcars for bagged and bulk salt.

 

One type of car not switched were produce reefers (Class RS). These were not used to transport meat except in later years of the ice bunker refrigerator car era when some were used to transport meat products in smaller, well-sealed containers.

 

I really doubt that processed foods were manufactured at slaughter houses, however, such plants produced meat sides and boxed meat cuts that were distributed to affiliated branch houses all over the country where the meat was further broken down into cuts for meat markets. It was not unusual for the branch houses to manufacture sausage.

 

Bob Chaparro

Railway Bull Shippers Group

https://groups.io/g/RailwayBullShippersGroup

[OT Dean]

trainsarecool

What types of train cars were switched at meat packing plants other than reefers and stock cars?

 

  Someone wrote to MR years ago, asking why he'd seen tank cars spotted at a local meat packing plant.  The reply was that the glycerine from fat was transported to manufacturers for use in other products.

[azrail]

OT Dean

 And the lard and tallow from the rendering process were put in tank cars (still done today)

 

trainsarecool

What types of train cars were switched at meat packing plants other than reefers and stock cars?

 

 

 

 

  Someone wrote to MR years ago, asking why he'd seen tank cars spotted at a local meat packing plant.  The reply was that the glycerine from fat was transported to manufacturers for use in other products.