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I'll tell you right now that while I can imagine in my mind's eye a batch of ARMN Reefers spotted at say... Liberal Kansas and humming waiting to be loaded with beef. Let's look at Whorley's in Pittsburgh PA. I recall delivering beef there once or twice. They sit in a large multistory building deep inside downtwon Pittsburgh. Show me a rail siding anywhere near the building. Let's look at any of the walmart distribution centers. Any of these will work if only you can lay rail to them. They work the grocery and dry on one side and cooled and frozen on the other side. Everything else gets stored in the trailers until they need them. Let's look at inner city. I recall Baltimore once had stockyards for a Oscar Meyer plant (Old Swift facilities) I guess they can do alot of street running to reach this outfit by rail. But would need to connect this place first. So. There it is... rail service to these places directly to the customer is nigh impossible due to years of neglect of the "Local" shippers and recievers. Railroads will prefer to run a 100 car double stack of humming refridgerated containers to either coast than to dig thru weeds and sunken rail to get that reefer load of meat to the customer. My local grocery store depends on Associated Grocers and Sysco as well of any number of vendors. None of which are built for rail. However, all of them treat meat loads as TOP priority. I recall a Kroger's in Ft Worth Tx which is a distribution facility for local stores in that metroplex. They get thier meat out of Denver. You must have it on thier propery at Ft Worth the next morning by 9 am. 10 Am they start refusing those who are late to finish up the day's shipments to service the local stores. I dont see a easy way to rail that center. Now.. here is my idea.. Take the meat loads, load em on the train by way of intermodal boxes. Stack the boxes of say.. regional bound meat and send them down the rails towards... Baltimore. Now loads destined for Baltimore, Richmond, Harrisburg and most of everything in between can arrive at a "Inland Port" to be offloaded from the train by drivers who is working by day to get the trailer or box to the customer and get it unloaded. Theoratically this same train should recieve empty boxes and run em back to the western plant. The only problem is expediting the meat trains, naming trains dedicated to a specific region for instance the train I mentioned might be called the "Seagull East" There are many seagulls in the Chesapeake Bay. Other regions will have thier own namesake meat trains. Like the Gulf Cajun for the City of New Orleans which is also a great customer of meat. The "Regional Centers" that accept meat loads from trains, gives them to the truckers and waits for returning empties later that day probably could take a train once a week or twice a week from a plant. If you want to run faster, you need to buy more trains, build more track, etc with the same attitude of a model railroader establishing a meat packing plant on one end of the bare plywood that is his layout and building a icing station somewhere in the middle and finally a cold storage near the end close to his customers near the town or big city. If we can do this in HO on bare plywood, why cannot we do this in real world using lands that is not being used for anything? There is a lot of acreage near Hagerstown Md that is close to Baltimore, Washington and Harrisburg. All of whom needs the meat. How fast can you get this trainload out of Liberal Kansas over the tracks in the USA to Hagerstown Maryland? The only problem then should be finding the truckers to get the stuff off the train and delivered to the customers in this region. I have been wrestling with a Apple problem on the Pacific Northwest to run by train to points east of the mississippi river. There are incredible challenges facing the drivers in that region. One benefit would be not having to cross the Blue Mountains on chains at 10 mph thru 2 feet of snow into the teeth of a building winter storm. I know that for everything I wrote here probably will generate alot of very good reasons why railroads cannot, willnot or just cant afford "Door-to-door" delivery of meat products from the plant to the food store. Some of which includes schedule conflicts, friction, problems with individual loads, finding truckers to service your area *Ahem.. train Finding freight west would be a challenge and time consuming. Might as well just run them empties back straight to the plant in Liberal Kansas I used as a example. By the time your train gets there all they should need to do is wa***he cars, fuel the cars, load the meat and turn the train around back east. Apparently we have been doing this for years with containers, trailers on train and other methods with cargo throughout the USA. I also wonder if you do run trains instead of trucks out of a plant, would you run the risk of "out running" the supply of cattle in Liberal Kansas? These things need time to grow. Once you exhaust the local feedlots, strip the local farms and reach into everywhere else within a trucking day of Liberal to scrape together hoofs to ship ... everything should slow down and stop as the entire operation waits for a fresh supply of cattle. The horror is similar to allowing a Car factory in Detriot to run out of parts and have to stop the assembly line for a day or two as your truck with the vital parts race to reach it. Keep in mind I dont have any hard data to back up my theories, only what I have seen over years of hauling many different types of loads and doing way too much thinking about how to get X amount of "Widgets" there faster and safely. According to a small majority of the recievers, you are never on time. You are late and they need the product now. I wonder if the product need is driven by a financial greed that allows them to sell the stuff or use it to make items for a profit? Or these widgets are actually being used as fast as they can make it?
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