Don't know about now, but...
My father tells me that when he was growing up in Tenafly NJ back in the 30's and 40's the gent who ran the local nursery called "Pendergast's" would head up to Maine about a month before Christmas, then return a week prior to with one or two boxcars full of Christmas trees on the local Erie branch. He'd leave clean-shaven and return with a full beard!
"Pendergast's" is still there by the way, still in the family. It's now called the Willow Run Garden Center, just over the Tenafly border in Cresskill.
In my mid-teens in the mid-fifties, I got to "work" at a nursery tree lot that put up billboards on Rockville Centre's piece of Sunrise Highway advertising the sale of "100 carloads of Christmas trees."
There was a great quantity of 40' CNR box cars loaded with trees spotted at the team tracks; whether there were 100?
"work?" After a salesman completed the deal, he'd call over to one of us kids wearing necklaces of baling twine to get the tree loaded and secured on the buyer's car.
We worked for tips...usually a dollar. In two Sundays, I got enough to buy at a big midtown NY Camera store an $85 35 mm. camera. There I found out that at anything over 66% of the retail price made money for the salesman and the store...to learn that at 13 or 14 years old...
When I was working as a clerk for the Soo Line in Harvey ND in the 70's alot of trees moved thru in Double Door Box. The doors were blocked open about six inches for air movement. The trees were handled on the head end of the train as they were considered perishable. Alot of them were I/C to the RI in the Twin Cities.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.