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Flat switching can also tear the stuffing of the lading. When I was in high school, I had a part time job at a grocery distribution company that recieved carloads of canned goods. I spent about half my time unloading boxcars and semis. The company that prepared our private-label brands in Californina shipped by rail, and would use two different routes - ATSF-Streator-PC or ATSF-Kansas City-MP-St. Louis-PC. The Chicago cars were almost always in good shape when they arrived - they usually switched at Argentine, Elkhart, and Buckeye Yards, which were all humps. The Kansas City cars had shifted loads about a third of the time - some of them were real disasters, especially if the load contained glass jars. The traffic manager told the damage occured at St. Louis - I guess the boys at Dupo Yard may be been moving a little faster that 4 mph! The worst mess I ever saw were four boxcars loaded with gallon jars of apple juice from Washington State - it normally shipped via truck, but there weren't enough trucks available at the peak of the Arab oil crisis. Easily half of the contents of each car load was broken - there was a layer of "syrup" on the floor of each car. It was fall, and the yellowjackets quickly found out about it the mess - they got so thick that we had to cable one of our semis to the cars and pull them about a quarter mile to the far end of the siding to keep the insects from attacking the guys on the loading dock. PC had to call a cleaning contractor and wa***he cars out on site - at night when the 'jackets were inactive. The shipper later told us that all thirty cars he shipped that day had the same problem - apparent whichever crew switched the cars off the Yakima local that night must have been in a hurry to knock off.
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