My railroad is set in the '40’s, in central Arizona. I need to know how 2 commodities were shipped.
First we are talking about ginned cotton. That was a big staple in AZ. I presume it was in boxcars, but was there anything special?
Secondly, in downtown Glendale, AZ, there is a huge building that I understand started out as a place to process sugar beets. How would this be shipped?
Thanks for your help.
Cotton bales were jammed into boxcars, as you surmised. Nothing special. Cottonseed was sometimes shipped by boxcar too but more often it was consumed locally as animal feed. Cottonseed ruins boxcars for anything else.
Sugar factories received beets, coal to generate steam and electricity, and either lime or limestone to make milk of lime, which is used to raise the pH of the sugar liquor in order to clarify it and precipitate impurities. Beets arrived from local farms via trucks, wagons, and railroads. Rail haulage of sugar beets in the West was mostly using drop-bottom gons. Western railroads had large fleets of drop-bottom gons which were ideal for beets (and many other commodities such as coal, ores, concentrates, ballast, sand, gravel, pipe, lumber, logs, poles, you name it). In a pinch during the height of the fall sugar campaign they would use stockcars and even boxcars, as well as any open-top hoppers they might have had, but in the 1940s there were very few open-top hoppers in the West. Sugar factories also received coal (via the ubiquitious drop-bottom gon) and either quicklime (bagged in boxcars) or crushed limestone (drop-bottom gons) that they made into lime on site. Sugar was shipped bagged in boxcars. Some molasses might be shipped by tankcar but since it was low value and couldn’t bear much of a freight charge, generally molasses and beet pulp was hauled away by truck or wagon as animal feed by the same farmers who grew the beets.
Arizona sugar factories might have used residual oil from California refineries instead of coal – most of the Arizona smelters converted to resid around 1920s. If you can find a vintage photo and you see lots of tankcars, that would be convincing.
RWM
Raw sugar could also be shipped bulk piled in boxcars. That’s how it moved from Galveston to Imperial Sugar in Sugarland, TX.
Dave H.
Great info; just what I was looking for. Thanks a lot.
Can’t swear as to Arizona but in most of the west sugar beets (which are a light load) were shipped in gondolas that had wood extensions to take as much advantage as possible of the load limits of the cars.
Dave Nelson
From this website http://www.trainboard.com/grapevine/showthread.php?p=456182
Comes this photo
The question is whether there were side extensions in the 1940s, the era of interest in this question. I am not sure about SP, but on UP and D&RGW, two other major sugar beet shippers in this era, standard drop-bottom gons were used sans extensions.
RWM
I know I have a WB Video showing beets being hauled in Colorado on the C&S c.1959 in gondolas without extensions (behind steam by the way). I believe in this area (Minnesota) hopper cars were used too, seem to remember seeing that in a GN video from about 1962. Crystal Sugar here (I think it’s HQ is in Crystal MN) is a big processor of sugar from sugar beets.