I thought the last two articles in MR about meat packing plants were good, but was it purhase lacking info a bit? The auther talks about alot, but doesn’t really mention much about specific products and rail traffic? How many butchered animals would it take to get enough lard and tallow to fill a tank car? How many tank cars a day and so forth and so on.
Any help please? I also enjoyed his little track plan idea.
Don’t be cowed by the crusty old farts here. They’ll get around to answering you after they’ve horsed around with you for a bit…
[:D]
http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/Sandifer/Clinics/Packing/Index.htm
Amazing what a quick google search can turn up, isn’t it ? I used search terms modeling meat packing “model railroad”. This was hit no 3.
Smile,
Stein
I read the title and thought you were referring to some kind of muscle-based flora…
Doug Harding’s articles in the Oct & Nov 2004 issues of Railroad Model Craftsman included a great deal of detail on the meat packing industry.
One may order back issues from their site or Railpub.
Well, for a stockyard operation, where livestock is delivered by stock car, obviously the lard and tallow output is proportional to the number of stock cars unloaded. If the stock cars are crammed full and the cows run 10% lard and tallow, then you get one tank car load out for every ten stock cars unloaded. If you allow some space per animal in the stock cars, to keep the SPCA and the inspectors off your case, then maybe 20 stock cars per tank car.
Of course your packing plant ships out the dressed beef by rail. At a guess, it takes a couple of stock cars worth of cows to fill a single meat reefer.
Presumably the packing plant takes delivery of coal for the power plant by rail. And there’s gotta be preservatives, salt, and cleaning chemicals and other stuff delivered by box car or covered hopper.
and it does STINK.
Hi!
I too enjoyed the articles! Insofar as number of cars in or out, they would certainly be proportional, probably close to equal in number but different types of cars. In example, stock cars going in, and reefers, tankcars, and a few boxcars going out. Remember, NOTHING is wasted, so like they say, everything but the “moo & squeal” is processed out.
Obviously the amounts will vary, depending on the animal type and so on, but I would guess for every 20 stockcars coming in you would get 15 reefers, a couple of tankcars, and a boxcar or two.
Having been around a few stockyards, I can tell you they have an odor all their own. And as I understand, those boxcars that carry hides to tanners - well they are about as bad as it gets.
Mobilman44
Back in the latter 1950’s, my Brother in Law was an engineer on the Terminal Rail Road Association (TRRA) in Saint Louis. Once per week he hauled two maggot-ridden open gondolas of offal from a meat packing plant in East Saint Louis, across the Eads Bridge, to a rendering plant in Saint Louis.
The meat packing plant shipped out 10 reefers of beef per week, according to some bills of lading he saw at the time.
Well, it looks like this thread is definitely bringing home the bacon for the OP. Of course, most model railroads don’t have the space to go the whole hog while modeling industries like this. So you’d have to be careful how you go about it, otherwise the fat may be in the fire, and your goose would be cooked.
if you had to quess how much room would be needed to model a plant the size of the example in the article, and you laid it out in a corner like it is, how much space do you think would be needed?
LOL Selector, you feeling Okay? [(-D]
I guess if I would have searched “modeling a meat plant” I would have actually gotten some info. Thanks Stein for the link, it answered ALL questions. The auther was also mentioned by others here and on a yahoo group I’m a patronage of and asked the same q. Thanks all. Course, now it’s got me thinking again… And the rendering plants aren’t too bad smelling. The one a few blocks away kind of smells like baking sugar cookies.
The old Monfort Plant in Dumas Texas is one example I will use here.
First off, I have hauled to and from the Meat Triangle as defined by Waco Texas to Dumas up to Omaha and over to Ft Collins Co and on down to Garden City, Liberal etc. There are many smaller operations scattered around the USA. But I focus on one big plant here.
Dollar trucks bring in the livestock. They come off Feedlots. These Feed lots are truly massive operations out west. The stink on some days are hard to comprehend as well as the scale of the feedlots themselves. With that said, when the buyer for the plant calls for the livestock to be brought in, the dollar trucks get them there to the plant ASAP. As in 100+ mph.
The dead livestock or dying ones get shoved off onto the ground by the intake dock to the kill floor. These never make it to the human chain. When they get stiff, a bobcat comes out and maneuvers them and they were made to go away. Fortunately not too many dead livestock.
At Dumas, you have a gate. Beyond the gate is a wash bay. All trailers go there. Then they get jockeyed to a dock to be loaded. About 550 cases, 90 pounds more or less to a case.
Around the Dumas complex there are several buildings to the rear with a mass of tracks in, around and through some. On these tracks are a variety of rail cars. Gondolas for hides and whatever else… those are covered with flies in the summer and are… sad in the winter.
Then you have tanker cars. Brine to make hides packable, To take out non human edible fats and guts and other things. A Livestock to the top of the kill floor, is killed. At that time everything is processed down to the hoof as they say.
Meat gets chopped and loaded after blast cooling. Guts get sent out. Hides go to the process area where they are cleaned. The wastes, blood and fluids go away. The nervous system usually dont make into human food, they will ship that somewhere else to be useful. Fats go to make medicines and other good things we use.
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I can attest to that. While going through college I had a summer job at the packing plant where my dad worked. I was a utility worker, so I went where ever they needed a replacement for a sick or vacationing employee. But once every few months they needed someone to haul sheep hides up the elevator from the “hide cellar” and stack them into a railroad boxcar for shipment to where-ever. Not only did they stink to high heaven, they were also packed in rock salt to preserve them. And that salt gets all over you as you are handling them. Not good if you have open sores.
Anyway, back on topic, one of the features of the plant where I worked that was not mentioned in the MRR articles was the ice dock. Though by the time I was working there most railcars had mechanical refrigeration,the plant was old enough to still have provisions for the days when cars were cooled by blocks of ice. There was a causway across the top of the shipping dock with an insulated storage room at one end of the dock. There were metal chutes at strategically placed intervals. Back in the day workers would have hauled wheelbarrows full of ice from the storage room and dumped them down the cutes into the openings in the top of the car. While the meat was being loaded through the doors in the dock below.
On the other hand - if you follow the link I provided, you will find a discussion on how to model a meat packing plant in a way which does includes icing cars (albeit not right at the loading dock as it is being loaded - but in a way that generates more switching operations - which is good for a model railroad), plus a lot more.
Main link: http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/Sandifer/Clinics/Packing/Index.htm
Sub page processing: http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/Sandifer/Clinics/Packing/Proc.htm
Sub page “cars needed”: http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/Sandifer/Clinics/Packing/Car.htm
Sub page “model operations”: http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/Sandifer/Clinics/Packing/Ops.htm
Smile,
Stein
Jeff did talk about the icing a little bit, in the articles and his small track plan idea.
There were a few conflicting things though. Jeff noted a small plant could process 2000+ head a day, the online article just said a national meat plant would do that. I’m assuming it was just two different choice of words, but still. Another is stock car capacity. Jeff notes 25-30 cattle per car, the online articles say 40-50, but also mentions about having to keep the SPCA and inspectors happy. Perhaps was Jeff’s count to keep everyone happy and the larger online count when the cows were crammed in?
The aritcles did help alot though, both of them. The online says often times a meat plant would have their own switcher and work along with a yard crew. This gives me an exscuse to have a small…well, mini switcher like a 44 tonner. Or even a micro switcher like a Plymouth MDT (both of which I coincidently have electronic copies of operating manuals). I’m mostly interested in the smaller size plants, so no big complexes with 20 buildings, 40 tracks, 100 cars laying around.
One other discrepency, and this just may have been my misunderstanding too, was in particular catte traffic. Jeff mentioned, and to me, made it sound as if a small plant would either get cattle from either local farms OR by rail. The author of the online article (forget his name sad to say) wrote a little about his operating scheme and mentions getting most of his cattle by rail, but some of it local traffic too. I would most likely go with the latter, if anything to cut down on the amount of cars. Same reason for running paunch and other end trails to a local plants by truck instead of rail. I just don’t know if someone would want to operate a single switch job for a few hours, but I could be wrong. I’m sure there’s a lot of back and forth work involved for the switch crew to keep them occupied and entertained.
My other little quipple is with ma
It’s a building. The box it comes in doesn’t have to say “meat packing plant” on the outside - just pick some industrial building you feel is about the right size for your layout.
You could e.g. use Heljan’s slaughterhouse in N scale: http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/322-681
Or Pikestuff’s Milton A Industries : http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/541-8016
Walther’s Superior Paper: http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3237
One of Walther’s modular 3-in-one kits, e.g: http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3297
Or something else 
Smile,
Stein
Ooh, I forgot about the Heljan kit. I think the main building from Walthers Sterling kit looks great, but the kit seems a little expensive. Maybe I could reproduce it using their modular kits, but I don’t know how big the wall panels and such are to get a final building size for track planning. Plus it looks like it’s been around a while. The Pikestuff kit has cought my attention before for project ideas, but being an all steel building it’s a bit new for my purpose. If I DID decide to model a meat plant I would stick around the mid 40’s to mid 50’s.
Haven’t been following this thread closely, but have you seen this information?
http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/Sandifer/Clinics/Stk/Index.htm
Mark