Back in the day, portable dock plates were most common, but I think the built in dock plate goes back farther than any of these other modern advancements.
I grew up around the trucking industry, my father worked in that business most of his life. From 1967 to 1977 he was a terminal manager for CAROLINA, then the largest carrier east of the Mississippi. I worked in the terminal in my late teens.
Baltimore was a big meat packing town in the day, and I did electrical and refrigeration work in many of them early in my adult life. Loading docks with roofs over the trailers were very common, and many of those facilities had totaly indoor loading - trailer was backed into a bay deep enough for the whole truck and trailer!
Many regular freight transfer terminals also had roofs that overhung enough to provide weather protection without bellows or seals. Many still exist here today…
In this region, indoor rail car loading/unloading is/was pretty common too. The oldest industrial parts of Baltimore had tracks in the streets and cars were switched into sidings that often go inside the building.
The now gone GM asasembly plant here had a massive indoor rail unloading area, eight tracks in pairs with door level docks like passenger platforms. Boxcars and flat cars full of frames, body panels, engines, transmissions, etc, were unloaded with fork trucks and rolling cranes. And that plant also had totally indoor truck loading docks as well.
Nothing against all these new gadets, they are just outside my era…
I believe I’m old enough to be Your Father…I started working on the dock, for an outfit called Moore Freight lines in Chgo. in 1960, I was 18. The dock was two 35ft. flat beds back to back in an empty lot, for about three months, before a building was found. Been in the trucking/intermodal/owner business of same until 2004, when I fully retired…sold every truck I had left, starting in 1999 until 2000 when I had bladder cancer…operation was sucessful, so now I take one day at a time.
Oh! I was in Vietnam in 1967 and came home with a lifetime gift from there…but that’s another story!
Yes I do have the Bud’s building also…that’s what prompted Me to get the larger building when I found it on sale. I also will not have another layout or ISL, not in My lifetime anyway! But what I have been doing…is buying a lot of things on sale and building them for My two youngest Grandson’s, who have an on-going build of a layout in their basement and have sections of My layout incorporated into their’s. Mainly because I had come to the realization, that Mine was just too big, for one operator and I don’t get around to well anymore…So My dream hopefully will live on through them.[;)]
Well frank, you are a little older than me, but you would have had to start pretty young to be my father. I was born in 1957, my father served during Korea, he drove a Sherman in the army, then transfered to that new “Air Force” thing they were putting together. They needed machanics, he could fix anything…
I missed the last draft registration by a few months, but have a good friend your age who was in Vietnam.
But here on my ATLANTIC CENTRAL we have rewritten history - It is only 1954 the government has already got out of the way of piggyback, all the trailers are still 35’ and less, and Intermodal has a stronger start than it did in real life…Trucks and trains work in total harmony for the greater good…
When I worked at a Wal-Mart FDC, we called them door seals. And, believe it, or not, they still used chocks for trailers. Someone from Asset Protection had to visually check for chocks before the door could be tagged for pull in/pull out. They had incidents where an unloaded pulled into a trailer that hadn’t been chocked, which would shove the trailer away from the door, causing the unloader to hit the ground.
Marlon,I worked as a forklift operator at a warehouse and we also used wheel chocks and wasn’t allowed to release the trailer lock until the chocks was removed. It was my duty to place and removed them.
My supervisor called them bellows. Another supervisor called them a boot. I called them junk because they was in poor repair and leaked.
I supposed sucking in cigarette smoke,propane fumes and diesel fuel wrecked my lungs.Thankfully I don’t have lung cancer but,I get short winded. I had a near fatal heart attack in '05 that retired me and changed my life style…I haven’t smoke since my heart attack.
I could have been a young Father…LOL, I was 15 when You were born.
Interesting to note…My father was in Indo China (Vietnam today) and Burma during WWII when I was born. I didn’t even know I had a Father or see Him until late 1945.
Brakie, I’m glad you survived. The one thing I noticed about dock doors was that they were too big for containers. Trailers fit the door fine, but since most containers are shorter than trailers, there were big leaks around the doors. In winter, cold air coming in the doors could ruin a whole shipment of bananas from being exposed to the frigid air. Bananas, by the way, are Wal-Marts biggest selling item.
