I want to model a modern beef packing plant. Ive seen satilite photos off Google Earth with tank cars outside of the plant. Does anybody know whats coming in/going out in these tank cars? Also, does anybody know where I can find pictures for reference? Thanks
-Tom
They are probably hauling out tallow.
Right here we go.
Take a look at Liberal Kansas. That there is a typical packing plant.
Let’s see now… Cattle and Hogs are brought in by cattle truck. As fast as possible having been bought and paid for by the buyers. Some die and are hauled off to the side of the dock and kept out of the human food chain. The rest of the cattle goes up a ramp to a controlled “Kill room” there thier hearts are stopped via electricity and gutted right there.
The portions of the body that can be used by humans as food gets sent to a processing area where they are butchered, sorted, counted, weighted and packed. There is a certain amount of waste products and perhaps some fat generated. Some goes to tank cars for further processing (Marked Inedible for Human Consumption)
Alot of the body like Hides are skinned off and sent to another building to be dipped into vats and cleaned then folded. The good hides stay here in the USA for domestic processing into Leather Products etc. The lessor product get exported to Mexico for further processing. Having pallets of hide on a flatbed “Covered Wagon” with flies following you on a no-wind day is something that is quite miserable. I think Gondolas take away unuseable material and those are definately something you dont want to see or be around.
The rest of the body down to the hoof and bones are further processed and sent out further down the line to be made into Charcoal, medicine products or perhaps makeup etc.
What’s left? A little bit. There is a certain amount that gets sent out to rendering plants. Dog food? who knows? But see one of those trucks drip onto a Weight Scale… WOE onto that driver. In fact it is a personal insult and slap to the Law Enforcement to have that awful stuff drip into thier nice clean scale. between these trucks and those who haul Bees… they are priority traffic through a scale any time.
That’s it for now. Many meat plants are alike in some ways and different in others depending on whe
Thank you very much. Very detailed. No need to leave out the name, I used to live an hour from that plant.
I will add to Safety Valve’s response;
A former acquaintance of mine used to drive truck for a company in Iowa. One of their customers was IBP(?) and one of the things he did was haul scraps from this slaughterhouse in Iowa to a dogfood processing plant (Purina???) in Minnesota. These scraps were hauled in tarped semi-trailers; they were loaded through a chute and unloaded with a tilt up. Time was critical; there was only an eight to ten hour window from loading to unloading. If you went over this time the load had to be destroyed even though the temperature might be well below freezing and the load would arrive at its destination frozen as solid as bricks. This situation tended to make for a whole bunch of unhappy campers.
This trucking company was a bear to work for and they were forever firing drivers for being late on their deliveries even though most problems involved troubles with this company’s shoddily maintained fleet of tractor-trailers. This acquainance of mine said that he walked off the job one morning along with eleven other drivers who finally had it up to their eyeballs.
When I haul containers a few years ago, one of regular customers had us picking up hides in 20-footers, usually on tri-axles. The things I saw would make you think twice about eating beef, especially the two in Toledo, OH and South Bend, IN. The one in lower Michigan was neat and clean, though. we’d have to what for a load of cattle to get in, and they,d bring through and do the nail to the head gun, string on hooks, strip the hides, and load us up fresh. Anamax in Green Bay was our main stop. They specialise in road kill, dead on the farm, ect. They grind the meaty parts and bones into a meal and load them in covered hoppers. The innereds are used for tallow and loaded in tank cars. And the hides are used for leather interiors for Ford.
NYK used dedicate containers for all this, and even though they’d get lined with a giant “garbage bag”, blood would drip out the trailer for a good hour or two. We did occaisionly get pulled over cause somebody would call the police thinkin’ we were hauling bodies. I had a cop that I though was gonna have a sense of humor. When he asked me what I was hauling, I told him I was delivering some of Hoffa’s friend’s to the Union. Turns out, he didn’t have much of a sense of humor.
Firings is very infectious in trucking today. Every week about 10 to 50 orientation attendees wanna-be’s ready to go by mid week. Sure, fire that bum who is late and never mind the crappy equiptment that made him or her late in the first place.
Dont get me started about that.
In my later years I refused to tolerate older equiptment, I would quit in a heartbeat if the company refused to maintain the truck 100% I think it was Napoleon who said “for want of a horse the battle was lost due to a lost horsehoe” or something to that effect.
In the end I never uttered the words “Ok Boss” to a load offered by a dispatcher and put it on “My” 5th wheel if I thought it will be late or not make the scheduled time. If it’s going to be late despi