Our local defunct line had a siding to our Cremery. Can anyone tell me what type of rolling stock would serve this industry? Both in the past, and if any dairy products are currently shipped by rail, and if so, what type of rolling stock would a cremery get? I haven’t google searched this yet…I am looking over my track plan, wondering about what type of industry my railroad might serve, and I remembered our local railroad served this cremery in days gone by. I will be modeling a more modern era, the 90s-ish(current wisdom 
)
Sorry, I meant CREAMERY…duh.
It would have received milk picked up by a local train that stopped at many locations along the line where farmers put out cans of milk daily. That’s the origin of the term, “Milk Run” for a local train that makes many stops along the way.
The milk may have been put into a boxcar, but was usually just carried in the caboose if there were not that many dairies along the way.
Outgoing products would probably have gone to local grocery stores by truck and would have been primarily butter, cream, and milk.
Not to be confused with a Crematorium?
Jeff Wilson’s Industries Along The Tracks series of books covered Milk and Dairy Traffic in Volume 2. Highly recommended - I buy anything he cares to write about industries.
By the way Google Images is unusually rich with wonderful stuff if you type Creamery or Creameries as your search term, which of course you use to get to the accompanying text. You’ll be busy for hours.
Dave Nelson
Are Creameries currently served on our present day lines?
Sorry, no. Milk carried by rail declined steeply in the '40s and '50s and was probably gone by the end of the 1960s in the US. That traffic all went to trucks.
There might be a factory somewhere still shipping processed milk products by rail (doubtful), but none receive milk by rail.
Farmers brought their milk to creameries, and the railroad picked up the milk and brought it to cities. Milk cars might be milk tank cars, or can cars. The creamery would chill the milk and pump it into the tank cars, which were just insulated, not refrigerated. The insulation would keep the milk cool enough, long enough to get in into the city. Can cars were merely insulated express cars loaded with 40 quart cans. The city milk plant had to clean the cans and return them to the owning dairy. Which is one reasons why tank cars were popular.
Athearn and Roundhouse make decent milk car models, painted for the many different companies that handled milk. These models are fairly prototypical except they both have roof ice hatches which the prototype did not. Milk cars remianed wood construction because wood is a better insulator than steel.
Trucks replaced railroad milk cars by the 1970’s. The Boston and Maine hung onto milk traffic longest, where as it was gone from the New York Central and the New Haven by 1960.
Larger creameries might make butter and cheese and ship that out by rail as well as the milk.
Before on-site refrigeration became common, creameries would also receive ice in reefers. The source could be either an ice plant in a city or an ice storage house where ice was harvested in the winter, and stored packed in sawdust until it was sold.
There were 2 types of creameries. One, as mentioned above would process raw milk into milk and cream for local sale. Another type would basicallty be a way station for collecting milk from the “milk run” trains, then ship it in milk tank cars to a large plant in a city for final processing. The 40’ Pfaudler car made by Roundouse is one example of this type of car. It looks lile an ice bunker reefer, but had 2 glass lined tanks inside to hold the milk.
http://www.athearn.com/Search/Default.aspx?SearchTerm=40’+Pfaudler+Milk&CatID=THRF
A more streamilned version was the Bordens “Butter Dish” car, as described in this article
http://www.nyow.org/Articles/Butterdish/butterdish.html
Funaro and Camerlengo makes a model of this; a friend of mine who has done quite a few craft kits says it is a difficult kit with many issues of parts fitting properly
http://fandckits.com/HO%20Milk%20Cars/1010.html
Model RR Craftsman had an aritcle on creameries in the March 2010 issue; “American Small Bussinesses: Creameries”
This is why I love this forum, and this hobby. Thanks for your assistance. So, if I were to model a 90’s prototype, it would/could be truck served with milk, and run outgoing reefers? Maybe I am trying to stay local with industries my railroad will serve, and also wanting a good run of locally produced mix freight leaving…this seems like a plausible reality.
I’m afraid by the 90’s it would be milk in/products out by truck. What few farms are left in our area are picked up with tank trucks. Some pull pup trailers, another tank on wheels that can be unhitched when they have to get to a farm with a less than desireable road. Other farms are picked up with full size tractor trailer tanks. When the tanks are full they head for the milk processing plant. For some close cheese plants and local brand daries the driver that picked up the farm delivers the milk to the plant. Milk going to a large processing plant close to the city, the trucks change drivers. It is much easier for them to ship the raw milk close to where it is going to be consumed in a large tank than to process it, package it, then have to ship all the packaged products to distribution centers.
You could have a creamery along a siding where it used to be served. Now the rail line goes past it to other industries, but do not service it. If it had a seperate siding, it might still be used for car storage. But the milk coming into the plant would be in big silver trailers and delivery trucks going out.
Have fun,
Richard
Hello when I was a kid Borden’s Dairy Products where very common, I imagined this little sidetrack business. I used a DPM kit and also kit bashed a Reefer to serve it’s purpose.
I hope this will give you a few Ideas of your own.
Thank you.
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What about milk bottles??
How would the early dairies have gotten their bottles?
When I was a kid (several centuries ago) milk was delivered to our door step in bottles. In the Winter when it was freezing the cream which would be on top of the milk would raise up out of the bottle with the cardboard cap on top. ( no homogenized milk back then) As I remember the bottles weren’t returned.
But I digress. Maybe the dairies could have gotten their bottles by rail. I don’t know, do you?
Bob
Edit: scribelt…great modeling…tremendous scene
Carnation Milk used reefers until the 80s.I’m sure canned milk is shipped by rail at some plant locacations in 50 ft. and 60 ft. boxcars.
I remember home delivery in bottles as you describe in the 1950’s. The milk man picked up the empty bottles which were returned to the bottelnmg plant to be cleaned and reused.
The mllk man delivered a lot of items in addition to milk. The customer had a “fan” which listed the products. It was placed sticking up out of the top of a bottle with the desired products showing. Products included different flavors of milk, ice cream, cheese, eggs. I think they had fruit juices too.
There was a creamery in Carrington, ND that also received loads of coal for their powerhouse. It was closed before the late 70’s when I started working up there so can’t tell you anything else about it.
Yes, some creameries are served by rail, as illustrated by the California Dairies plants south of Tipton, CA, in Turlock, CA, and in Visalia, CA. They manufacturer powdered milk, butter, and condensed milk. Since there are uninsulated boxcars and reefers there, I would say all may be shipped by rail.
There was an MR article a year or two back about milk trains, generally short locals that ran through farm country, stopping at trackside platfomrs to pick up each farmer’s milk. This was steam-era stuff. It was such an interesting idea that I plan to model it on the next section of my layout. The milk was brought together, either for further shipment or for delivery to a local creamery. These “milk run” trains sometimes carried a passenger coach or a caboose that could accomodate paying customers.
At a train show last fall, I was listening to a talk about these operations. A creamery operator and a railroad man had a chance meeting, and the milk guy complained about how he couldn’t get milk from the farms because the city was growing, and the near-in dairy farms were being sold to developers for housing developments. They put their resources together. The result was the H.P. Hood company, now a 2 billion dollar dairy business.
As something of a sidelight to this entire creamery/dairy industry discussion, at one time on Milwaukee’s south side there was a large factory, rail served, that made bottle washing machines, used in various industries, including the dairy business. The advent of cans, throw away (“no deposit/no return”) glass bottles and waxed cardboard milk containers killed the business off. When my sister went to school even the milk served in elementary school came in small glass bottles. I imagine the schools were happy to see an alternative to glass. By the time I went to elementary school we received our daily milk in small waxed cardboard containers, and it was very common for pretty good sized chunks of wax to be mixed in with the milk. That and a stale graham cracker were an integral part of the school day.
And somehow all of us managed to be taught how to read and write. Maybe it was the waxy milk?
There was also a thriving business on Milwaukee’s north side that dealt with cullet, broken glass from damaged and broken returned bottles in the beer, soft drink, and dairy industries. The track to that industry looked like it was ballasted with diamonds in the sun. I have seen a similar look at the tracks leading to the glass plant in Streator IL.
When recycling first became a buzzword, most of us remember when it was required to separate glass by color. Now it is all mixed together and I have read that as a result there is less glass recycled today than there was 20 years ago.
I bring this up because as is so often the case there was a great deal of ancillary industry that surrounded the creamery/bottling industry back in the day. For example casein, a byproduct of milk, is used in adhesives and in paints, or at least has been used that way, and is also a food additive.
Dave Nelson
Actually I can think of two creameries here in Wisconsin that still ship by rail. The Land o Lakes one in Portage still ships to a central distrubution service, that which isn’t used in local. From the couple of occasions I’ve been up there, it’s 2 to 4 cryo cars every two weeks, depending on local demand. The other does bulk processing and ships it somewhere else to do labelling for generic brands.
I know of a large warehouse in Pennsylvania that gets condensed milk by boxcar. It ships in the modern yellow TBOX high cubes, these cars have become popular for shipping canned goods. I think the milk is coming from somewhere in the Midwest(Wisconsin?) I have seen reefer cars of butter, cheese and margarine at times .
Jim