Bill Gentleman actually got the Federal Government to agree to waive the 28 hour rule. This rule required that livestock moving by rail be let out into pens for food and water every 28 hours. An exception was that livestock that would reach their final destination within 36 hours could move on through. This rule did not apply to truck movement of livestock.
The waiver was contingent on: 1) The livestock could move freely about in the railcar, 2) The livestock had access to food and water in the railcar. Neither of these conditions was a significant problem.
Although I am generally loathe to conceed any freight market to trucking, I don’t see much opportunity for rail transport of livestock.
I would love to see a return of livestock movement to rails as much as anyone but without the big livestock processing centers you had back in the day (Chicago, Omaha, Kansas City, Dallas/Ft Worth, South St Paul, et al) I just don’t know where/how you could do it. I do wonder, however, with the persistent drought conditions that exist in some parts of Texas, if you could move livestock to other locations by rail for grazing (or if it would even make sense to do so).
My big regret is the loss of the Farmer John’s traffic (hogs) out to their facility in LA on Union Pacific. I remember being on the UP portion of the Overland Route mainline back in the mid-80s and seeing the livestock cars at various pens in Nebraska and have the pics too. The question I’ll always have is why neither CNW and/or ICG couldn’t have participated in this traffic over the CBLUF gateway. Keep in mind, there are several counties in Iowa that are well-known for hog production; Delaware County (on the now-CN Iowa Division mainline) is one of them.
But where’s the market demand for rail transport of livestock? Everything starts with a market demand for a product or service. I just don’t see such a demand. I could well be wrong. But, if I’m wrong, could someone please point out where such a demand exists?
Here’s my understanding of cattle transport in the US:
The steer/heifer is born on a place alternatively called a ranch, or a farm, or a “cow-calf operation.”
Said steer/heifer is left with its mother for nurturing until it reaches a certain
Right!!! Historically cattle-cars were common 100 years ago, when nearly all of the USA’s meet processing took place in Chicago, and the Chicago Stock Yards occupied a large area, including several railroad freight branches and one dedicated passenger elevated rairoad branch, all gone.
Livestock and meat processing is a far more localized industry than it was years ago. Guelph is a large processing hub for Southern Ontario. I see the same cattle trucks multiple times every day, running the same routes…presumably they’re picking up cattle within 100 miles of Guelph and then hauling them to Better Beef Co. for slaughter and processing. Better this way I suppose than having these poor critters in transit for a number of days.
Effective, controlable refrigeration changed the industry from destination processing to origin processing.
The TV show Rawhide glorified the cattle drive from Texas to the railhead in Kansas. From the railhead in Kansas the stock go transported to all the Eastern market areas on the hoof for processing to the consumer. These days the stock is trucked to a ‘nearby’ processing plant and the final product leaves the processing plant and then moves in controlled refrigerated vehicles to the consumers point of purchase.
That’s for sure. The US produces great volumes of red meat and chicken. The production is concentrated in facilities that are long distances from the consumers in coastal population centers. Unlike livestock, the killed meat goes from concentrated origins to concentrated distribution facilities.
There’s also significant export volume.
The meat and poultry move overwhelmingly by truck. Railroads run right by the plants and make little or no effort to get the business.
Backhauls can be almost anything. You can put a non-refrigerated load in refrigerated equipment just fine.
Farmer John has been sold to Springfield. They announced the closing of the Vernon, Ca. Plant next year. They didn’t mention the fate of the famous mural around the plant at the corner of Bandini & Soto st. in Vernon.
If you can put together 100 car unit trains, they might be willing to talk. But remember that the vaunted unit trains of produce from the west coast are now carload freight.
While backhauls CAN be most anything - there isn’t that much of anything to utilize the available space that brings the processed ‘farm products’ to the large market areas. Remember the farm producing areas are almost by defination low population areas in relation the major markets.
And farming and trucking are very much intertwined. Show me a farmer and I’ll show you someone who is comfortable around heavy equipment and likely owns one to four trucks… i.e. customers who own their own means of transportation may be less inclined to use rail in any event.
The farm YouTube channels I have been watching recently - in addition to owning and using multiple ‘heavy duty’ tractors, grain carts to recieve harvested crop from the harvesters as well as multiple crop heads for the various crops they have planted. The multiple and various storage facilities the farmers have built at their own expense so they can ‘play the market’ for the sale of their crops which they transport from their own storage to processing centers in their own tractor trailer grain hauling equipment. One of the farms has BNSF trackage running either through it or adjacent to the property line. One of the farms is over 2000 acres and plants seed corn, commercial corn, soybeans, cattle and hogs. Another farms 10000 acres - spring wheat, winter wheat, rye and field peas.
The 18 wheelers they own not only take product to market but are also used to bring seed and fertilizer to the farm.
About 50 miles away from me is the sixth largest meat-packing plant in the U.S.
It sits directly adjacent to a double BNSF mainline running diagonally through the photo. However, the only train service to the plant is some tank cars that haul certain waste products away.
On the middle right side of the photo, notice the number of truck trailers. I imagine the plant deals with trucks and not trains because the trucking companies give them the best service for the best price.
Be thankful that the waste liquids are being hauled away - I worked B&O’s FY Tower that was bolted to the 33rd Street Bridge over the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh in the pre EPA days where the processing (rendering) plant would pump those waste fluids into the river at 6 PM daily - if you hadn’t eaten your lunch before 6 PM you would not be able to get it to go down and stay down after 6 PM.
