I just completed a bakery on my layout and I went with several small “silos” made from PCV pipe for storage of flour. It seems all of my Cov Hoppers have bottom discharge. How did the Protoype get the flour from the cov hopper into the silos without contaminating the product? Is/was there a special type of hopper for this type of cargo? Tks for any input.
Terry
Auger.
Or even air pressure in reverse.
Hoppers probably were lined airslides to help the product move.
Otherwise back in those days 100 pound bags in boxcars.
Just poured it into an undertrack concrete trough (sp?) - maybe under a roof to avoid rain and dirt- and then used an auger to lift it into the storage bins, perhaps ?
There is a lot of different ways to unload a car with bulk contents. How about this unloading of a box car with grain at the Farmers union-GTA elevator in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1957 :
Grin,
Stein
I have never heard of flour in a gravity discharge car. It compacts almost like concrete after vibratiing over the road. Airslides or later PD cars. It would never be dropped into a trough as it is foodstuff. Before airslides, and even now, bagged. -I used to know a Sara Lee driver and all their flour was bagged.
Flour isn’t a bulk commodity, it’s a finished commodity. As such, it would have been shipped in bags, boxes or barrels to avoid contamination.
In the 1950s, covered hoppers were used to transport bulk minerals, not foodstuffs.
As has been stated above, in the 1950s flour (and corn meal, and sugar, and…) would have been shipped bagged, in box cars. Once inside the bakery’s receiving bay, the bags would have been slit open and emptied into a bin (with a cover that would normally be closed.) At the bottom of that bin, an Archimedes screw (aka auger) would have moved the flour horizontally to another box, where it would be picked up by a blast of compressed air and wafted lightly to the top of the storage and dispensing silo. The outward indications of this system would be an inverted-J shaped pipe going up the side and into the top of the silo, and several covered, screened air vents on its roof. (Flour, being extremely fine, doesn’t lend itself to being raised by a vertical auger, hence the compressed air. Locomotive sand was lifted by compressed air because of its abrasive nature.)
By the '80s, bulk flour would have been delivered in tightly sealed covered hoppers, bottom discharge fittings hose-connected and movement of product would have been air-assisted all the way from car to silo.
(Remember the foregoing from a conversation I had with a compressor salesman several decades ago.)
Judging by the photos I’ve seen, all of the cement for Hoover Dam arrived on-site in box cars. Some of it was ‘blown’ from the unloading point (at Himix) to the lower concrete plant (Lomix,) a distance of close to a mile horizontally, with a 500 foot vertical drop.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Thank you everyone for your input. I guess I should have asked this question several weeks ago. I just finished a Two silo off load station for my bakery. I assummed incorectly that is was blown in from the covered hopper in the 50’s as it is today. So with that in mind I built a small compressed air hookup station to connect the Cov hopper to the piping to the silos. It looks really good. Now what am I going to do with it??? I guess i could remove the hookup station and build a small bldg attached to the main building with an unloading dock and move the piping to come from it to the silos? While on the subject I suppose the same unloading info would be appropriate for my brewery as well? Hops/Barley would come bagged in boxcars, not via cov hoppers?? Anyone need some cov hoppers? Thanks again.
Terry
Keep your covered hoppers, IF they are Airslides, and IF you model after about 1955.
Santa Fe received the GA-93s, its first class of Airslide covered hopper in 1955.
ATSF #310000-310049 are listed in 1961 and 1971 Equipment RegRegisters.
Photo, Model Railroading NovDec83 p.51
pix 310000 ATSF Color Guide to Frt & Psgr Eqpt p.90
review of Atlas single-bay Airslide. Model RRer Jan93 p.51
upgrading N model, N Scale magazine MayJun97 p.32
Yeah, but those Airslides (and the prototypes, which were for the NYC) were in captive service, working between specific loading spots and a SINGLE specific end customer, who had a brand new plant with the infrastructure to handle unloading the cars. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that covered hoppers became popular, because by then the cost of manual labor had risen to the point that mechanisation became economically viable in a large scale. Even then, boxcars were the dominant way to handle bulk foodstuffs into the 1970s, and the practice didn’t die until almost 1990.
So if you’re modeling the 1950s you COULD have food-shipment airslides, but you COULD have baby hi-cubes too. They’re just not typical.
Having started at a warehoouse in 1971, among our jobs was unloading inbound rail cars from our main plant. While we did have our own leased cars within our compnay system, the company had to supplement our fleet with one way leased cars. Some of these cars were lined with heavy brown paper/cardboard along the walls and inside of the doors. I assume these were food stuff cars prior to reaching us.
A lot of these cars did not have interior moveable bulk head doors. They were equiped with the cross memebers (wood/steel bars) you had to lock inplace across the car to hold your loads in place. Those cross members were son of a guns to get loose if the load shifted against them. They were nasty and easy to pinch a finger in too.
Well…I think hi-cubes came in around 1966, but the point is basically correct - you certainly could have clean-lading service airslide LO’s in the fifties, but you’d be modelling the exception rather than the rule. More normal would be boxcars of bagged flour and sugar coming in, and boxcars / reefers with the finished product going out.
Heck, for much of the 20th century, coal was transported in boxcars!!
Now there’s a statement that begs an explanation! [:O]
I have heard that during the war effort, there were older boxcars that were stripped and roofs removed and coal dumped into them.
I have no information or hard data to back up this little tidbit. I have it filed under Hearsay.
While true, I think this phrasing is more accurate: “For most of the 20th century it was still possible to see coal transported in boxcars.” Grain in boxcars was very common, and coal in gondolas was as well, but coal in boxcars would be rare after the development of steel self-clearing hoppers around 1900.
KL
The Northern Pacific Ry Hist Soc had an article an issue or two back on coal service in Minnesota, particularly between Duluth/Superior and the Twin Cities. (Coal came into Duluth/Superior by boat.) Anyway, it included a pic of the coaling facilities c.1900 and IIRC all of the cars being loaded were boxcars. The article pointed out that most all coal in the area was moved by boxcar.
By the '20’s gondolas had taken over. Gondolas were preferred over hoppers because for most coal dealers, it was easier to unload drop-bottom gondolas than hoppers. But I believe coal in boxcars (particularly sacked coal) continued to some extent thru to maybe the WW2 era.
Re coal in box cars: I have a copy of the 1922 Car Builders Guide with designs for box cars and drop-bottom gondolas hauling coal as well as cattle/stock cars in coal, coke, lumber and vegetable service. Can’t you imagine a watermelon shipped in such?[:P] John T.
I think the Ma and Pa had watermelons in the Ventilated Boxcar at least something that had air moving thought it.
We haul those via covered wagon or cardboard container pallets today.
I was recently talking to Ted Schnepf, who’s an expert on West Virginia coalfields (Google his books). His O scale layout features at least two coal mines that load boxcars. I asked him about the practice and he said that mines were being built as late as 1950 with one loading track with more clearance than the others, specifically for loading boxcars. He said that the practice didn’t die out until most industrial coal-powered electric plants were shut down by the EPA (post-1970). Some customers SPECIFIED coal in boxcars because of the way their plants were designed.
As for melons in a stock car, don’t make faces. Stock cars were possibly the CLEANEST cars on the railroads. Due to Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and the stink it caused, the Federal Government mandated in 1909 that every stock car interior be STEAM CLEANED before and after hauling livestock. No other cars had to be cleaned, on such a regular basis, so for hauling unwrapped produce, stock cars were the most hygienic way for it to travel.
Stock cars were specialty cars that the railroads didn’t really want to have on their rosters. If they werent’ being used to haul stock they just sat and took up space, so railroads tried to find other uses for them on the off season. Melons, rail, lumber, pipe, cotton and hay were all popular loads. The Santa Fe even took some on the off season and added more planks to the sides, creating full single-sheathed boxcars. Once the car was needed as a stock car again, they’d pull the extra boards.
Ray, I LOVE IT!
Now I have all kinds of excuses for my cattle cars ---- THANKS John T.
The Alton used stock cars to ship car and locomotive parts from the Bloomington Shops.