Before the advent of drop bottom gondolas, a dedicated track with one rail raised 12’ above the other was utilized, loaded boxcars would be spotted and chained to the rail on the high side, jacks were then employed to tilt the car further, once proper angle was acheived a vibrating ram was was placed on the end coupler to shake the car, with the low side door open and upon removal of any loose fruit, workers with shovels and brooms would enter the car via the high side to remove any remaining puterfication.
This must have been some rugged duty as car interiors were washed infrequently, if ever. The foul nature of the cargo demanded dedicated cars, vintage boxcars in particular that had no extensive metal construction prone to decay from the acidic loading.
For my application the pits were seperated from the flesh, washed and conveyed to a juice plant were they were consumed as fuel for the power plant. The remaining by-products were dried and ground up for use in cattle feed and cosmetics.
Twelve FEET ??!!, Gotta be a typo. Times were different back then. Not only were people not afraid to work hard, they also were not afraid to get dirty. I think I would much rather clean out a boxcar of rotten avacados than clean out a car used for a rendering plant[+o(]
Still, it’s interesting how things were accomplished in the past.
I remember the Rock Island fruit house in South Mpls - they would employ day labor to clean out the reefers after unloading. The Milw Road had a ‘clean-out’ track at St Paul Yard to clean out boxcars. Reefers at Swift & Armour were steam cleaned before icing. Rough boxcars for ‘hide loading’ could be smelled from quite a distance.
I spent a couple of hours looking through articles from old TRAINS magazines, but couldn’t find the one in which I recall reading of an incident on the New York Central.
Supposedly, a string of older wood reefers (un-iced) had been loaded with offal from a packing house - the cars were probably near the end of their useful service life. For some reason, rather than being sent to the rendering plant, they were set out on a siding somewhere in the country in order to free-up yard tracks. Unfortunately, they were forgotten for some time, and when “re-discovered”, the summer heat had taken its toll. Rather than attempt to save the cars, they were burned on the spot, with any metal parts remaining salvaged later.
Indeed, 12’ HAS to be a typo. Wheels fixed on axles 4’ 8.5" apart couldn’t span two tracks where one was 12 FEET higher than the other.12 inches maybe. 12 inches in the span of the track gauge is nearly a 25% slope, probably enough to get things to roll downhill with a little vibration help.
Typo-12 inches-gotta stop typing with my glasses on backwards!
The avocados were in a advanced state of decay when shipped to the rendering plant, Santa Fe hauled solid trainloads in from from as far east as Texas and all points within California, SP too was minority player. One amusing aspect of these venerable cars was the abilty to leak their contents all over the right of way during transit, makes one wonder if the customer got all that he paid for!
They sure could, and you could also hear the buzzing of flies as you approached the car. But even worse were the open gons of guts, fleshings (bits of meat still on the hide), raw bones and other left overs that tanneries, slaughter houses, and pet food plants would accumulate – sent down to a glue factory/fertilizer complex along the C&NW in Carollville (now Oak Creek) WI when I was a kid. On a hot summer day – impossible to describe. I was told that from time to time the heat would activate gasses and there would be a sort of volcano of guts slopping over the side. it actually softened the roadbed so that when ties had to be replaced, it would release those odors all over again.