Staggered into the model room half asleep when I (almost) woke up… and noticed the side of a Roundhouse box… image on the side was a silhouette of something like GP40 followed by a stock car…
I suddenly thought “When did they stop running… did they”?
The I wondered whether they stopped running as whole trains before odd cars vanished…
What happened to UP’s Pig Palaces? (Did anyone ever do a model?
Then I recalled a film about nasty Cajun baddies in the Bayou (or wherever)… which starts with the hitmen pushing a run-away baddy in front of a train in a stockyard area. Hunky hero rescues luscious blonde… and they end up blowing up the hotel… Haven’t a clue who the actors were… Nicole Kidman? maybe?? I dunno[%-)]… Anyway that film was about 198? …so were stockyards and stock cars still in business then?
with the advent of refrigeration and a large fleet of trucking operation companies, the rail cattle industry fell into decline in the early 70’s…cattlemen didn’t have to take their cattle to a railhead to travel for miles to a stock yard processing center anymore…with the advances in refrigeration, it was easier for a local processor to process the meat and freeze it to be sent out for delivery in trucks instead of the railroad…I remember as a kid seeing long stock trains on the Kerrville branch of the SP that actually went to Kerrville to pick up cattle for processing in San Antonio…now there are many meat processing centers in the area and the cattle didn’t have to travel that far by rail which was the death of the Kerrville branch…all the kerrville branch does now is go to the outskirts of San Antonio to a large Limestone quarry, a coors beer distributor warehouse and a lumber yard…the cattle are no more found on the railroad and they took up almost 50 miles of track because of this…about the movie?..well, sounds like hollywood at it’s finest…yes there are still stockyards but they are downsized and are serviced by trucking companies…not the railroad…don’t believe everything you see on the silver screen…chuck
By the 70’s, most US railroads retired their stock cars. I remember old GN/CB&Q/NP stack cars in MOW service hauling ties in the mid 70’s. The ‘Pig Palace’ cars were NP cars, not UP. They had a metal sheet with a smiling pig on them. The UP had a once a week stock train(pigs) that ran to a packing house in California. This used some larger 50-60’ cars painted a green color with HOGX reporting marks. I think the train was called the ‘California Livestock Express’. It ran by itself and was later combined with other trains at the end. IIRC, it lasted into the 80’s.
BTW, when I worked for the CB&Q in the late 60’s we once had to set out about 6 stock cars with cattle. These came off of the GN or NP, and it took almost 2 hours to spot each car, unload it, and re-spot for the next car. I t was easy to see why the railroads did not want this business! And our lead unit was a GP40…
It seems I actually remember stock cars when I was a little kid in the late 60s and early 70s. Funny how things like that fade away without a person even noticing it.
I remember asking this same question myself a while back while doing research, and ran out and bought at least one for all of my roads. I run them from the 1930s on up to the late 60s myself. Now they’re like a staple car and there has to be one in every freight train…
When the railroads ran trains of livestock, the law required that they stop every hundred miles or a certain period of time and unload the cattle so they could be fed, watered, and rested. This was the purpose of the “Drovers’ Caboose” that carried the cattlemen who cared for the livestock at the stops.
Stopping the train on a siding while the livestock was tended to was very expensive for the railroads because they had to maintain the sidings, water, and feedlot facilities, in addition to the lost crew time.
I remember that the Southern Pacific had large feedlots in Yuma, Gila Bend, Marana, and Benson, Arizona devoted specifically to cattle trains.
hello Mark…things are good in Crosby…not much happens here which is a good thing…(my next door neighbor’s horse had a colt …and that’s about it ) i like the peace and quiet…been working on the layout a lot lately but will have to put it up for awhile…momma want’s the yard fertilized, and the garden tilled…all that spring stuff…how are you doing?..chuck
The end of use of stock cars also depends on the region. Stock car movements persisted a bit longer out west, due to the distances involved I presume, although even there they fell off greatly by the 1970s. The last D&RGW stock car movment was in 1980, but they borrowed UP stock cars to do it.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
I have to agree with Mike Lehman about the region. Having grown up in Cleveland, Ohio and seeing the stockyard operations from the late 40’s and through the 50’s. I remember gates being put across the street to stop traffic. Cattle were herded across the street to the Swift processing building.
In 1968 I started working for UPS and my route started at the stockyards. The meat packing operations in Cleveland had really dropped off. Almost all livestock were being trucked in. The major packing companies had all left the area. Most processing operations were handled by small companies with just a few employees. The largest processing plant was the poultry and duck processing building.
doug
Modern livestock moves by truck can ruin your day. Usually after I’ve had my SUV detailed, I find myself behind a truck and trailer rig spewing brown liquid on the Interstate. Makes you wi***he railroads still had the business.
Someone mentioned that the RRs used stock cars to haul ties
Not to make anyone queasy or anything – but they also lined them with plywood and used them to haul grain during the fall grain rush. Maybe they even washed the floor first.
Back when the NEB&W site was free they had some pictures
Dave Nelson
In Colorado, stock cars were used to haul coal, hay, straw, and lumber. Given that they hauled seasonal traffic, almost anything that could be hauled would be in the off-season to generate additional revenue.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
Great stuuf guys! Thanks!
How’s the colt doing?
Marl Pierce… which State would that be in? …and how would you detail it on a model highway?
Thanks all [:)][:)][:)]
I’m good Chuck. I just started a new job that I’m not all that crazy about but hopefully will lead to a better deal. Recently bought a SP F-7 A & B black widow set.
I’m also still seriously thinking about going HO but can’t seem to come up with enough space. Oh well. I’ll keep chipping at it until I come up with something.
Okay… so where do i get that kind of stock car as an H0 model? …and a trailer for it to ride on?
Also, I recalled… when I first started looking across the pond and researching I came up with Railroad engineering journals with information on “combination cars”. these cars could be swapped between box and stock car combinations. Some could even have the floors re-set to make hopper (centre discharging). Some of these had roof hatches making them effectively early covered hoppers. Some had drop floors like drop floor Gons… I wondered whether that made cleaning them as stock cars better or worse.
Guess that lining stock cars with ply is another case of what goes around comes around. Anybody know when they stopped doing this? In MoW use did they have the roofs taken off? Or how did they get the ties in and out?
To David – I’m from central California, and the subject Interstate is HWY 680. My situation could be simply modeled by finely splattering some light brown paint on the victimized vehicle, and placing that said vehicle behind a cattle truck set out on the road.
P.S. I’m looking forward to purchasing several of Red Cabboose’s soon-to-be-released RtR S.P. simulated wooden stock cars.
Scroll down on this link for an article about stock cars. It has a picture of a HOGX car for carrying hogs. THE UP ran them in intermodal trains “until recently”. Unfortunately no date mentioned.
Milwaukee Road torn the roof’s off some of theirs and used them to haul old tires, from junk yards around Milwaukee. They didn’t last to long in this service because the cranes at the yards ripped them up pretty fast. Also in studying papermills I saw photo’s of some roofless stock cars with the walls covered with plywood and put into woodchip service. Thats what I am doing with my P2K cars, which is really easy because they already have a removeable roof.