I know that the NYC used to deliver meat to the various distributors between 8th and 12th streets and 12th avenue in lower manhattan. Since they are long gone which railroad delivers the meat to the distribors now?
I remember as a child being amused at “A. Salmon and Sons, Wholesale Meats” off the West Side line as seen from the parallel highway at high level. This was all much further uptown than “8th to 12th St” by the time I saw any of it.
I don’t think there has been meat delivery by rail to Manhattan in many years. It would be interesting to see if one of the experts like greyhounds could put together a modern service that would be cost-effective compared to trucks, but I can’t imagine it coming to Manhattan on the Empire Connection even if sidings in the Thirties were a possibility, and I don’t think there is much chance of effective intermodal vehicle service to any likely transfer locations that could effectively reach where the meat wholesalers are. Perhaps about the best approach would be to break bulk of refrigerated meat trains on the Jersey side and transfer by truck from there. Almost certainly subsequent deliver would likely not be in 40’ containers, let alone longer or higher-cube ones…
Does CSX deliver meat to refrigorated storage and/or processing at Hunts Point Market, across several Harlem River street bridges from Manahttan? This is the South Bronx area, with track connections both to the NEC New Rochelle - Hell Gate Bridge trackage and to the Hudson Division of Metro North, the latter track going under the viaduct to the bridge to the GCT approach.
If this is not true now, at one time this was the case.
Any railroad that is delivering meat to NYC is doing it via intermodal - refrigerated trailers or containers hauld to a NYC area intermodal terminal. Doubt that there is any longer car load movement of meat. Intermodal covers at least 70-80% of the commodities that once were hauled in box cars.
Meat probably is delivered in refrigerated containers or trailers now. As a kid, my father worked as a meat lugger during his vacation to earn extra money and I rode with him and his helper. I remember the reefers parked on the tracks next to the buildings.
I don’t think any single case better depicts the slow decine and eventual rebirth of the rail freight system in the United States better than the loss, and partial recovery of dressed meat traffic.
In the fall of 1959, the late Philip Hastings rode Illinois Central symbol freight CC-6 (IC’s “meat train”) from Omaha to Chicago; the article ran as a Trains cover story the following spring. Part of the focus was on cooperation with Eastern trunk lines via an Indiana Harbor Belt connection at Broadview, IL, and the role of Rath Packing in Waterloo (known for its distinctive reefers and a high-end marketing policy) in the process.
Ten years later, the opration was a shambles. The completion of Interstate 80 across Pennsylvnia’s northern tier gave the truckers too much of an advantage, and TOFC trailers of major Western transcontinentals were being diverted to highway carriage east of Chicago due to the unreliablilty of schedules, and due in turn to decaying track. The destruction and disruption to the Eastern lines by Hurricane Agnes in the spring of 1972 was the final blow, and Rath, often cited by business publications as a paralyzed operation unable to change, gave up the ghost by 1985, though it had deserted the rails some years before.
Just about everything addressed in that story has changed, but every afternoon, an eastbound NS freight passes my “vacation home” here at the Topton House with any number of refrigerated TOFC trailers – some of them the property of well-known players for dressed meat traffic, and others owned by freight forwarders (consolidators of smaller shipments) such as Clipper.
So it would appear that this highly-desirable traffic is once again in play, though under a much different set of rules.
I wish that Mr. Sand was right, but AFAIK, there is no significant rail movement of domestic red meat or poultry in the US.
The US has what your economist types call a “Comparative Advantage” in the production of animal protein. This means our agriculture sector produces a whole lot of meat and poultry. The USDA numbers for 2016 are: Red Meat - 24,954,400 tons, and 2) Poultry - 23,683,182 tons. (Poultry includes chicken and turkey, but it’s mostly chicken.)
At 23 tons per truckload this breaks down to 1,084,974 truckloads of red meat and 1,029,660 truckloads of poultry. (give or take a few loads) It’s a huge maket and the railroads basically do not participate. I find this very irritating.
The production of this protein is very concentrated by geographic area. It is also very concentrated in to large slaughter facilities that ship a large volume each day. It is a growing economic sector. Next month, August, 2017, a new hog plant will begin operations in Sioux City, IA. This plant will ramp up its operations and, by summer 2018 expects to be slaughtering 20,000 hogs per day. There is a second new plant being built northeast of Ft. Dodge, IA that will come on line later and handle 10,000 hogs per day. There are many existing facilities in that area that have similiar capacities for red meat.
Chicken production is concentrated in the southern states. Georgia is the leading production state for Chicken.
There is totally inadequate protein production near the large population centers on the coasts. (Such as New York) There is a large beef plant in Wyalusing, PA and a smaller pork plant in Vernon, CA, but that’s about it. Wyalusing is where old dairy cows go to die. It produces only ground beef. Vernon does about 7,000 hogs/day. That’s totally inadequate for the Los Angeles area.
It’s far more efficient to raise the animals near t
Thanks for a highly informative post. I wonder if the major railroads have a mission statement for marketing departments? If so, it often seems to be either “Comme ci comme ça” or “Only try for the low-hanging fruit” or “Let it Be” depending on which line.
“Comparative Advantage” is also a key concept in international trade, which protectionist-types seem inclined to ignore.
You’re talking about before the high line got snipped at Gansevoort St, or after? When would that have been?
Yes. Around 23% of US pork production is exported. The largest customer by volume is Mexico. The largest customer by value is Japan.
I was on the phone interviewing the logistics manager at Triumph Foods in St. Joseph, MO. (Triumph is owned by hog producers. It does 20,000 head/day in St. Joe and is a partner in the new 20,000 head/day facility in Sioux City.) I asked her if they used rail intermodal. She said they did, but only for export loads.
Now if the railroad can handle the export loads to the west coast ports, just why can’t it handle the larger volume of domestic loads to the US coastal cities? No, it’s not because the export loads are frozen. Fresh pork is handled by ocean freight to Japan and other Asian countries.
It’s very frustrating to see the various railroads totally ignore this significant opportunity.
Most loads of boxed meat unless they are going to grocery warehouses for stores like Wal-Mart Costco Safeway or the other large Grocery chains are going to Resturant supply chains places like US Foods Sysco and places like that. Now the meat that doesn’t go into those 2 supply chains and is used by small grocers is supplied on a per case basis by LTL reefer carriers or by full truckload carriers that make multiple drops all over the city. You might have a truck make 10-15 stops to unload a mixed load of beef and pork boxed meat at those stops. Sorry hubby hauled meat into and out of San Fran and Seattle for a few months. He would make more on drop pay at 30 a drop plus 40 a stop hand unloading. Yeah that is what he got paid to throw it off the trailer.
A Marketing Opportunity Missed! Every day here, we see combo trains: [Stacks and TOFC] going East and West. In addition to the dry boxes, UPS,FedEx and YRC. There always seems to be a compliment of reefers, Westbound, they seem to have only a few with units running(?). Eastbound, the majority of the reefers seem to be running. [At night the lights on the units blink on and off] Many, KLLM, Prime IM, Allied Shippers, TransAmerican,to name a few. As well as, many from other smaller carriers as well.
There is a good progression of NS intermodal trains with refer units for the NY, NJ, and PA regions.
NS still handles quite a bit of trailers and trains such as 20E, 20K, 22W are all heavy refer trailers (and a few containers).
Heavy users include Marten, Alliance, Clipper, FFE, and others.
Gotta be some red meat in those trailers.
Ed
Tend to agree, especialy when I note that there don’t seem to be as many units of the better-known refrigerated carriers (Shaffer, Schanno, Cornhusker, Kroblin) on I-80; the railroads might not be getting that big a share of the traffic, but I don’t doubt that they’ve made a play for a piece of it.
I’ll stand by what I wrote. With over 2,000,000 truckloads produced in 2016, there is no significant rail movement of domestic red meat or poultry in the US.
The reefers on the NS trains are moving west coast fruit and vegetables to eastern markets. There might be a load of meat or poultry in there somewhere, but nothing significant.
The railroads have not made, and continue not to make, any efforts to secure this high volume, long haul, business.
The UP is sitting on a gold mine. California does not produce anywhere near enough chicken for its huge population. The dead chickens are brought in, by long haul trucking, from places such as Arkansas. (IIRC, something like 100 truckloads of chicken enter California each day. These birds are not from Nevada or Arizona. US chicken production is concentrated in the southern states.)
That means a two way reefer haul is available. Chicken goes west, fruit and vegetables go east. The UP doesn’t have a clue as to how to develop this opportunity.
I think railroads only want easy, low risk traffic, so they shun perishables. In 2005 UP was hauling 20-30 mechanical reefers and with a similar quantity of RBLs on its QFRNPP Express Lane train every day during peak harvest time. Then they downgraded the Express Lane trains to junk status. Now the MFRRVs have at most a half dozen loaded mechanical reefers. Many days it has none. Also, the Express Lane service no longer exists. It is all self checkout now.
Well, no.
The UP has sought some perishable business with the Railex unit trains. Some of these trains originate at Delano, CA and are in lieu of the QFRNPP. These unit trains have a “Z train” status. They handle no meat or poultry.
I think the unit trains demonstrate that the UP doesn’t know what it’s doing. You don’t hold perishable shipments for days in order to aggregate a unit train. They’re trying to make the shipments into what they know, they’re not trying to handle the shipments as is needed.
I think it may be more that UP has optimized so much of its traffic around the one-speed, scheduled just-in-time delivery model that revolutionized stack intermodal. We’ve seen over and over that there is no market for effective lane-scale service at high sustained track speed – not with the Super C, not with general freight on the BSM, not with Genesis testing on Z trains, perhaps not even in relatively short dedicated corridors as with CP Expressway.
Reefer traffic is the same kind of ugly whammy that characterized VOIP traffic: you need both reasonable speed and low latency to compete effectively with the kind of truck traffic we’ve seen discussed for much of the potential market. And that just doesn’t fit with anyone’s current way of providing precision railroading, not even BNSF’s ex-ATSF 90mph main.
There’s at least one way it might be tried, which is to run one or more dedicated trains on Amtrak’s scheduled blocks, perhaps using CBTC to reduce the required separation to a safe minimum. Assuming Amtrak has reasonable on-time assurance, this puts a certain number of platforms between the same points without violating much of the ‘rest’ of the way the host railroad would work. You would need dedicated facilities very similar to what CP Expressway uses, and streamlined procedures to direct these trains there and not have to yard them or hold up approach. I have been considering this as one of the potential ‘sweet spot’ markets for the angle-loading systems like the British CargoSpeed, which can theoretically get all the trailers off a kangaroo-pocketed spine train in no more than several minutes in little more than the space used for three aproned conventional tracks.
Might also be
What the blazes is VOIP traffic?
I totally disagree that perishable traffic requires anything all that special. Current Z train service will do just fine for most things. (We’ll leave the strawberries to air freight and team driven trucks.) The railroads do handle some fresh fruits and vegetables competitively. Tiger Cool is expanding and doing fine. The railroads just ignore the meat, and they don’t have intermodal terminals near the production areas such as Yuma, Yakima, Sioux City, etc. (Marketing fail.)
I see no need for any new rail equipment designs or specialized terminals. A 53’ highway reefer trailer on a spine car will do the job well. Heck Fire, it currently does the job well. A 53’ reefer container also works well with double stack. (See Tiger Cool.)
The UP runs Z trains. They just have to put this business on those trains. Of course, they have to also actually try to get the business in the first place. They’re not too good at that.
Don’t make this any more complex than it is. It is a simple business development process that doesn’t require new specialized custom designed rail cars. It doesn’t require service type innovation. It doesn’t need new terminals except for the ones in the producing areas. And those need to be simple, effective and cheap.
Perishable traffic will readily fit into existing operating patterns. Don’t give me this BS about tying it with Amtrak. Or about how it’s just so special that normal Z train service won’t do the job.
Voice over internet – in the old days, sending telephone communications ‘digitally’ via TCP/IP when the ‘money’ was still in long distance instead of data.
There was a great deal of experimental ‘work’ in compressing down the data content of each packet; one telco that shall remain nameless went so far as to advertise how it ‘utilized the silence’ to cut down on bit rate.
The problem was that actual TCP/IP handshake for high speed involved negotiating longer and longer datagrams per packet. Even by the time we got to OC3 backbone speed some of these were 9600 bits. The problem, though, was that each little compressed packet of telephone traffic needed to be recombined during the latency window for spoken telephone conversation, about 250ms each way, or annoying audible delay like that for geosync satellite routing results. That meant that the metadata for each little worthless piece of telephone audio had to be given top priority through the routing architecture. And, as a result, it displaced any other packet that happened to be needing routing during that period, and of course its time-to-live had to be very short.
The result was this: An OC3 backbone can be thought of as a great many parallel highway lanes or railroad tracks, each of which can be scheduled to have noncolliding packets sent over them, at very high (for the time) speed. The first problem is that a little 27-bit telephone packet that interferes anywhere with the length of one of those long data packets will take priority. And if another subsequent one occupies the next 9600-odd slot, it will take priority, and so on until, likely, the TTL of the data packet expires, it’s deleted, and has to be queued to be resent.
The other ‘shoe’ is how speeds were negotiated in IP at the time; it was via handshake from assumed default slow s