Milk trains and a Creamery

 Every city needed to bring farm products into the town to feed its population. These did not need to be teeming metropolises either. Small towns need to feed their populations. The large and varied milk operations of the northeast, Illinois, and Southern California need not be duplicated everywhere, but fresh milk needed to be transported from the farms to where it would be consumed.

On AIR 2 I plan to add a can car to my mail trains and use an action bill to simulate loaded or MTY  milk cans. Cans would be picked up on the inbound leg, by mail trains, and delivered to the creamery that will be located near my passenger service facility.

MTY cans would be picked up, by mail trains, at the creamery on the outbound leg and dropped off at appropriate stations on the way out.

Some sort of finished product, probably butter, will be simulated by an express Reefer load spotted at the creamery for delivery “West”. A west bound mail train will also pick up this car.

Additionally sealed cars of milk cans, or express reefers of dairy products can be transferred from connecting roads. So at the eastern end of the layout, in Chatsworth, head end cars from the WM, B&O and C&O can (And probably will) be spotted at the Chatsworth depot waiting to make a connection with #27, the Westbound Mail.

While some of these cars will represent dairy products, bound for the Creamery in East Charleston (In Littlerock yard)  they will also represent mail and express for set-out in East Charleston.

I suppose some sort of cross layout delivery of finished dairy product could be made as well, but I am, as a rule, opposed to cars being picked-up on-layout and delivered to another location on-layout. The distances in most cases are too short, that job would most likely be done by a truck, and these kind of switch moves seem excessively toy-like to me (That is a toy-like procedure on a large toy train set!)

I have received a lot of negative feedback about my ideas of milk train operation. Most everyone thinks automatically of the Northeast and does not see the validity of this type of service. I think if you gave it only a little research, and only a modicum of reading, you’ll find that the transportation of dairy products was a very real part of almost every railroad operation across the country in our era, the steam era.

Of course as roads got better this type of traffic moved to trucks, but it was going strong well into the mid to late 1950’s.

Do you simulate the movement of basic dairy production on your layouts? If you do how do you do it? If you don’t, would you consider it?



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