[Date Prev][Date Next]
[Chronological]
[Thread]
[Top]
Re: (erielack) Milk Traffic
>>One thing that always perplexed me was how fast the milk traffic
>>evaporated. In 1960 it was still a fairly large commodity but >>seemed to
>>drift away with the mail contracts. The odd one was Becker who could have
>>easily trucked milk. Were truckers >>that much cheaper? Or, did the
>>railroads find milk a money looser?
>Another good pun. Basically it was short-haul traffic, and once you had
>good highways it was unprofitable for rails at the >truck rate.
Somewhat more complicated than that.
The history of the milk traffic is interesting -- and no one has really
written in depth. There are lots of sources of data for individual railroads
of course. And because so many "milk runs" also carried passengers, we have
some good photo material. Even better, having the "local" switch the
creameries along the way gave 1930s-era railfans an opportunity to take lots
of great shots with their old speed graphics of this specialized operation.
Likewise, family investments in dairy co-ops often spawned photo records not
found with other industries.
But the big "macro view" has yet to be written. One cannot understand the
evolution of milk on the Erie and Lackawanna without also understanding the
nature of the business in general.
Milk filled an interesting niche -- it was the farm product of "last resort"
which always made the economics vulnerable. Once it became cheaper to sell
wheat and other grains from "the old Northwest" in New York City via the
Erie Canal, milk was the result -- aided by faster means of local
transportation near the eastern big cities. With advances in natural ice
storage and technology, fresh cream and milk supplanted and replaced butter
and cheese to a great extent. Pasteurization and the big drive for purity
made milk far more popular. A large and successful lobby developed to get
milk into public schools so that all children -- rich and poor -- would have
access (at subsidized prices 2 cents per half-pint when I was a kid --
that's 8 cents a quart in the early 1950s!).
I think every railroad coming into NY carried milk at one time or another.
Looking at principal milk shed maps from the early 20th century is
interesting -- New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago were major
destinations for milk, and the business developed faster in some place than
others. I believe the Erie had milk on the west end into Chicago for awhile,
for example.
All **our** favorite railroads were hugely dependent on a few commodities
that shaped (and mis-shaped) their histories -- consider anthracite and
natural ice as well as milk. But unlike the first two -- the dairy industry
is still with us.
And the industry has been hugely influenced by federal farm -- dairy in
particular -- policies. States put in all manner of regulation as well --
mostly placating dairy farmers with a relatively expensive production cost
and low, unproductive margins. Farmers demand minimum price supports, for
example -- reflected down at your local Dairy Barn and supermarket.
I've seen studies that claimed that railroads like the DL&W, O&W, LV, NYC
and Erie would have lost the milk business even earlier had free markets
prevailed, because, like the technology of the Erie Canal before, mechanical
refrigeration would have enabled far lower dairy farming costs elsewhere.
There's a thread here on E-L UPS and TOFC service; I'm not sure how much the
E-L received, but there were truck trailers with dairy products (mainly
butter and cheese) shipped eastern markets -- and still is. I suspect that
an analysis of the TOFC business might reveal dairy products on the E-L
sometime into the Conrail era -- just not in those interesting and quaint
old milk cars of which we're so fond.
So -- yes, it switched to trucks. But the history has far more twists and
turns than that.
Cheers,
Jim Guthrie (who really enjoyed that ride to Branchville once upon a time)
The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List
Sponsored by the ELH&TS
http://www.elhts.org
------------------------------