(erielack) A Short History of Railroad Milk

["Jim Guthrie" <jguthrie_@_pipeline.com>]

> Can anyone give me a generall rundown of what happened with milk traffic? 
> They >just decided it was not a sanitary way to transport milk or what?
> I'll say it's list content since the Erie did haul a lot of milk in it's 
> time

Milk has an interesting history. It was generally something that came from a 
coy in the yard or cows in the neighborhood, but this became untenable as 
cities ge and specialized,

But the next bigh push for milk as we remember it as railroad nostalgia fans 
was the Erie Canal. New York Farmers who grew grains to feed NYC were 
devastated by the Canal, because it turned out to be cheaper to move grain 
from the "Old Northwest" to tidewater and the big cities than to haul it, 
say, from Orange and Sussex Counties.

Dairy/milk was borne of desperation, and its gowth coincided with the 
extension of the Erie into Orange County, Technology like condensing and 
canning added to the marketing possibilities as well as the traditional 
cheese and butter-making.

A side business, related to this was ice - needed to keep whole milk fresh, 
but to get to a point where making the ice business worthwhile also included 
selling ice at retail -- a new business in the 19th century to be sure (and 
orth a topic by itself).

Those milk cans (and not just from the Erie) went to Jersey City and other 
places where they ended up on milk wagons -- which went around street by 
street like the later day Good Humor trucks, ringing a bell and calling 
mothers and children out with a bucket, where a ladle would pull the milk 
from the can and into the bucket. In poor neighborhoods, one used it quickly 
because families could not afford ice to preserve the milk.

The unsanitary nature of all this (plus watering scandals) became an issue 
as childhood diseases of all sorts became a crusade (typical familes might 
start out with 7-8 births and end up with 3-4 children making it to 
adulthood).

Technology replaced the 40 gallong milk cans with bottles, and tankers to 
central bottling plants quickly replaced the railroads "way of doing 
things." Railroads tried tamkers, but milk trains were not geared to central 
24-hour a day bottling plant needs. And one would not want to try to ship 
bottled anything by rail <g>.

Mechanical refridgeration took the profit margin out of ice, and the need 
for ice in the milk business could not support ice on its own

Tanker trucks, operating on new, taxpayer-supported highways with mechanical 
refridgeration was an answer that blended in perfectly with the new model of 
the business.  New Deal legislation aimed at boosting support for farmers' 
income also contributed to the changing nature of the market.

And technology came to critical mass about the time of the Great Depression, 
when railroads lost nearly half their business and had few resources for new 
investment. What's more the railroads persuaded the ICC to start regulating 
motor carriers in 1935 -- and as usual, when the railroads demanded 
something, the ICC complied (even as railroads would always suffer untended 
consequences and whine about "burdensomne regulation" later <g>).

They insisted that motor carrier rates be set in relation to railroad rates, 
but not the level of service, so truckers ate the railroad's high-value 
commodities (like milk) in almost one huge gulp, because good service was 
important on a perishable product on a relatively short-haul like milk.

Obviously there's much more to this interesting story, and no one has really 
taken the step back to look at the history of milk transportation in detail 
(at least not that I know of).

There's been lots of railfan history of the subject: Bob Mohowski's O&W Milk 
book is outstanding; the M&NJ Society's publications ditto, and the Rutland 
fans have published some neat stuff too. And there are the nice books on 
creameries and the like on the DL&W too.

But Milk and the Railroads is one of those great gaps in railroad 
history-writing.

Cheers,
Jim Guthrie 


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