Milk-it does the railroad good! HOmogenized!


I have a question about the milking industry dating in about the 1950's. Milk and mail will be the main supporters of my freelanced railroad. I'm not quite sure what all supporting buisness are needed to make it all possible. I currently have rolling stock and a few structures such as milk platforms and a icehouse loading platform that will fall inline with whats going on but for some reason I'm drawing a blank with what would be needed to assist in all the other possible operations that could assist the operation. My layout room that I am currently building benchwork is 12'x21' so I have room to add several givens I'm just not sure what they are at this point. So if anyone has any ideas please throw them out there.
Thanks in advance.
Ken
 
OK, that's a bit back in the dark ages, but I'll have a go at it:

Trucks (flatbed stake) delivered most of the raw milk to the processors in days gone by, so a truck unloading dock and a ton of milk “barrels”/cans would be appropriate.
More modern facilities would unload small tanker trucks by pipe/hose directly into holding tanks. The 50s are going to be predominantly barrels/cans on flatbeds, but there might be some tanker deliveries starting for some of the more progressive farmers in the area.

Large vertical stainless steel (shiny!) tanks would be used for holding the milk before and after processing, but probably not too ginormously sized. It isn’t a refinery….

Some piping going to these tanks from some of the buildings would be appropriate. You can get technical or just representative of the idea.

External components of refrigeration equipment (more pipes, large water chillers with blowers, etc) would be there.

Actually, of several milk processing plants I’ve seen over the years, most date from the 30s-40s and don’t still exist; but none had RR tracks.

but everything will be extremely clean.....
 
Ken you think just like this Ken, had to get one as soon as it was released. Its assembled and weathered sitting on a shelf waiting for a ribbon cutting. Its surrounded by 18 of these!
 
MO Ken,
There's an extensive thread on the milk industry in New England going on now - just search for it and you'll find it.

By the mid-50's, almost no milk was being picked up in cans by train outside of a few areas of New England. Smaller farmers still delivered milk by cans to creameries in the back of their pickups but most larger farms either had their own tank trucks or contracted with the creamery for pickups. Depending on the size of the creamery, the milk would be sent out in milk tank cars to other plants for processing or would be made into end products like bottled milk, butter, and ice cream at the creamery. A simple processing creamery would only require a truck dock, a few tank buildings and an office, a pastuerization plant, and a spur track for the milk tanks cars. The cars would be delivered already iced and precooled. A large end product creamery would be a big operation with separate plants for milk, cream, cheese, ice cream...lots of different profucts come from a cow. :) Wikipedia actually has a pretty good article about dairies at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy. Also check http://users.rcn.com/jimdu4/MilkTrains/Creameries.htm for some simple creamery modeling ideas.
 



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