Dick came by to help design and build a bridge for the bulk tracks behind the freight house.
Here's a map to explain the layout of tracks:
Dick came by to help design and build a bridge for the bulk tracks behind the freight house.
Here's a map to explain the layout of tracks:
There are a lot of smaller commodities, along with specialized commodities that won't come to New Britain. Livestock is one I covered earlier. Let's see if there's anything left worth looking at by category:
There are feed dealers in New Britain. C.W. Lines on Chestnut St. Here are two views. It's on the right in the first picture, this side of the railroad tracks, and on the left in the second, on the opposite side.
This also gives us a nice view of both sides of the crossing shanty here. Unfortunately, Chestnut St didn't make the layout, the Berlin Line crosses through the helix at this point.
Reynolds Hugh Grain and Feed Co is on Commercial St, right next to New Britain Yard.
Of course, the most common shipments here are from the meatpacking plants. In New Britain there's the Armour and Swift plants. Of course, others may be seen too, such as this Morrell reefer:
For through freights, there are Armour, Cudahy, and Swift distribution plants in Hartford. Armour, Cudahy, and Swift are also in Holyoke. I know Wilson was in New Haven and New London, possibly others. Hormel, Rath, and Tobin all had a presence in CT, although I haven't identified towns. But they might be seen on the Maybrook freights to Hartford.
Of course, as the picture above shows, other brands may be seen regardless of whether a distribution center is present. 'Generic' meat reefers, such as Mather, or NX, would also be appropriate.
For example, in New Britain there is also AYO Packing Co, M Krawczyk and Sons, Martin Rosol's, and Vitamin Sausage Products, all companies that make sausages and other processed meats, and would likely receive them via rail. In Hartford is Grote & Weigel, Kaufman Bros, Morris Packing, Mucke, Rex Provision, Sparvery Bros, and Stanley Provision. These would also receive reefers, even if it's at a bulk track.
The other products of animals are in such small annual quantities that I won't need to concern myself with them. For example, the 25 annual carloads of leather may be to a single industry somewhere in CT.
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Combined with what I've covered in prior posts, those are all of the commodities for those categories that show up in the 1% waybill study.
The consequent benefits to the railroad and the communities were manifold. For our part, we had a net gain in freight tonnage from these industries of 251,220 tons annually. The communities had a net gain of 141 industries, employing 5,045 persons.
Their food bill alone would be over $3,000,000. Housing and fuel expenditures would be more than a million and a half dollars. They would spend well over a million dollars for clothing, better than $600,000 for household furnishings, and another $400,000 for household operations. Automobiles, entertainment, medical care and other items would run over two millions.
Interesting, too, is the diversity of products turned out by these new industries. The greater the diversity of manufacture in a given territory, the less is the likelihood of disastrous results from untoward conditions affecting a particular type of industry. Diversity is good "insurance."
Here are some of the products represented by the new industries: advertising displays, furniture, groceries, air filters, plastic wire connectors, electrical appliances, printed forms, lithography, Fritos, rulers, toiletries, phonograph record blanks, wallboard, steel products, flooring, paper cartons, lumber, paper, trailer frames, yarn, cranberry sauce, castings, cotton yarn, glassware, construction equipment, plywood boat forms, plastic products, phonograph cabinets, pallets, builders' supplies, concrete blocks, paint brushes, photo equipment, metal tube and hose, dog food, aluminum foil, wire cord, rubber gloves, textiles, jams and jellies, clothes cabinets, wrenches, plasticized fabrics, synthetic felt, paper tubes, Propane gas, bananas, brass and aluminum castings, beverages, cinder blocks, frozen foods, aluminum door frames, steel chain, facial tissue, aluminum skis, woolen yarn, rayon fabrics, nails, fencing, beer, castings and shoes.
Industrial development work began on the New Haven away back in 1911, when, in cooperation with the Boston & Maine, the first railroad industrial development activities were organized. This pioneering produced such excellent results that soon power companies followed the railroads' example, and this was fallowed in turn by greater activity by local chambers of commerce and similar organizations.
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This is also the issue announcing the launch of the Cranberry, plus faster service for a lot of trains, many from 5-10 minutes, but the Colonial's running time has been shaved by 45 minutes. The Merchants also gains coaches during the summer months for the first time.
It seems that things aren't quite in the decline that most attribute to the post-war era. To be sure, we do see a decline in the next few years, with a brief boost from the Korean war, but in this period where the railroad has just come out of bankruptcy looks like things are going well.
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Lastly, there's a letter from News Syndicate, Inc. referring to damage to newsprint paper rolls, and the reminder that there is a growing option of having the newsprint shipped via water routes. The author says he was a railroad man who worked the spare board for a decade and would like to see the business stay with the railroad.
As interesting as the letter is, it's the statistics that he quotes that interests me: they receive 600 carloads/month of newsprint.
This is New York City, so they may receive it from several railroads. I don't have the 1% waybill statistics for New York (much less the city), but that's 7,200 carloads a year, and more than double the average delivered to CT 1950-1954.
What do Railroads do?
A digression - for decades we've seen layout plans talk about point-to-point layouts, as if they are inherently different from a layout designed as a loop. But the real point (ahem) is that a real railroad travels and moves goods and/or people between two or more points. So that means you have to design a layout with a start and and end, right?But it probably didn't take long for people to realize that even in the smallest scales, we can't build the entire rail system in our basement (or laundry closet), so we'll need to find a way to include the parts we don't build. Thus the concept of staging.It's pretty simple - you have a layout designed with two ends, and staging at either end to represent everything else. And obviously this has absolutely nothing to do with the layouts we built as uneducated kids on a 4' x 8' loop.Except that my layout has a helix at either end, that goes down to the lower level where the staging is, and it also forms a complete loop. So I guess it can be a loop, but part of the loop is hidden, right?Why don't I just get to my point, which is:Point-to-point is a method of operation, and not necessarily a physical design.Back to my layout to clarify. If I have an open house, I can just put a train on the mainline, and let it loop through the layout for as long as I let it run. It's a loop. But when operating the layout, we consider that the right helix is heading toward Hartford, and the left is going to Plainville, and no train going down one side would ever come back up the other one.Yes, it's certainly possible (and often preferable) to design a physical point-to-point layout. But just because a layout is a loop doesn't mean we have to operate it that way.
I moved the spray booth back to where I originally planned, under the west end of the layout: