That's why the invented the reefer. The packers could Slaughter the meat
out west and just ship the valuable parts and no 28 hour rule to worry about. It seemed the IC stock car fleet dropped about as fast if not faster than the steam locomotive fleet as the loading switched off "on the hoof" to "on the hook". Mark Rickert
Hi Mark,
What you're describing didn't really start happening until outside of the scope of this list, and was done by the packers partly to break unions, and partly and to get rid of rail shipment rates and reefers in general. Trucks killed livestock movements, Ike's highways killed reefers, and the railroads themselves killed customer relations (some time around the 1850s). Streamlining the supply chain by eliminating the railroads as an intermediary was a dream of MANY shippers since the invention of the internal combustion engine.
And the IC ran steam until 1960; their stock car fleet started dropping in the 1930s, specifically because of RATES: it cost just as much to ship live animals from Dubuque to New Jersey as it did to ship sausages or hams, and it was far less of a pain to ship processed meat products that far. The IC did run one of the larger stock car fleets past WWII to cover feedlot movements and the dwindling amount of hog rail movements from central and southern Illinois.
