--- In STMFC@..., "Gatwood, Elden J SAD " <elden.j.gatwood@...> wrote:

Jeff;

I don't know if it was common, but I have seen an awful lot of cars with
powdered flour all over them, like a powdered doughnut almost. I once asked a
guy that worked in a bakery (a BIG one), and he says he worked a summer in
which he shoveled out box cars of flour into a conveyor. I trust the story
was true. I also knew a guy that worked for National Biscuit company
(Nabisco in Pgh), and he said that in the days before the big covered hoppers
came on the scene, they got flour that way.

A while back James Dick of the NP Historical Society sent me copies of a bunch of 1920's era correspondence from the NP files (some of it concerned Soo Line cars and was of interest to me) concerning damage to flour loads from the Minneapolis milling distraict caused by water condensing on the inside of unlined steel roofs and dripping on the load. In this correspondence both loads of bagged flour and bulk loads were mentioned.

I suspect that bagged flour went to consignees who now receive bagged flour by truck, while bulk loads went to volume customers that now receive Airslide hoppers.

Dennis