Milk Trains

[JJJeffries]

According to now retired employees of the old Buffalo Line of the Pennsy, back in the 20s to 40s Milk Trains ran overnight to the cities with fresh cans of milk.

Can anyone enlighten on this interesting topic? Did they use a cabin car or a rider coach?

The trains ran at passenger speeds and were given high priority to get over the road.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Best,
Craig[/b]

[wis bang]

They used wooden reefers in the pasenger consist.

[AlexC]

Usually passenger trains with a head end reefer.
Trains will pull into the station to load passengers, and on the "inbound" side of the tracks, there would be a platform with milk cans (the big ones, like you see at a carnival).
Roll 'em into the reefer. In the big town the passengers would get discharged, and the milk offloaded.

Once you know what to look for, you see them in old pictures lall the time.
On the reading's Perkiomen Branch....
http://www.west2k.com/papix/arcola.jpg
http://www.west2k.com/papix/yerkes.jpg
http://www.west2k.com/papix/rahns.jpg

[2nd trick op]

Yahoo has a very active group, called simply "milktrains" -- membership is large and open to anybody. Though the focus is on modeling, just about anyone's milk operation will be addressed here sooner or later.

The two largest milk haulers in this region were probably DL&W and NYO&W, with the EL reportedly marking the last haulage of milk in the summer of 1966. DL&W's Syracuse and Utica Division was probably the most prolific generator of milk traffic.

With specific regard to PRR, Jerrry Britton's "Keystone Crossings" site has a number of references to milk traffic archived.