Milk Churn Commodity

harvan75

New member
I am using the TOTC 60ft converted baggage carriage to convey the milk churn commodity.

I have added the commodity to the carriage as an acceptable good, and the dairy to produce, but I am unsure how much (how many) the carriage should carry, and what I need to set to allow this to occur.

Any suggestions would be gratefully acknowledged.

I'm looking for one carriage load per day, as I am also running the bulk milk load in glass lined wagons.

Andrew
 
Take the floor size of the carriage and divide it by the circumference of a churn. This should give you how many you could fit in there. However this does not take into account weight...
 
Some ideas on milk...

Firstly am I correct in presuming that by the term "churn" you mean the classic (around here) metal cans; about 16 inches (or so) in diameter and 30 to 36 inches tall, two handles at he top and not painted?

Secondly, always remember there are two parameters to any load, volume and weight. If I remember correctly Trainz uses volume units multiplied by a weight per volume figure. For example; the car can hold X gallons (volume) and milk is about Y pounds per gallon, resulting in a product weight, in pounds, of X*Y. It is entirely possible to load out a car's weight rating and not its volume as well as the reverse volume and not weight. An often overlooked point, milk "churns" (or cans) are round, so there is some lost space when placing them in a square container. The quick and dirty way around this is to assume that you place them like hexagons, and have a missing part can at the end of each row.

Thirdly, in New England milk was a big commodity in the first 60-70 years of the last century. The Maine State Museum had a good exhibit (rotated out unfortunately) on the whole process, not much on the rail transport though. Most rail transportation was from small local creamery facilities to the larger facilities in the cities (Portland, Boston, etc.). As the road network improved in the area the use of rail transport understandably declined. However the area railroads ran many milk trains until about the late 40's, using specialized head end equipment on passenger trains. The most common equipment around here for cans was the insulated express boxcar not the express reefer, however many baggage cars were also insulated. In New England there was also the problem of keeping the milk warm enough in the winter. "Insulated" cars seem to have been preferred over "refrigerated" cars however this may be due to semantics or designation by the railroad. Most of the boxcar looking glass lined milk tankers were only insulated. A note to the "yeah right" crowd, a partial car of milk will keep itself cold (or warm) enough as it is a mater of insulation and the cold milk provides the cooling effect.
 
A Churn make butter

A Milk Churn is a device that stirs and churns the milk so the butter fat will congeal and separtae from the liquid. Some of them do look like a milk can, but on the railroad, a milk churn was a product that would be delivered to a hardware store for the farmers to buy to make butter. A Milk Can was and is still used to transport milk. So much for my milkcan rant.

I have found that on many cars, the number and location of attachment points will limit the number of commodity items that can be loaded.
 
Milk churn

I've found a good source for information on the English milk trade is http://www.igg.org.uk/gansg/12-linind/milk.htm and even better (with diagrams of the vans used http://www.myweb.tiscali.co.uk/gansg/7-fops/fo-milk.htm.)

In England the containers used to convey the milk were called milk churns (not cans). I'm now starting to build up a knowledge of the vented 12 ton 4 wheeled vans used to convey the milk (stuff no-one else in the family wants to know about :( ), but am still unsure of what I need to tweek in the config file to ensure that the number and mass of the churns loaded are correct.

Two hours later and I've settled with using the Milk Churn Commodity and the LMS 12 ton vented van, which seems to accept 20 churns as a full load. Probably not totally realistic but good enough to start with. (The commodity has a weight of 100kg, I would have thought it would be closer to 50?)

The next problem I have is with the GWR Siphon wagon. As a slat sided louvered van it would be better for the milk run (the open sides apparently allow the wind to keep the churns cool (probably also allows soot to coat the containers)) but it isn't industry enabled. I can enable the industry easily, but what I want to do is to allow the churns to be physically loaded inside so they can be seen. Does anyone know of any instructions on how to do this?
 
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