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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 11 (March 1, 1928)

Milk Conveyors

Milk Conveyors.

Milk forms one of the most important of railway traffics. By the Home railways there are annually carried more than 280,000,000 gallons of milk, of which 95,000,000 gallons are handled by the London, Midland and Scottish, and 85,000,000 gallons by the Great Western lines. Until recently all milk traffic dealt with by the Home railways was conveyed in small metal churns, which involved a tremendous amount of handling, and called for the utilisation of a vast number of covered milk vans. Now the L.M. & S., and G.W. Railways have brought into use special tank cars for the conveyance of milk, each of 3,000 gallons capacity.

The new milk tanks are mounted on a steel underframe, 18 feet long, and they are glass-lined and fitted with an outlet cock at each end. Special arrangements have been made to avoid any undue variation of the temperature of the milk during transit, and each tank is encased with two layers of slab-cork, each one inch thick, and finally covered by thin metal sheets welded together at the joints. Special milk depots have been established at selected points, where milk from surrounding farms is concentrated, passed through a cooling plant and loaded into the tanks. At the point of delivery, the milk is unloaded from the tanks at the rate of 150 gallons a minute, and speedily conveyed to the consumer by motor and horse trucks.