Potatoes

I was reading in an early 1970's magazine about how BAR was losing a lot of the potatoes market share, but the company was going to try to get some of it back. Beingfrom the midwest (and a visitor to Maine this year), I'm curious if that attempt was successful and if there still is potato hauling today.

MM&A is completely out of the potato hauling business and has been for many years. This business was once the mainstay of the Bangor and Aroostook but was lost to the railroad due to poor service from its connecting lines and better service offered by the truckers.

BAR

What about (from the list of north-south shippers topic)?

Maine Potato Growers in Squa Pan
McCain Foods in Easton
Cavendish in Caribou

The last 2 i do believe are outgoing only shipping french fries,though I could be wrong?

I think produce in general is something mostly relegated to trucks.
Because of the time sensitive nature of hauling produce, trains simply cannot compete for service. This being for the railroad to turn a profit, they need a large shipment or block of loads. They simply can't run 1 or 2 car trains whenever at customer demands.

amtrakhogger wrote:I think produce in general is something mostly relegated to trucks.
Because of the time sensitive nature of hauling produce, trains simply cannot compete for service. This being for the railroad to turn a profit, they need a large shipment or block of loads. They simply can't run 1 or 2 car trains whenever at customer demands.

However, the UP has quite a fleet of reefers. THey haul lots of stuff out of California.

I've always read with much interest BAR's history with the potatoe traffic. BAR hauled just under 13,000 cars of spuds in 1968, which by the way, was the same year the I-95 was completed to Houlton, Me. However over the next decade, that traffic certainly went into a freefall. After handling only 19 cars in 1979, BAR offered various incentives to shippers, but to no avail, soon severing ties with the potatoe business thereafter.

The national reefer fleet is less than 10,000 cars... a drop in the bucket considering the North American fleet total of 1.5-1.6 million cars. Part of MMA's (and BAR's before them) problem is that the bulk of Maine's table potatoes are consumed in NY/NJ/New England. Short haul... more suited for truck. Much of their seed potato crop goes south to the Carolinas and FL... not sure why they haven't picked any of this up, but anything out of Maine is a trucking backhaul... really cheap.

Hi All,

Interesting points gentlemen. In point of fact, trucks have pretty much taken over the "Spud Rush".

At one time the Spud Rush depleted both the UP and SP of steam Locomotives to haul endless trains loaded with potatoes. Extra steamers were called in from the far reaches of the RR. It was quite a sight to see several steamers hauling a solid train loaded with "Spuds".

As mentioned in BAR's post, poor service from Bangor and Aroostook's connections to the south was a great contributing factor to the loss of potatoe traffic in the late 60's to trucks. The culprit was the Penn Central, which was having major service problems at the time. So, no matter how fast B & A, MEC or the B & M moved the potatoe reefers to Southern New England, once handed over to the Penn Central........major delays incurred.

There was a great news item this week concerning a bulk rail shipment of produce from the State of Washington to Rotterdam, N.Y. This concept with today's railroading can certainly work. Try the link below.......stories under articles titled " Produce Train arrives ahead of schedule " and " Train bears fruit of success "


http://www.timesunion.com/tunews/author ... hornum=191

One of the weirdest and in a way saddest things I saw on this topic was an UPFE reefer of Idaho potatoes being unloaded in Oxford, Maine, a couple years ago (an SLR customer behind Oxford Plains Speedway). Why would Maine need to import potatoes?

Same reason Maine newsprint goes to Chicago... despite plenty of paper mills in Wisconsin, Minnesota, etc.

And in this day and age we haul reefers of fish to Boston,Fall River& New Bedford!

McCain is outbound french fries (frozen, in reefers)

Not sure about cavendish.

MPG would be things like fertilizer, maybe LPG, etc.- MPG is basically an agricultural supplier.

>>Why would Maine need to import potatoes?

From what I've read, there were two main reasons: Maine farmers made a wrong decision, and they had "help" from the feds.

In the years following WW II, Maine farmers went for volume rather than quality, and thus lost the high-margin table potato business while they were producing the raw material for instant mashed potatoes and similar products.

At the same time, the feds poured lots of tax mooney into Idaho to enable the state to develop a thriving agricultural economy based mainly on high quality potatoes, like Russets.

Throw in the Interstate system, and the red-white-and-blue reefers were doomed.

PBM