MILK DEPOTS FOR LONDON

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 17977, 3 January 1933, Page 3

MILK DEPOTS FOR LONDON

GREAT WESTERN’S SCHEME AN EXPRESS SERVICE LONDON, Nov. 13, It i s understood that arrangements will be completed shortly for the daily delivery by rail of 60,000 gallons of milk to three vast depots to be erected in West London. This is one of the results of the intensive campaigns which the railways are waging to recover some of the traffic, they have lost to the roads. The sites for the three depots belong to the Great Western Railway, and negotiations are in progress with three of the biggest milk-distributing concerns in connection-with the erection of suitable buildings. At present the three distributing companies receive the enormous quantity of 21,900,0C0 gallons of milk a year from the areas in Wales and the. West of England served by the Great Western, and it is all delivered at a large number of small depots in various parts of London. It is intended to eliminate these by concentrating deliveries at the new depots, which will In. effect be “milk-clearing houses” for a. large part of London.

The rattling, clanging milk churns will disappear under the new scheme. Milk will be carried in specially built rail milk tanks, many of which will be of the “road-rail” type.

The. latter will be carried on motorlorries to the farms, filled with milk, and taken to the railway sidings, where the tanks will be swung olf the lorries and on to railway trucks. On arrival at London they will be similarly removed from the trucks on to lorries.

Many of these tanks are being made to hold 3000 gallons of milk, and they will thus save the handling of 300 of the 10-gallon cans.

Some of the farms from which this milk comes are over. 200 miles away, and the Great Western Railway has guaranteed to provide a service of “milk tankers” run at express schedules. The automatic train control with which their line is now equipped is one of the factors which makes this possible, for it very largely eliminates fog delays. The milk will bo collected from over a hundred stations in Wales and the West of England, each station being a collecting centre for a large number of farms.

If this co-operative effort between railway and distributor works successfully it is probable that similar arrangements will be made with the other railway companies who serve large dairyfarming districts sufficiently far away to make rapid transport necessary.