QUOTE (Lancashire Fusilier @ 14 Oct 2008, 05:50)
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>Now, what about abbattoirs? Were these ever rail serviced?
The answer is sort of yes and no. The whole business of bringing cattle to market for sale and subsequent slaughter for meat was well established long before the railway arrived, resulting in the situations described in your link to the Wolverhampton meat processing business. This has never been much of a hobbyist area (!) so the data has to be dug around for. The UK gov's BSE report indicates around 1,500 market/abbattoir operations still going in 1975, compared to below 300 just 20 years later.
Before reliable refrigeration, meat had to be distributed very fast after slaughter, every town therefore had to have some place where cattle could be brought and kept alive, so that when slaughtered the consumers were on the doorstep. There's the reason for what must have been thousands of small market/abbatoir operations in the UK. That was the state of play when railways emerged, and by and large they were superimposed: cattle could be moved greater distances to exisiting places of sale for slaughter, but the investment already made in stockyards, auction facilities and abbatoirs meant that unless the railway could be brought close to the stock yard or abbatoir there might not be that much integration. Stock yards were usually located where water and feed could be readily obtained, right down in a river valley was typical, and depending on the terrain it might be impractical to make these rail served. Worth poking around older market towns in rural areas to see what the layout looked like, for the few that I know, the rail facilities were all a fair distance from the meat market.
This is very unlike the situation in the USA, where the development of the railway and cattle ranching in the mid west, simultaneously with the start of mechanised processing and refrigeration, resulted in Chicago becoming the central point for the majority of commercial meat production.
