The Livestock Car: How Railroads Learned to Move Cattle Without Killing Them

What is a livestock car?

A stock car, also called a cattle car, is rolling stock for carrying livestock, not carcasses, to market. A traditional one looks like a boxcar with louvered sides, sometimes also ends, so air can move through. Cars for large animals such as cattle and horses can be single level, while those for goats, sheep, pigs and poultry can have two or three. Specialized types have even carried live fish and circus animals. The facts here come from the Wikipedia article on stock cars.

For the beef business, the stock car was the link between the cattle trail and the packing plant. It is the live-animal half of a story whose dressed-meat half is the refrigerator car.

From open cars to boxcars, 1830s to 1860

Rail cars have carried livestock since the 1830s. The first shipments in the United States were on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in general-purpose, open-topped cars with semi-open sides. From then until 1860, most shipments went in ordinary boxcars fitted with iron-barred doors for ventilation. Some railroads built combination cars able to carry live animals or regular freight.

The suffering of animals from hunger, thirst and injury was considered inherent. A congressional inquiry found that a certain share of deaths on the way to market was treated as normal, 6 percent for cattle and 9 percent for sheep on average, and carcasses of dead animals were often dumped beside the tracks. Some were sold to glue factories or unscrupulous butchers.

Drovers' cabooses and railroad resistance

Some early railroads added passenger cars to livestock trains, and the Erie Railroad advertised special cabooses for handlers who rode with their herds. These were the ancestors of the drovers' caboose designs used until the middle of the twentieth century. Handlers were private contractors or employees of the shippers, not railroad staff, and railroad rules covering them were very limited.

Railroads also resisted improvement for as long as they could. They preferred standard boxcars, which could carry many kinds of cargo. Even with handlers and faster schedules, many stock cars were still listed with open roofs and little to improve conditions for the animals.

Illinois law and the first patents

When the railroads and cattle industry failed to act, the government and the public did. Claims were made that the meat of neglected animals was unfit to eat. In 1869 Illinois passed the first laws limiting how long animals could be kept on board, with five hours' rest for every 28 in transit. Ohio and Massachusetts followed, but effective federal law did not arrive until the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906, according to the source.

The Pennsylvania Railroad's class KA car, first published in 1869, had a removable second deck for pigs or sheep. The first patented designs to see actual use were by Zadok Street, patented on 30 August 1870 and used that year between Chicago and New York City. They had water troughs and food hoppers for a trip planned at 90 hours, but carried only six steers each, which made them impractical.

Mather, Hicks and Burton: the humane cars

Alonzo Mather, a Chicago clothing merchant who founded the Mather Stock Car Company, designed a car in 1880 that was among the first practical ones with feeding and watering for the trip. In 1883 he received a gold medal from the American Humane Association for the humane treatment his cars gave animals. Henry C. Hicks of Minneapolis patented a convertible boxcar and stock car in 1881 and improved it in 1890 with a removable double deck. George D. Burton of Boston introduced his version in 1882, and his company's design gave animals room to lie down on straw.

The numbers changed fast. American railroads had about 28,600 stock cars in 1880, 57,300 in 1890 and 78,800 in 1910. In the 1870s few cars were longer than 28 feet and carried about 10 short tons, and by the 1880s the average was 34 feet and cars regularly carried 20 short tons.

Where to read more

The stock car and the cattle drive worked together, as the Great Western Cattle Trail article shows. The refrigerator car arrived because shipping live animals wasted so much, as covered in the refrigerator car article. For more on rail and ranching, see the ranching section on farm.FM or a farm.FM story on the stockyards.