Over thirty years ago I used to have a beer with a guy named John. John worked for J J Nissan Company, commercial bakers at that time in Portland, Maine. Nissan makes bread and rolls for sale in super markets and grocery stores. His job was to get the flour, shipped by rail, to the bakery by truck.
For some strange reason yesterday I started to think about how flour is handled as freight, you know my mind works in strange ways to think of stuff like that. Anyway, when I got home I looked up the methods used to ship flour. For the sake of this blog we'll say it was shipped from Minnesota to Maine. I don't know if Nissan, now in Biddeford Maine still receives shipments via rail, or if trucks are used now. Trucks are kind of taking over the transport at this time. Dry bulk shipments would be in trucks like the one at the top. They load on top of the trailer and unload at the bottom. Dry bulk could be flour, seeds, or grain for critters or who knows what.
Flour shipped by rail is handled like the photo above. The flour is filtered at all ends of the pipeline, that keeps impurities to a minimum.
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| Flour loaded on to rail cars at the mill - click to enlarge. |
Next time you go to the store for a loaf of bread you'll know how the heck that flour got all the way from some mill way out west to a factory baker in Maine, or anywhere else. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to make a sandwich.
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