Crosswise Loading of Long-Type Watermelons

Excerpts from the report: Although watermelons have always sustained considerable loss and damage in rail shipment, the problem has become more acute in recent years in shipments from the southeastern producing areas to northern markets. Most of this substantial increase in melon damage has been directly attributable to the increased production and shipment during the last 5 years of several new and improved varieties of long-type melons that are considerably more susceptible to bruising than the older varieties of round- type melons. Shipping experiments by rail from Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina to northern markets with the Congo variety of watermelon during the 1953 and 1954 seasons disclosed that loading this long-type melon crosswise of the car resulted in a reduction of 71.6 percent in melon bruising, 68 percent in the number of cracked melons, and 30.6 percent in surface scarring as compared with loading melons lengthwise of the car (the conventional method). The overall reduction in total external damage to melons was 70.5 percent. Observations were made on a total for both seasons of 111 test cars with the melons loaded crosswise and 109 companion carloads of comparable melons loaded lengthwise.