How do RR's choose the order of freight cars?

The short general answer is...they don't. Put all of your cars in a bag, put on your blindfold, reach in and start pulling them out and lining them up.

Then come the exceptions:
Since N&W's big tank car explosion years ago;
Loaded dangerous tank cars now need to be no less than the sixth car from the engines or occupied caboose.
Empty dangerous tank cars can be the second car behind the engine or occupied caboose.

Cars that have shiftable loads (loads that extend over the top of the sides of a gondola or a flat car without a bulkhead) cannot be next to an occupied loco or caboose or a dangerous loaded tank car.

Empty 89' flats will have trailing tonnage limits depending on the territory, so they will have to be placed in the train far enough back where the trailing tonnage is below the limit. Passenger cars may have a trailing tonnage limit too.

Sometimes around here they used to "Hobo" loaded coal cars on unit grain trains. If that is the case the coal cars need to be behind the grain cars to avoid grain contamination (yes, those covered hoppers are vented to atmosphere).

Scale test cars without brakes cannot be less than the second car from the rear of the train.

There's probably some other little things that I have forgotten, but, the main answer is that train makeup as to the type of car is basically a toss up.

In manifest freight trains, cars are typically "blocked" or sorted in groups based on distant terminals, destinations, connecting railroads, what have you.  For local freights, the conductor will build his train based on the order of the set outs he has to make.

Curt

I believe empty cars added to braking purposes have a specified location.  Certain types of cars also need idler cars around them, like ethanol cars on the ITRR, where they must have a car between them and the steeplecab.

Just about everywhere I worked the railroads "blocked" their trains. For instance an eastbound freight coming out of Spokane might have a Missoula block on the headend followed by a Laurel (Billings) block then a block of cars for Lincoln/Omaha and finally a block for Kansas City.
Up until the mid 1980s the union agreements required that on long distance freights that did the local work along the route the cars had to be in "station order".

How bout explaining how the independent car owners make money. ie; the railroads use their cars to ship freight , whats the % to each the RR and the car owner?

I understand the system when the railroad owns its owns cars but what about the non owned cars?

Buzz

Buzz:

I'm assuming you mean private car owners? 

Years ago, the railroads would commonly pay the car owner so many cents per loaded mile depending on the car type.  The car owner, if it was a leasing company, would normally pass this mileage revenue back to the car lessee in the  form of a mileage credit to help offset some of the cost of the lease.  Whether the railroad paid mileage was dependent on the rate; if it was a full mileage rate you collected the full credit per mile.  Conversely, if it the rate was zero rated for mileage, you collected nothing.  On zero mileage rates, the assumption was the railroad had given you a lower rate to compensate for not having to pay you mileage revenue.

About a decade ago, many railroads and shippers began to migrate away from full mileage rates to zero mileage rates.  This enabled the shipper to collect the equivalent benefit of the reduced rate immediately as opposed to having to wait 4-6 months to receive a mileage credit from the leasing company or a check from the railroad. 

The flip side of the coin is excess empty mileage.  Whether the rail rate is full mileage or zero mileage, the car owner or lessee is limited to how much empty mileage the car may travel on any given railroad without the shipper having to pay a mileage penalty to the railroad.  Typically, railroads will allow a private car to accrue empty miles on their railroad up to 106% of the loaded miles traveled on that same railroad.  If the car goes over the 106% threshold, the railroad charges the car owner / lessee a penalty cost per excess empty mile.  This penalty charge is adjusted annually but, for excess empty miles accrued in 2014, the penalty charge was 91 cents per mile on our private cars.  Mileage equalization is calculated on a calendar year basis so; using the 2014 example, we received our 2014 mileage equalization invoices from the leasing companies in late summer / early fall 2015.  

If the excess empty mileage is the result of railroad mishandling, in theory the shipper can file a claim either directly with the railroad or with the leasing company to receive a credit for the miles resulting from railroad mishandling.  By way of example; let's say we had a loaded movement from Atlanta to Jacksonville.  When the empty is being returned, rather than send the car straight back to Atlanta, the railroad instead routes the empty car over North Jersey, Cleveland and Chicago before directing it back to Atlanta.  Most railroads will look at this type situation and honor a claim for railroad mishandling.  CSX typically does not.  The mileage tariff states that an empty must be handled over the same junction points as the loaded move but, this applies only if the car has to interchange to another railroad.  I have seen multiple instances over the years where, for example, CSX will take cars coming back from New Orleans and destined to a point in Mississippi with an empty route of CSX-MOBILE-AGR and send the cars as far to the east as Rocky Mount, NC before reversing direction and sending them back to Mobile for interchange to AGR.  In these instances, CSX has denied our claim despite all the additional empty miles traveled, because the cars still interchanged to AGR in Mobile, where they were supposed to.  Kind of a license to print money, if you know what I mean.

There are other aspects of mileage equalization that apply to private cars moving to the shop that I won't go into in this post as it can get complicated pretty quickly.

Curt 

RJR posted:

I believe empty cars added to braking purposes have a specified location...

Railroads do not add empty cars to a train just for braking purposes. You can't make money hauling empty cars around that aren't going somewhere to be loaded.

It is a business, after all.

I recall reading in a few places that railroads do sometimes add empty cars in hilly country to achieve adequate braking power.  While you can't make money hauling empty cars, you also can't make money if you can't control a heavy train in mountainous country.

RJR posted:

I recall reading in a few places that railroads do sometimes add empty cars in hilly country to achieve adequate braking power.  While you can't make money hauling empty cars, you also can't make money if you can't control a heavy train in mountainous country.

In all my years in the railroad industry, I must admit that I am not aware that empty cars have been add to a freight train just for braking, hilly country or not.

However, you may have read about previous UP steam deadhead moves, that had empty freight cars added for braking, before the steam crew expanded their support cars to more than just the crew/toll car.

That could be, hot water.

For the RR history buff, during WWII, the Italian Army tried to move a lot of troops by rail.  The engineer, at gunpoint, was convinced to move the train despite his fears it was overloaded and couldn't be stopped.  Many Italian soldiers burned to death in the aftermath.  Brakes just couldn't hold the weight.

Hot Water posted:

RJR posted:

I recall reading in a few places that railroads do sometimes add empty cars in hilly country to achieve adequate braking power.  While you can't make money hauling empty cars, you also can't make money if you can't control a heavy train in mountainous country.

In all my years in the railroad industry, I must admit that I am not aware that empty cars have been add to a freight train just for braking, hilly country or not.

However, you may have read about previous UP steam deadhead moves, that had empty freight cars added for braking, before the steam crew expanded their support cars to more than just the crew/toll car.

Yes, in cases where there is a movement of an  especially heavy load or equipment (ex. old steam locos) without an operational brake system, empty cars will be added for braking power. However, I have never had empty cars adding to a regular freight train for the express purpose of braking power.

GG1 2340 posted:

How bout explaining how the independent car owners make money. ie; the railroads use their cars to ship freight , whats the % to each the RR and the car owner?

I understand the system when the railroad owns its owns cars but what about the non owned cars?

Buzz

 

Companies like American Railcar and GATX own cars they lease to companies or RR's to haul goods, and companies like Phillips 66 and Dow Chemical own cars to carry their own products. These private car lines save money by simply delivering their own product in company owned cars. The private car lines hire RR's to pull their loaded cars for processing or delivery to market. About 2/3 of the cars hauled by CSX, for example, are privately owned. 

juniata guy posted:

There are other aspects of mileage equalization that apply to private cars moving to the shop that I won't go into in this post as it can get complicated pretty quickly.

Curt 

What was in your post above this was complicated enough. I imagine this is a nightmare to keep track of? And was probably really something before computers when it was all done by written form or whatever they used back then?  

Do the companies that own the cars keep track of this as well or is it just the railroads? Are there any kind of GPS devices on the cars to help with the tracking? Seems like a GPS device would help both parties, owner and RR? Do any of the cars ever come up missing?

This kind of boggles the mind (mine anyway) when you think about how many cars are out there and they are all constantly moving around. Sorry about so many questions...but this is interesting and I know little or nothing about it.

Is there a website that decodes the X- - - -  abbreviations on private owner freight cars?  I have often tried to "tease out" an owner's name, but it never quite works!

Google the reporting marks (the "x--- abbreviations", i.e. the 3-4 four-digit letter code accompanying the road number), a number of websites list owner names for them.

---PCJ

mark s posted:

Is there a website that decodes the X- - - -  abbreviations on private owner freight cars?  I have often tried to "tease out" an owner's name, but it never quite works!

http://www.railserve.com/aar_r...reporting_marks.html

rtr12 posted:

juniata guy posted:

There are other aspects of mileage equalization that apply to private cars moving to the shop that I won't go into in this post as it can get complicated pretty quickly.

Curt 

What was in your post above this was complicated enough. I imagine this is a nightmare to keep track of? And was probably really something before computers when it was all done by written form or whatever they used back then?  

Do the companies that own the cars keep track of this as well or is it just the railroads? Are there any kind of GPS devices on the cars to help with the tracking? Seems like a GPS device would help both parties, owner and RR? Do any of the cars ever come up missing?

This kind of boggles the mind (mine anyway) when you think about how many cars are out there and they are all constantly moving around. Sorry about so many questions...but this is interesting and I know little or nothing about it.

Here you go: http://trn.trains.com/railroad...ata-tags-and-readers

And yes, cars do come up missing.

Jeff "just a fan" - Thank you for the website. No wonder I couldn't guess the meaning of the reporting marks - there's about a billion !!  I will use this site.

Leasing companies do gather and retain tracking and mileage data for the cars in their fleets.  This information is shared with their customers upon request.  For shippers who actually own their cars, either they can track this themselves or, more commonly, retain an outside contractor to gather the data.

As a shipper who leases our private cars, we use a third party rail fleet management company called Intellitrans that allows us to create and transmit electronic waybilling direct to the railroads as well as track and trace not only our leased railcars but, those of our suppliers when used to ship raw materials into our plant sites.  If I want to know all the shop and loaded movements one of our cars made in a calendar year, it is a very simple query to find out.  Likewise, I can use our system to determine the route followed by our empty railcars.  By comparing the loaded route versus the empty route, you can quickly see if mishandling may be occurring.  Interestingly (to me at least), you'll also discover directional running schemes the railroads haven't publicized.  For example, BNSF runs westbound manifest trains between the Twin Cities and the Pacific Northwest over their own railroad across northern Montana - the old Great Northern Hi Line.  Eastbound BNSF trains use Montana Rail Link, who has a slightly more circuitous route through Montana than the Hi Line.  As a result, the mileage on an empty car coming east is always somewhat greater than the loaded mileage for the same car going west.  Railroads are permitted to do this as it involves a long standing "catch all" called operational convenience.

The siting or location information for railcars is created by automated equipment identification (AEI) tags applied to both sides of every railcar in service in North America.  (Locomotives carry them too.)These tags contain the car initial and number along with several other key pieces of data, all loaded onto the tag in an electronic format.  If you live in an area that has toll roads and use some sort of an electronic tag in the windshield of your car or truck, AEI tags are similar, just bigger. 

When a car passes a wayside AEI scanner, the information on the tags is read by the scanner and transmitted along with the location, date and time to both the railroad and to Railinc, an industry clearing house of sorts.  Railinc then makes this data available to other railroads, shippers and third party rail fleet management services.

There are some companies, Olin being one, who equip all of their railcars with GPS.  The advantage to this level of monitoring is that it is in real time 24/7 whereas the AEI tags only tell you where the car has been.  Affixing a GPS unit to every car and paying for monitoring is an expensive proposition though.

Getting back to mileage equalization; many companies retain a mileage auditing firm to review railcar mileage monthly and file claims immediately rather than waiting till the following year when the invoices are issued.  These auditing firms don't come cheap however, so a shipper needs to make a value determination whether the cost of the audit is justified by the dollars saved when claims are approved.

And I'll agree this must have been a nightmare before computers.  I have a book on the history of Union Tank Car in which it makes mention of mileage clerks (with green eye shades and sleeve garters, no doubt) reviewing telegrams providing siting events on UTLX cars and then recording the information on large sheets of paper than came off rollers, similar to pull down window shades.

Curt

Hi, As a conductor for NS awhile back I will add my 2 cents.

Juniata guy is right about placement of cars for local freights.  They are placed in order of the set outs to be made.

As far as adding cars for braking purposes I ran coal trains over the mountain from Pittsburgh to Altoona.  Each car weighed about 140 tons (100 tons of coal and the rest was car weight).  Usual length of a train was 130 cars = 18,200 tons of train not counting the engines.  We never had to add empties for braking.  Once in awhile we would take on helpers depending what kind of engines we were using ex. SD40-2s.

Rick

The only time I've seen empty cars added to provide braking was on a "hospital train" I had one day. It was about 30 wrecked cars that had no brakes that were being moved several hundred miles from the wreck site to the car repair shops. So we placed an empty hopper car with working brakes between every two non-braking wrecks to provide braking for the train. Long jumper air hoses were used to by-pass the 2 wrecked cars between each braking empty. The train speed was limited to 25 mph max.

I've seen extra empties added to a freight train so it could run faster. One night I got the through-freight local. It ran 850 miles from Lincoln, NE to Billings, MT and made all of the station pickups and setouts along the way. I had to pick up 15 cars of coal at our terminal and I was, uh, whining to the night clerk that the weight of the coal would make our train 101 Tons Per Brake which would limit us to 45 mph instead of 60 mph. He calmly said "Pick up 7empty coal hoppers from #6 track and take them to Montana with you".  Not wanting even more tonnage I said those cars are not on our list? He said "Do it anyway". It then occurred to me that those 7 empty hoppers would reduce our Tons Per Brake to 99.5 instead of 101 thus those cars would make us a 60 mph train again. So thanks to the clerk we gladly picked them up and departed smiling all the way to the away from home terminal. Of course the yardmaster there could find no waybills for those additional 7 empties so he promptly sent them back on the next days train :-)
So the RR used a bit more fuel to haul those 7 hoppers 320 miles just so I could run 60mph that night. Heh heh. Its nice to win one once in a while.

Wyhog, loved your story. LOL

Dan Weinhold

Classification Yard • Union Pacific's Bailey Yard, North Platte, Nebraska • Video

Freight cars go over the hump, through the retarders, and into the bowl to be divvied up into westbound trains at Union Pacific's Bailey Yard, North Platte, Nebraska. The world's largest rail classification yard is seen from the top of adjacent Golden Spike Tower.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDcx-NrseOE

Gary - Cheers from The Detroit and Mackinac Railway

Juniata Guy, Thanks for taking the time for the detailed explanation to my questions, it helped a lot. Very nice explanation and understandable for the novice too. Still sounds like a lot of work, even with computers recording the data.

Just A Fan, Thanks for the link, I will give it a good read and further study. Also thanks for the link on the reporting marks, I am going to look at and bookmark both of these for further reference.

As I said earlier, to me the car (and even engine) tracking is a fascinating subject. BNSF, the chosen road on my layout has something like 6,000 or 8,000 locomotives alone, no idea how many pieces of rolling stock, and I have trouble keeping track of the very limited quantities of these items I have on my layout and I don't even interchange with other railroads.  

Traintoomgary, I have a DVD about the Baily yard. It is a bit of a drive for me, but I would like to take the tour of the baily yard someday. I live near the BNSF Argentine yard, but as far as I know they don't give tours. I should probably investigate this further someday.

Hey JuniataGuy,

How about milling in transit?  You might as well haul the cars empty.

rtr12 posted:

BNSF, the chosen road on my layout has something like 6,000 or 8,000 locomotives alone, no idea how many pieces of rolling stock,

79,582 pieces of rolling stock according to the most recent ORER (Official Railway Equipment Register). That's nothing compared to some of the guys I've seen on this forum!

I never knew exactly what we hauling, but sometimes our orders would include one that stated a load was classified "explosives A" or "explosives B" in our consist, and the yard crew had to place it precisely in the middle of our train. And there is a lengthy list of restrictions as to what cannot be placed beside an explosive load. 

Empty 89' flats will have trailing tonnage limits depending on the territory...

Yep.  And if no such rules are written down, there is still common sense.

Just outside Quanah, TX the Frisco pulled up out of Groesbeck creek bottom, through the QA&P yard, and delivered to the FW&D via a very sharp wye track.  A typical lengthy train would have its rear tonnage hanging in the creek bottom incline while the headend waited for an unlock from the FWD DS.

I once saw the aftermath of an ill-fated delivery with 2 loaded tofc cars (which were on the head end) now resting on their sides right inside the south leg of the FW&D wye.  Ouch.

Just a fan posted:

rtr12 posted:

BNSF, the chosen road on my layout has something like 6,000 or 8,000 locomotives alone, no idea how many pieces of rolling stock,

79,582 pieces of rolling stock according to the most recent ORER (Official Railway Equipment Register). That's nothing compared to some of the guys I've seen on this forum!

Some folks around here do have a LOT of train equipment, but BNSF has got to be right up there close to some of them anyway.

79,582 is a LOT of cars to keep track of though. I have a BNSF engine guide, but it's from 2012, I need a new one. It appeared they put out a new one about every two years so this might be the year to upgrade.

Just a fan posted:

rtr12 posted:

juniata guy posted:

There are other aspects of mileage equalization that apply to private cars moving to the shop that I won't go into in this post as it can get complicated pretty quickly.

Curt 

What was in your post above this was complicated enough. I imagine this is a nightmare to keep track of? And was probably really something before computers when it was all done by written form or whatever they used back then?  

Do the companies that own the cars keep track of this as well or is it just the railroads? Are there any kind of GPS devices on the cars to help with the tracking? Seems like a GPS device would help both parties, owner and RR? Do any of the cars ever come up missing?

This kind of boggles the mind (mine anyway) when you think about how many cars are out there and they are all constantly moving around. Sorry about so many questions...but this is interesting and I know little or nothing about it.

Here you go: http://trn.trains.com/railroad...ata-tags-and-readers

And yes, cars do come up missing.

Yes, Canadian National finally embargoed Ketchikan Pulp from using their clean, dry boxcars to ship our dissolving grade pulp to Celanese Mexicana in Zacapu, Michoacan.   A good boxcar like this had many uses once it got down there and never came back across the border.

Gary Graves posted:

GG1 2340 posted:

How bout explaining how the independent car owners make money. ie; the railroads use their cars to ship freight , whats the % to each the RR and the car owner?

I understand the system when the railroad owns its owns cars but what about the non owned cars?

Buzz

 

Companies like American Railcar and GATX own cars they lease to companies or RR's to haul goods, and companies like Phillips 66 and Dow Chemical own cars to carry their own products. These private car lines save money by simply delivering their own product in company owned cars. The private car lines hire RR's to pull their loaded cars for processing or delivery to market. About 2/3 of the cars hauled by CSX, for example, are privately owned. 

Lots of different situations (companies get creative). Private car lines (PCL's) are companies that own RR cars to carry their own goods, or contract with other companies to carry the company's goods (whether they are manufactured, mined or whatever) and most often pay the RR a % for the RR to pull the cars on the RR's tracks. RR's sometimes lease PCL  cars from private car lines (PCL's) to transport goods and save on outlay and maintenance, other companies lease cars from PCL's, or the PCL's originate their own business. It's a win/win - RR's get a cut, PCL's devise a business plan that makes them money, manufacturers get their products delivered. CSX said that 2/3 of the cars they pull are owned by PCL's.

I am not in the business, but I am in the business of assessing the property tax on PCL's. PCL cars do not have to be registered the way a motor vehicle does (so the states do not derive revenue from them in that way), or pay tax in Florida for sitting idle. PCL cars only create value and revenue when they are used (miles). They pay personal property tax when they run enough miles in Florida relative to system-wide miles. By contrast RR's pay personal property taxes on their cars and equipment and they pay real property tax on their track and buildings. Value x the locally levied millage rate minus the exemptions = tax bill. I'm not sure I am explaining this very well, but maybe you get the idea.