Ran across a half mile of parked auto racks on BNSF track outside of Stratton Ne. (SW part of state). Various RR markings. Are there any charges or fees involved here? Also does the car owner know where it’s cars are?
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The answers to your questions are, “Yes.” and “Yes.”
Cars storage charges are typically a few dollars per car, per month.
Auto racks are complicated. Most are in pools. If the BNSF has a auto assembly plant on their line they can request the other roads that will share in the revenue to supply racks in proportion to the amount of revenue they will receive. Most railroads will lease the flatcar the rack is going to be built on from Trailer Train. The flat car has TTX reporting marks and the rack has the owning railroads number on it. The auto racks are assigned to a pool and returned to pool location when they are empty. The Pool operator is responsibility for managing the cars assigned to the pool, including storing unused cars assigned to the pool. If the traffic situation changes, resulting in the car requirements changing, the pool operator can release unnecessary cars from the pool. If this happens the released cars will be sent back to the home road of the rack. If the change in traffic looks long term, the railroad that owns rack may chose to have it removed from the flat car and scrapped. The flat car will be returned to TTX and the lease terminated.
Before retirement, I managed a private rail fleet for a chemical company. We typically made arrangements with short lines if cars were going to be placed into storage for three months or longer. As a general rule, Class 1’s want nothing to do with private car storage - especially residue hazmat empties.
The short lines I worked with would charge either so much per car (could be as little as $5.00/per day) or, so much per linear foot of track space. Several of our plant sites were physically served by short lines and, at those locations, I’d normally contract for whatever linear footage I believed we’d need and then make monthly payments for cars held plus any applicable switching fees into or out of storage or for “cherry picking” specific cars.
Just about any railcar operator has a fleet management system to track car locations, maintenance and so on. The tracking aspect of these tools allows you to “see” where your cars are. When cars are switched in or out of a storage track, the conductor will report those sets and pulls and that info is uploaded by the carrier into Railinc. From there it is available for download to the fleet operator.
Curt
