Real Train Shipping

Been selling Carloads of wood products for 40 years. The box car or A Frame loaded car stays in the same car from the mill to the destination!  This has been done since the 1970's and would be surprised if the 50's were different! Don in Montana

@turtle7 posted:

A question please. In real transport by trains in the 1950s & 60s ( not the toy train world), a shipment of a wood load occupying an entire GN flat car from Seattle Washington to Portland Maine initiates, for example, on the Great Northern Railway  ( GNR) with transfer to the NY Central in Chicago on to Boston with another transfer to the Maine Central RR to Portland ME. Would the load likely remain on the initial GNR flatcar all the way thru-or would the load be transferred to a NYC car in Chicago and perhaps even another transfer to a MEC car in Boston-if not ( and the load remains on one car) I presume that the railroads would try to find something for that car to carry in its return to the GN. How often is that accomplished as opposed to having to transfer empty cars?  I should know the answer to this, but I am uncertain of RR shipping practices in that era. Thanks in advance-turtle7

Cars are interchanged between railroads.  You may find all the niceties by doing a Search for Interchange Rules.  It would include the charges incurred when that GNR car is on the tracks of another railroad. Concerning the use of the empty, the rules used to be load it to a consignee on, beyond or in the direction of the home road.  That wording isn't exact, just the words I used.  Sometimes that was ignored as the first rule is to provide your customer with a car and if they need a fifty-foot boxcar for Seattle and the only one you have is a T&P, spot it.   John

In short . . .

1. Yes, the load remains on the same car, unless that car is found to have a defect that will require lengthy repair.  In that case, the load will be trans-loaded onto another equivalent car.  If an en route defect is discovered and it can be repaired, then the car might spend a couple of days on the rip track (loaded) and then continue to its destination.
2. The originating carrier (where the car was loaded and the waybill was created) would always try to use one if its own cars (called home road cars) instead of one belonging to another railroad (a foreign line car).
3. The originating carrier got the biggest slice of the revenue, if the car had to be interchanged to another carrier to complete the trip.
4. The home road owner of the car collects a per diem fee from other foreign line carriers when it is off-line.  (See item 2.)  Thus, only when absolutely necessary, is a foreign line car loaded by an originating carrier.  Private owner cars are treated differently as to per diem, but otherwise pretty much the same.
5. Railroads are like organized crime syndicates when dealing with each other.  They count their money to the penny and never miss an opportunity to charge another railroad for anything possible.

(I underlined a few railroad terms that you can use to dazzle your friends when having coffee and donuts with them.)

@Number 90 posted:

1. The originating carrier got the biggest slice of the revenue, if the car had to be interchanged to another carrier to complete the trip.

I think there may be exceptions to this.  For example, a CNJ car loaded in Bayonne for a Santa Fe customer in San Francisco routed CNJ-NYC-Chicago-SF the Santa Fe more than likely would receive a larger percentage for the line haul and switch than CNJ received for switch and line haul.  Of course, the CNJ will receive per diem while their car is offline.  John

@Number 90 posted:

1. Railroads are like organized crime syndicates when dealing with each other.  They count their money to the penny and never miss an opportunity to charge another railroad for anything possible

Tom,

I love the way you phrased your last comment. Thanks for the afternoon laugh.  I needed that!

Tom; many rail shippers would be in complete agreement with your fifth bullet point too - especially the “organized crime syndicates” part! 🤣

Curt

@rattler21 posted:

Cars are interchanged between railroads.  You may find all the niceties by doing a Search for Interchange Rules.  It would include the charges incurred when that GNR car is on the tracks of another railroad. Concerning the use of the empty, the rules used to be load it to a consignee on, beyond or in the direction of the home road.  That wording isn't exact, just the words I used.  Sometimes that was ignored as the first rule is to provide your customer with a car and if they need a fifty-foot boxcar for Seattle and the only one you have is a T&P, spot it.   John

Besides, if the railroads had to transfer loads from car to car each time the load moved over another road, the shipping costs would increase greatly because of the labor involved.

Image the labor (and delays) involved to get that Seattle lumber load transferred 4-5 times to get to Maine.

Rusty

@rattler21 posted:

I think there may be exceptions to this.  For example, a CNJ car loaded in Bayonne for a Santa Fe customer in San Francisco routed CNJ-NYC-Chicago-SF the Santa Fe more than likely would receive a larger percentage for the line haul and switch than CNJ received for switch and line haul.  Of course, the CNJ will receive per diem while their car is offline.  John

I understand your point.  However, even when the originating carrier only spots the car for loading, picks it up and bills it, and interchanges it in the same city (thus providing almost none of the line haul), the originating carrier still gets a disproportionately large cut of the revenue.

And you correctly recognized that the home road car starts the clock for making per diem immediately after interchange, so there's another bonus for CNJ there, too, in your scenario

It's really good to be the originating carrier.

The need to transfer a load from one car to another was a big strike against the narrow-gauge railroads. It was tolerable in Colorado or other places where the mountains gave the smaller trains an advantage in building and operating the lines, but in other areas (like the Midwest or example) narrow-gauge lines were often converted to standard gauge after only a few decades. Nowadays, few people know there ever were narrow-gauge lines in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, and other states.

The needs to transload the shipment is what killed the Maine 2-foot gauge lines. Labor costs went up, so transferring the loads from 3 narrow gauge cars to one standard gauge car cost more than it was worth.

wjstx: just ran across one from Des Moines IOWA to Jefferson Iowa and up to Okaboji and Spirit Lake. Milwaukee took over and went standard.

Time is MONEY, and any unnecessary transloading would be cost inefficient!