"Official Territory" Trunks?

[Kozzie]

Hey crew [:)] I've just finished reading 'The Mountain Way" in April 04 edition of Trains Mag.

The article used what it called "the old Interstate Commerce Commission groupings of railroads" and referred to the New York to Chicago mountain routes as being in the "Official Territory."

What is the background to that name? All the other ICC grouping names used in the article (and in the excellent map on pages 28 & 29), have geographical references in their names, but this one's got me stumped. [%-)]

Cheers

Kozzie [;)]

[jeaton]

Kozzie-An expert and accurate answer would have to come from a very serious rail historian. But let me offer some speculation. Prior to the establishment of the now generally defunct Interstate Commerce Act -1878, I believe-railroads were totally free to set rates any way they wished. With the establishment of the IC Act, rate making was subject to provisions of the new Law and I suspect the name may have been derived from the notion that the new rates were "official", i.e., the rates that had to be used for freight charges.

[Kozzie]

QUOTE: Originally posted by jeaton

Kozzie-An expert and accurate answer would have to come from a very serious rail historian. But let me offer some speculation. Prior to the establishment of the now generally defunct Interstate Commerce Act -1878, I believe-railroads were totally free to set rates any way they wished. With the establishment of the IC Act, rate making was subject to provisions of the new Law and I suspect the name may have been derived from the notion that the new rates were "official", i.e., the rates that had to be used for freight charges.

[:D] Thanks jeaton! Some interesting info.
I might get somemore comments as time goes by. [;)]

Cheers

Kozzie

[Anonymous]

I should preface this by saying that a complete answer would require about 100,000 words. I am not exaggerating. Here is the short answer, which leaves out so many important aspects it's probably completely worthless. I have more than 100 books on railroad rates and regulations on my home bookshelves, but none provide a simple answer. (I looked.)

The only thing that is easy to define is the boundary of the Official Territory. Moving counterclockwise, it was bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the international boundary with Canada, a line generally south of the Santa Fe from and including Chicago through Streator and Joliet, to and including Peoria, to and including St. Louis, the north bank of the Ohio River, and generally the lines of the C&O to North Kenova, Ohio, and the N&W through Roanoke to and including Norfolk, Va.

The Official Territory dates to the practice of pooling and traffic associations, which were formed by railroads in order to maintain rates, provide uniformity and predictiblility to shippers and railroads, and avoid ruinous competition. (First was the Iowa Pool, of 1870.) Following a rate war in 1877, the four Trunk Lines (which by definition are the New York-Chicago principal routes), the Erie, NYC, PRR, and B&O, formed a pool.

These are called trunk lines, by the way, because at first they were almost pure through routes to Chicago, with hardly any branch lines. The feeders that ran essentially perpendicular to the trunk lines, intersecting them at numerous small towns in route, were at the time largely independent. Like the trunk of a tree, the trunk lines gathered and distributed, and ran unbranched in a straight line from one end to the other.

While the ICC Act of 1877 outlawed pooling, it did NOT outlaw collective ratemaking, so the rate bureaus already set up by the railroads continued. The first territory to be acknowledged by the ICC was the Eastern Trunk Line Territory, to which was added the New England and some other territories, and by being acknowledged became the "Official" Territory. The other principal territories were the Illinois, Southern, and Western. Each of these was further subdivided into as many as five or six territories.

Territories came about to provide a pricing method for all the commodities hauled by rail between the some 75,000 origin-destination pairs of the era. The U.S. was divided into about two dozen classification territories, and in each territory the railroads ran a rate bureau that classified all of the possible commodities (e.g., pickles, in jars, in boxes not to exceed 100 jars each, etc.) and placed them into a rate group. Rates were often set to avoid discrimination between towns, regions, and commodities, but by so doing actually created all sorts of discrimination.

There were numerous problems this created, which in turn required armies of clerks and bureaucrats to administer it all. Deregulation abolished most of this, though collective ratemaking, discrimination between locales, and violations of the long-haul, short-haul principal are by no means dead. All deregulation really did was acknowledge that the small shipper either had vanished or might as well vanish, and that railroads were primarily movers of bulk commodities or consolidated merchandise shipments, which didn't need such an elaborate rate-making structure to ensure fairness. Nevertheless, there's plenty of people who feel that railroad rates are plenty unfair. (Just ask farmers in mid North Dakota what they think.)

The other groupings used in the Mountain Railroad issue aren't exactly ICC groupings, save for the Pocohontas. They do follow ICC groupings, because we used a similar logic in that we grouped railroads that were essentially doing the same thing on more or less parallel routes. The Pacific Coast lines grouping has no parallel in the ICC groupings -- because there WAS no Pacific Coast rail traffic to speak of until post World War II, as coast-wise shipping had it all. In truth, the Pacific Coast routes are all east-west routes that turn corners once they get west of the Sierra Nevada-Cascade Ranges. Today, there isn't much pure Pacific Coast rail traffic, either -- trucks have most of it.

The Official Territory designation no longer has any legal meaning. But it's still in common usage among railroaders because it instantly identifies a specific geographic place with practical meaning, just as the routes into Chicago are almost never referred to by their current names today, but by their ancient names. Recently I sat in a meeting of all the Chicago railroads and the various government agencies responsible for transportation there, and when the bottleneck at Brighton Park was mentioned, someone what routes crossed there, and the answer was "the Alton, the Panhandle, the B&OCT, and the CR&I." Not CN, CSX, and NS!

[Kozzie]

Thanks Mark - interesting reading and helps a lot.

Believe me, your reply is not worthless.. For folk like me, the short answer is qutie enough. Provides the answer to my question and lot more. [:D]
Hopefully others in the Forum have picked up some info too.

Cheers

Kozzie

[jeaton]

Kozzie-There you have it - a serious rail historian. An aside, In my "starting out days" I was one of the army producing pages of rate publications, which at the peak must have numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Serious money was paid to the people who found and correctly quoted the rates and applicable provisions.

Jay

[Anonymous]

I ought to add that what all this rate-making and freight classification really boiled down to was yield managment -- the same thing airlines do in setting prices for seats. But, unlike airlines, railroads were in the pre-computer era, and had to use people and paper to do the same thing, albeit crudely.

Most of the army of rate clerks and traffic officials would have existed regardless of the presence or not of the ICC. What fundamentally changed railroading was the application of the computer.