Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
As a way of introducing this subject, I'll try to answer your question. Miscellaneous charges, that is billing to customers by the railroads, are for services ancillary to but not necessarily involved with direct moving of a car. For instance, the various types of demurrage. Demurrage is a charge to a customer for excessive detaining of a freight car for loading or unloading. The purpose of demurrage is to encourage the prompt release of an empty or forwarding of a load, so as to provide the railroad a reasonable return on the investment of its equipment. A box car not moving is not producing revenue. There are other miscellaneous charges as well. As these posts go on I'll talk about them as is appropriate and as long as interest is there. Other miscellaneous charges may be the various types of switching, weighing, transit charges and other services indiginous to a particular location. On the former N&W, there was even a miscellaneous charge for koshering. There was a Jewish owned customer who received perishable goods by the carload. Since this customer was an orthadox Jew, he desired to have the load koshered before it was unloaded. The railroad had an agreement with a local rabbi to do just that. When a car arrived, the rabbi was called, he came and the load was koshered. The miscellaneous charge to the customer was $25 per car, if I remember correctly, which is what the rabbi charged. Since Ed, from Houston, expressed an interest in discussing chargeable switching, let's go there first. Right off the top of my head, I can think of 5 types of chargeable switching. 1. Intra plant. This is switching of cars from spot to spot within a customer's facility. Since nothing in railroad billing is simple, there are instances where intraplant switching is not billable to the customer. We can discuss this more in a future post. 2. Inter plant. This is switching between two customers, maybe even the same the customer with two facilities. 3. Intra terminal. This is switching within a railroad's yard limits. This could also apply to a switching carrier such as the one Ed works for. Such as two locations within one yard limit. 4. Inter terminal. This is switching between two terminals while still not a line-haul move. It may or may not be between two carriers. 5. Junction switching. This is switching done within designated geographic limits at the beginning or terminating point of a line-haul movement. To clarify, imagine a customer located in Chicago on NS who wants to ship a car to Florida to a location on CSXT. The customer prefers to have the car shipped from Chicago on CSXT. The customer contacts CSXT with a bill of lading. CSXT then notifies NS that box car CSXT 123456 is ready for switching to them. NS then gets the car and moves it to the interchange point with CSXT at Chicago. Since NS is not going to do this free, a junction switching charge is assessed against CSXT and settled with other similar switching moves monthly. This post has become long quickly so let's stop here and give everyone a chance to comment. If I've overlooked a type of switching or you wi***o add something or wi***o ask a question, I invite you to do so. More next post...gdc
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag