Let's imagine that your railroad, the AB&C, has a shipper who wants to send a carload of widgets to his customer. The car will be routed over the D&E for delivery by the FGH with approximately equal mileage on all three roads. Three nearly identical empties are on hand, one from each of the three railroads.
Which car gets spotted for loading? How about if the shipper needs two empties? Would your answers have been different at different times in our past?
ChuckAllen, TX
Chuck,
This is an AAR Car Service Rules question. My answer will be as of the late 1960's. I suspect rules today are very similar, and the logic can not have changed.
First I will make the happy assumption that the three cars are equally suitable for the load.
Basic rule was "Load to the home road, in the direction of the home road or via the home road" Mileage is irrelevant.
As I read your situation I assume the FGH is the farthest from origin and D&E would/could be intermediate carrier to FGH.
A load to the FGH is easy, use the FGH car. The shipper has the right of routing but we have no need to consider it.
The D&E empty must go back to the D&E via reverse route, except that if ABC interchanges with D&E, ABC can give back to D&E at ABC's most convenient junction point.
If the shipper also has a load for D&E then use D&E car.
Mac McCulloch
One time, short time, car distributor for BN At Balmer Yard, Seattle
That's about what I thought, Mac. Would it have been any different during WW II (my primary era of interest)?
And I knew the distance traveled on the three roads wouldn't matter. Don't know why I put it in there. But what about the location of the empties before spotting? Surely Car Service Rules would not require moving a foreign car from say, Philadelphia to Chicago for loading if a home road car was available in Chicago.
I believe the rules were substantially the same during WW II as in my previous post. If you have an Equipment Register the rules are printed near the back of the book along with a map of what railroads were in what areas.
Your example is very unrealistic since it contemplates hauling a foreign empty the entire length of the PRR to load east. If car was a Granger or Transcon carrier, that would be a violation. If PRR had a system car in Chicago they would load it and return the western car empty, probably via reverse route of the load. If the foreign car was New England car, say NH or BAR and it came up empty in Philladelphia after a move from the west, it should have gone to owner most direct route.
Of course the empty in Philadelphia is an opportunity. Assuming it was a western car it make perfect sense to move it to Pittsburg for a load to the west or to home road. This was OK and smarter than for PRR to haul that western car empty to Chicago or St. Louis, and haul its own car over the same route. It costs money to haul empty cars around!
Remember that traffic "flows", which makes it predictable in macro terms. On the PRR more loads moved to the east then the west. Think coal and steel. Box car traffic was probably better ballanced, but areas or stations that chronically had more loads out than loads in for given car types were well known, so general strategies could be adopted.
During WW II there certainly was a tendency to load anything with wheels regardless of rules. How common loading contrary to the rules was in fact, and how stringently the rules were enforced, I do not know.
Mac
PNWRMNM During WW II there certainly was a tendency to load anything with wheels regardless of rules. How common loading contrary to the rules was in fact, and how stringently the rules were enforced, I do not know.
I was just reading something about this. I'm not home and don't have the book with me. It sounded like the car service rules were either suspended or ignored during the beginning period of the war. It may also have only pertained to direct military loads.
I'll try to remember to look it up when I get home.
Jeff
Chuck and All:
The Northern Pacific built their first steel 40 foot box cars in 1940. An old time NP yardmaster told me that after WWII, the NP cars returned to the NP all rusted from the salt water air encountered in the various salt water ports. That tells me that the various railroads used NP cars because they were newer and all steel.
Ed Burns
Retired NP-BN-BNSF from Minneapolis
Since we're dealing with Car Service rules, what do they say about assigned service pools (thinking of auto industry) and how cars are contributed to such a pool?
As of October 1971, Car Service Rule 16 discussed cars assigned to a shipper under Car Service Directive (CSD) 145 or 435, the text of which I could find in the Register.
Shipper had to request the pool, in writing, from the origin road, at least 10 days prior to the start date of the pool. If origin road wants other road haul carriers to participate in the pool, the origin road had to ask the others to participate. Such assigned cars were exempt from Car Service Rules 1 and 2, I described in previous posts.
I recall pool cars displaying a stencil more or less to the effect of "CSD 145 Assigned Car. Return Reverse Route to Agent RR at STATION". The practical effect was that pool cars had to be returned empty via reverse route to the pool point.
I believe that the details of pools where one or more non-origin carriers supplied pool cars were worked out among the participating carriers, perhaps with the hot breath of the shipper on everybody's neck.
If the origin carrier had good credit, the freight rate was "good enough" AND car hire rate the cars could earn was at least enough to cover the cost of ownership, the origin carrier could simply buy the cars, assign them to the pool, collect the car hire, and use the car hire income to repay much of the cost of the loan incurred to buy them. The third item, the economic fairness of the car hire rate in relation to the cost/value of the car, was generally fair since every carrier was on both sides or car hire payments/earnings. The adequacy of the rate levels can also be assumed. If it was not, the origin carrier would supply poor cars and run the traffic off. The kicker was the credit worthiness of the origin carrier and its ability to supply the cars. Under the rules that was open to negotiation.
Imagine a regular movement of auto parts from Detroit to California. Imagine that the origin carrier can not buy the cars and really does not have much incentive due to the short haul nature of the traffic for him, but the western roads still have decent credit, and one of them serves the destination plant so they could choose to supply the cars, have them assigned to the Detroit Pool for use to only their destination(s). That is the kind of outcome CSD 145 was designed to encourage. The same thought process applies to pooling existing cars to protect a specific piece of traffic.
My recollection of the cars I saw stenciled CSD 145 is that they were "somehow special" box cars. Tall paper cars and 60-89 foot long auto parts cars come to mind. Remember that it is up to the origin road to supply cars to shippers.
The rule makes no mention of money changing hands, so I assume that standard per diem payments would apply.
John Kneiling advocated (in Trains in the 1960's -1970's) returning empties to the home road immediately - not waiting for a load in that direction - at a minimum speed of something like 50 or 100 miles per day. Back then average car speed for loads and empties was something like 50 miles a day, for billable (loaded) mileage of about half that, or about 25 miles a day. He claimed that was far faster than they would get there under the car service rules.
Also, would reduce empty car-miles - they were then 56% of all car-miles (how the heck did that happen ?!?). A direct return would cut that to the logically obvious 50%.
Finally, that would return the cars to the railroad that put up the money to buy them much sooner No more of a 'poor' railroad using the 'rich' railroad's cars as its own for a while, even if they were being loaded in the general direction of the home road after waiting for such a load to show up. Otherwise, only the per diem rate (too low then anyhow) was an incentive to return them anytime soon.
- Paul North.
Have some time on your hands? Here's a site with more information than you probably want. Sorry, it's current instead of the WW2 era.
https://www.railinc.com/rportal/aar-circulars
Circular OT-10 has the current car service/car hire rules.
jeffhergert Have some time on your hands? Here's a site with more information than you probably want. Sorry, it's current instead of the WW2 era. https://www.railinc.com/rportal/aar-circulars Circular OT-10 has the current car service/car hire rules. Jeff
Well, yeah, I have some time on my hands but not THAT much. I think I just got a case of digital indigestion.
Lots of great information there. OTOH, RAILINC's stock-in-trade is information and much of the site available to non-customers is a description of the data rather than the data itself. I don't think this was available back in the '70s when I was in Penn Central's IT Dept; it would have been very useful.
I remember hundreds 50', 60' & 86' auto boxes from ATSF, SP, Cotton Belt, KCS, GTW, PRR, NYC, Conrail all with "RETURN TO AGENT FLINT, MI." to service the the GM plants. The 86'ers went mostly to the complex near the GTW yard and the 50' & 60'ers went down in 'the hole' to the Chevrolet complex, to AC Spark Plug on the east side or to General Motors Parts (GMSPO) in Swartz Creek. An auto parts train left Flint daily for the west coast.
I spent some time in Car Distribution before I exercised my seniority and went back to being a Locomotive Engineer. In the modern era rail cars are split up into three different kinds of ownership. Railroad owned, TTX National Fleet, and Private ownership. To participate in the TTX National fleet you must be a member. All class one railroads are members and part owners of TTX. Private cars are owned by private shippers. Some are commodity specific such as tank cars and covered hoppers used for hauling chemicals. Often these cars will always return to the same plant for reloading to keep from contaminating the car. When they are changed to another facility the private company will clean them out. Other private cars like covered hoppers used for grain or cement or gondolas in scrap service are leased out to customers. This way a customer has their own fleet of cars and doesn't have to depend on the railroad to supply their equipment needs. These cars always will return to the last location they were loaded unless diverted to another location by the shipper. Third party grain dealers who lease private cars do this all the time sometimes diverting entire grain trains to another elevator for loading.
Railroad owned equipment is normally assigned in pool service and is often commodity specific. Boxcars for instance fall into three grades of service. You generally won't use a boxcar in brick service to haul paper. Most of the lower class boxcars leak so you want to assign those cars to pools where it won't hurt the commodity if it gets wet. Also grade A paper service and food service boxcars may look bad on the outside but are super clean and airtight on the inside.
So how does a car distributor assign cars for loading in the modern era? Well, unless the car is part of a national pool normally the car order will be filled with cars from the origin railroad's pool. And unless it is some kind of specialty load the car order will be filled out of a general service pool. On the NS out customers go online and order cars from the profiles we set up for them, as in 50' 100 ton plug door boxcar. Before the end of business on the previous Wednesday they will place an order for the following week Specifying how many cars will be needed each day for loading. The Car Distributor will then set the computer up to fill the order looking for cars out of the 50' 100 ton plug door Boxcar pool. Normally, the cars becoming empty from customers nearest to where they will be needed for loading. Sometimes cars may have to travel from other states to fill these orders. Cars belonging to other railroads will only be used if there is not enough of the home roads fleet available at the time, otherwise they will simply return home empty.
Tim G
Very interesting discussion (and I hope the model railroad "ops" types are reading this thread). I have some followup questions with examples.
Routing an empty back to the home road via reverse route unless the sending road has a direct interchange with the destination road.
OK let's assume a New York Central empty on the CB&Q. It probably got to the Q via a circuitous route, BUT the Q did have a very obscure direct interchange with the NYC at Zeuring IL. (Possibly also one at Streator.) Could the Q within the rules have just overloaded those tiny interchanges with ALL the NYC empties it had at, say, Galesburg and Chicago? It would have taken the NYC forever to actually pick up and make use of those cars given the relative rarity with which it send a train to Zeuring, not to mention the very small amount of interchange trackage there.
Second example, this time C&O empties on the Chicago & North Western. Could the C&NW within the rules dumped all its C&O empties at the car ferry docks at Milwaukee's Jones Island, rather than use the reverse route, thus likely filling up the ferry boat's return trip to Michigan with nonrevenue cars even though the ferry was likely the most expensive way possible to move a car on the C&O and was considered premium service for that reason?
It seems to me some rather nasty tricks are or were possible if the car routing rules were followed literally.
Dave Nelson
Dave,
Three things discouraged the "dirty tricks" you hyporthesized.
The first is that the car hire rules were/are reciprocal. That means "If you mess with me, I will mess with you!" Sort of like the Cold War "Mutually Assured Destruction" doctrine.
Second is that a road with a foreign car it could not load wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible since it was taking up space and the holding road was paying per diem on the car. This tended to put cars through big volume interchanges with good frequency of service.
Third is that Rule 2 "return at any junction with the home road" was subject to Rule 6. (Source ORER October 1971)
Rule 6 said "If movement of traffic requires return of empty cars to home road via the junction at which cars were delivered in interchange under load, the home road may demand return of empty cars at such junction, except..." (bad order cars for repair)
Interpretation 2., dated April 25, 1923 said, "Car Service Rule 6 gives to a railroad which may deliver regularly, to a connection through any junction, traffic of any kind in (or on) its cars of the same class, the right to require connection participating in the handling of traffic from junction point, to use that point of interchange for the return of the class of empty cars engaged in the service, instead of returning them at another juntion less favorable to the receiving (owning) railroad."
A note made clear that this applied to the class of car, not to specific cars.
One thing that is often over looked - just because two carriers have a physical connection at a location doesn't make that location a official interchange point. Interchange between carriers can only take place at locations they have mutually agreed to.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
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