Sam
You are welcome. Did Transit, demurrage, and interline divisions/billing for more years than I care to remember while also doing Train Orders and a mainline multiple track interlocking that was several miles long -- oh, yes, and Industrial Service Clerk. Busy busy busy.
After you learn what the nuances of a tariff are and the legal interpretations of same from court decisions as well as out-of-court settlement agreements -- well -- -- it becomes a real cat and mouse game to catch the sheisters, and when you do, the bills are usually BIG. And if they are not smart enough to settle out of court, they think that they are SO GOOD at sneaking things past you.
Your real opponant is not the do badder, unfortunatly, but it will be your own Traffic Department thinking that if the railroad prevails, you will lose the customer. If you do, you certainly didn't need them in the first place.
Eric;
Thanks for your information on these types of car movements; you have provided an unexpected level of clarity and information.
I am really amazed at the level of information that is forthcoming from the members of this Forum. It is enjoyable to read the personal experiences, source information, annecdotes, and historical information,from all over the globe; subjectmatter of all kinds over a very broad range of material surrounding the interests of this hobby we are so deeply into.
MP57313 wrote: I've heard of situations where customers use freight cars as portable warehouses - such as hopper cars with plastic pellets - but I didn't know they ever sent freight out on the rails in search of a customer. Does this still happen? If so, how would they decide how to route such freight - just point it in the general direction of potential customers, and move it from one point to another every few days?ThxMP
I've heard of situations where customers use freight cars as portable warehouses - such as hopper cars with plastic pellets - but I didn't know they ever sent freight out on the rails in search of a customer. Does this still happen? If so, how would they decide how to route such freight - just point it in the general direction of potential customers, and move it from one point to another every few days?
Thx
MP
Yes they did - and still try to do so. This quickly becomes VERRRRY expensive once they get caught at it. A good demurrage clerk (I don't think the RR's have such positions anymore.) would spot this in a micro-second. How is it done without incurring such expense? The Private Line Freight Car -- or "X" Line car and leased (or owned outright) storage tracks. The railroad gets money for moving the car and renting the track space to park the car on. Called "Storage in Transit". The "stuff" can be either left in the car or unloaded into a warehouse and reloaded into another car later.
samfp1943 wrote: Thanks, for the explanation,Kenneo. I seem to recall that it was also specified by the MIT rate- the prouct produced [the value added] at the stop-off could not be completely finished; additional operations to make the saleable product for consumption were equired.
Thanks, for the explanation,Kenneo. I seem to recall that it was also specified by the MIT rate- the prouct produced [the value added] at the stop-off could not be completely finished; additional operations to make the saleable product for consumption were equired.
This situation depended on specific tariff provisions and was true only part of the time. The normal cause for your father's situation was probably that he also did "toy blanks" for the various major wooden toy makers as you have explained above. That required a secondary (or subsequent) operation which, if it also had a transit standing (which it probably did), would require that all of the items shipped out by your father under inbound transit priviledges would also need to have an additional "something" done to them elsewhere. Espicially if the "finished product" that your father shipped went "back West" instead of continuing East - the Double Back Provision.
I was seldom so glad to see something disappear as I was transit. I couldn't understand the upsetness of the customer -- until I saw them be put out of business and all of their employees with no jobs (and no replacement jobs available). Traffic dried up. Not good, overall. It wasn't long before two Telegraph positions were pulled off.
arlaurent wrote: As you said, kenneo, Transit, rerouting, stop overs, and such are all very complicated in practice. This is a great discussion topic.I have come across a whole series of original waybills from 1962-1966 for a shortline in Wisconsin. There are many stop over and Transit waybills in the bunch and they are complicated. The Transit concept seems very strange to me, since the 'second leg' of the journey (mill to final customer) was done at a rate discount of almost 90% in most cases. The 'first leg' from raw material source to the mill was standard rates, but the Transit waybill freight charges were almost a joke. It was a great service to the shippers though! On most of those Transit bills, the original raw material shipments were referenced including the car #, date, and weight of the load. Very interesting stuff.BTW, the commodities I've found that used Transit priveldges include lumber, feed, meal, railroad ties, logs, and telephone poles...to name a few.Andy
As you said, kenneo, Transit, rerouting, stop overs, and such are all very complicated in practice. This is a great discussion topic.
I have come across a whole series of original waybills from 1962-1966 for a shortline in Wisconsin. There are many stop over and Transit waybills in the bunch and they are complicated. The Transit concept seems very strange to me, since the 'second leg' of the journey (mill to final customer) was done at a rate discount of almost 90% in most cases. The 'first leg' from raw material source to the mill was standard rates, but the Transit waybill freight charges were almost a joke. It was a great service to the shippers though! On most of those Transit bills, the original raw material shipments were referenced including the car #, date, and weight of the load. Very interesting stuff.
BTW, the commodities I've found that used Transit priveldges include lumber, feed, meal, railroad ties, logs, and telephone poles...to name a few.
Andy
What you didn't see was the reclaim paperwork which never went with the car but stayed at the transit point. Or more than one transit point. The burial vault account which started this conversation could easily have been one of a series of SIT or MIT operations.
For instance, you could have had a MIT operation from saw logs to lumber, then to a SIT where the lumber was sorted and reshipped - and perhaps combined with an MIT operation to surface and/or shape ore re-size the boards, then to various manufacturers (such as the vaults) (MIT); next to a warehouse for distribution (SIT); finally to the retail outlet.
To illustrate your rate notation above, without transit operations, the cheapest transportation rate would be to ship the raw logs all the way to the mortuary where they would be cut and milled into the proper stuff for the burial vaults. I know, the picture of your favorite funeral house attached to a lumber mill. Transit provided that all of this work be done at one or more points enroute while retaining a rate close to that saw log rate.
Record keeping was "blow your mind" and an accountants dream. Audits twice a year. "Sucks to be you" if you made an error someplace or failed to catch a shippers error. How complicated? At Medford, Oregon, 1969-72, both the 2nd and 3rd Trick Telegraphers were Operator/Transit Clerks - 12 to 16 hours a day 7 days a week of transit reclaims and forwarding billing auditing and that was for just 6 or so Transit Houses!
So with the rate reductions given to the transit operaters did the railroad make money off transit. YES. They all did. The railroad did not have to grant anyone transit house status.
Could transit operations be profitable today? Absolutely. It's done now under the guise of "Value Added" businesses, but they don't get any transportation relief. Most of this business is now done in places like China where the logs are shipped there, milled there, made into "stuff" there, then shipped back to the US. Transit would bring most if not all of those jobs back to the US. Steel is another example.
Talk about unintended consequences from Staggers!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Staggers did many good things for the railroads, but some very bad things for some shippers and local economies.
Thanks, for the explanation,Kenneo. A number of years ago, the gentleman who was the KATY agent at Erie,Ks. too efforts to explain the paperwork and practice to me..your use of complicated is right on the mark. My father's mill would process approximately 500 boxcar loads of Ponderosa Pine in a years time. The KATY agent helped him maintain the balance needed in the MIT freight rate.
The customers for the burial boxes were in the Southeast and Southwest, while the customers for the toy parts side of the business were North, Northeast and East. You can see that balance was truly a balancing act to comply with the MIT tariff and rate structure. All the inbound cars were unloaded and reloaded to destinations as full car loads in compliance with the MIT rate/tariff specs.
I seem to recall that it was also specified by the MIT rate- the prouct produced [the value added] at the stop-off could not be completely finished; additional operations to make the saleable product for consumption were equired. Which is why the burial boxes my father's plant produced were shipped unassembled [K-D/ knocked-down] to the final user who would put the box together and then sell or use it. Back then the caskets were shipped in the wooden box to the mortuary where it would finally wind up as a burial vault for the casket at the cemetery.
Reference above by Michael Sol and samfp1943 and Mack and Jim Rice.... (at least)
Just a bit more information. The transcontinental rate structure prior to Staggars had SIT (Storage In Transit), MIT (Milling in Transit), and "Roller Routs" which provided both the railroads, lumber industry and certain agricultural parties with certain economic incentives to load a car, do something with the contents and then "further" the contents to other buyers. This system started in the depression era and was designed to keep both local manufacturing and producing industries in business but also provide traffic to the railroads. Other types of cargo (such as steel and coal) were also included.
I am going to leave out what happens rate and paperwork wise at the stopoff points - simple in concept and complicated in application! MIT and SIT movements were (almost always) from the originating mill (XYZ Lbr) to the sorting or milling operation. There the Sorting and Milling operations would take place and the contents would be shipped out on a billing showing (in our case) the "final" owner as shipper and the "final" owner (SuperDuper Lumber Stores) as the consignee. SuperDuper would have several lumber stores and would divert the car to one of their stores, or perhaps sell it to another retailer, say in NY (HandyDandy-Manhattan), and the car would be rebilled and diverted thusly.
The reason that all of this could be done is (ONE) that the long haul transcontinental rates were usually lower on a per ton basis (say, Oregon to NY) than on shorter distances and (TWO) that industries along the route could do their value added work to the product. The roads in the diversion route would pick up a bit of cash for simply being on the original bill (depended on how the original movement was billed), and more cash if the car actually rolled over their rails. There were several of these railroads and, collectively, they were known as the "Alphabet Roads" - some being not more than a switching carrier.
Rollers went in carload lots as described by others above, first from "ABC Timber and Lumber" to themselves at a nearby billing station, and then when a broker picked up the load, from the broker at the same station as the lumber mill (or produce loading point) to the broker at some hard to service station by an "Alaphabet Route". When the car sold, it would be rebilled as from the purchaser at the original station to the purchaser whereever they wanted it to go.
And if the car didn't sell? When it got the the location that the broker had originally sent it to, it went into storage and lost its transcontinental rate basis, having to be rebilled on a new bill of lading from the storage point. As stated above, bad news for the broker. To prevent the broker from continually rebilling the car in a circle to prevent it from ever getting to a storage situation, there was a limit to how many times the car could be rebilled - usually no more than 3.
And then along came STAGGERS. The railroads "instantly" ended the transcontinental rates and institued single line billing.
For instance, a car that would have gone SP-OGD DRGW MP PRR on one bill and one rate from, say, Tillamook, Oregon to Washington, D.C. now needed one for each railroad involved, or 4 in our example. A new shipping order would need to be tendered at each junction with a new railroad with its attendant origin and destination charges as well as the line haul charge. (Yes, a charge was made to originate the car, then haul the car, and then terminate the car, even if it was in a run-through train.)
Should be easy to see what this did to the "Alphabet Roads". And it should be easy to see, also, how easy it would be to bill this car SP -EStl PRR. The broker and the SP could easily calculate what the 4 bill route would cost and the SP would simply make sure that it was at least one-cent under.
When interline through billing was re-introduced some years after the original Staggers, rollers again became a reality, but not to the extent that they were under the old Rate Bureaus interline system. I have not heard of MIT or SIT operations comming back, but they may have. Single line billing became exceedingly cumberson and expensive and interline shipments were starting to go to trucks because of this problem.
MichaelSol wrote:A lumber wholesaler I work with confirms to me that this is still how he operates; he loads the lumber and moves it whether he has it sold or not at the time.
Michael, as an anecdote and confirmation;
In the 1960's--1970's, my father operated a small manufacturing lumber company in Erie, Ks. Its main feed stock was Northwestern Pondrosa Pine lumber from which the plant made wooden burial vaults [casket boexs], and from the waste there was a tidy business in parts for the toy industry--Lincoln Logs were made from irregular blanks, as well as parts for various wooden toys for the likes of 'Playschool' were made from the scrap off the main product line of wooden burial boxes, the scrap was bundled, and then shipped in boxcar quantities.
The plant's existance in Erie was due to its two RR's crossing there, the KATYwhich was N-S and ATSF was E-W at Erie; as well as a railroad freight rate called "Milling in Transit"--said rate allowed a thru car rate on carloads of lumbe which could be routed to a stop off and processed into a product and then reloaded into the railcars on the through car rate-- as long as there was a directional balance in the number of cars processed under this rate.
The local KATY agent helped to keep this balance of inbound and outbound, between the ATSF [which was an East-West operation at Erie, on the old Pittsburgh-Sub of the Santa Fe; while the KATY was the North-South component of the balance.] This was primarily boxcar freight of loose diamension Ponderosa Pine lumber in-bound, and K-D [Knocked Down/ or disassembled] wooden boxes and diamentional wood parts out-bound.
That lumber was produced and loaded at mills in the Pacific Northwest was loaded and shipped to speculative destinations in the Midwest. Those destinations most favored by speculative shippers were locations that would have, at best, weekly train service, and available tracks to store cars on. The speculative lumber salesman would then get in contact with users/buyers of the product loaded,and start calling those buyers/users of that lumber. The pressure would build on the speculative salesman to find a buyer; then reroute the car of lumber to a final buyer/user's location would became greater as the car neared the interim destination. One of the most favored destinations for speculative carload during that time[1960's-1970's] was Beloit, Kansas for the afore mentioned reasons [only had weekly service]. My father used to say it was a game with the speculators; in particular, if they had a car about to start demurage in Beloit, then the price was gonig to get very much better for the buyer, as the demurage on the car was about to start eating the speculative salesman's/shipper's profits.
The abandonment of the Pittsburgh sub by BN [nee-ATSF] was the main agent that killed this particular business for my father's plant. That coupled with the legislated outlawing of the use of wooden burial vaults by funeral homes, in favor of other more permanent forms of vaulting [concrete or bituminous boxes] in underground burial vaults. The use of the latter was more esthetically pleasing, plus the cemetaries did not have to go back to refill the top of the graves after the wooden vault would naturally deteriorate and colapse.
.
RRs have (or had) "rate zones" where all shipments consigned to an area between point A and popint B got the same rate. I used to work as an opr on the SP and Saugus was the last stn in particular rate zone before you got into the one for LA. We would periodically get a call from LA that they had a car consigned to Saugus and what industry should they route it to...a case of a car out distancing the broker before he could get a diversion for it.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
The unsold lumber loads situation could explain the frequent sight of Center Partition Flat Cars loaded with lumber sitting on the CN Pavilion Siding in Michigan. The Lumber loaded Flats have sat on the siding for 5 days. The other possibility is that the warehouses are full of lumber.
Andrew
Watch my videos on-line at https://www.youtube.com/user/AndrewNeilFalconer
I do not know if they still do it so will accept Michael Sol's testimony. I suspect is a lot less common than it used to be.
I used to keypuch waybills for cars off the Wenatchee/Oroville line in Washington State in late 1960's. There was a big mill in Omak and other smaller ones. Most of the lumber cars were rollers. You could always tell by the route. The rollers had branch to branch interchange points. Oakes ND or SD, can't remember which state, to CNW was a favorite. I suspect but don't know that Oakes got less than daily service from each road so it was probably good for a least a week's delay. I remember one car went to CNW three times but thay gave it up twice. Deregulation had to put a crimp on this because carriers tended to close these wilderness gateways.
Mac
rrnut282 wrote: Did they say what goes on when they don't sell it before it reaches "point B"? Do they end up paying demurrage or a re-spot fee?
I don't know; they didn't discuss that level of detail. Maybe the other responders know? I would think with perishables, even if they are refrigerated, you would have a "sell by" date at the wholesale level...
Did they say what goes on when they don't sell it before it reaches "point B"?
Do they end up paying demurrage or a re-spot fee?
The practice is still takeing place on perishables and lumber originating on the West Coast and in general destined to markets in the East. The cars are shipped to the Shippers account at an Eastern destination city....while the car is still enroute it gets sold to the ultimate consignee...the Shipper then executes a reconsignment and diversion order to the appropriate carrier naming the final destination and route as well as the actual consignee that has purchased the car load.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
ndbprr wrote:I don't know but it makes sense with perishables. Fruit and vegetables need to be picked and shipped at the strategic time. What else can you do tell them to stop maturng? So it is highly possible to my way of thinking that on a four or five day trip to the east coast some could leave without having a buyer. Market forces may also influence this since the closer to destination the car gets the more likley the broker is to come down in price and it is to the buyers advantage to wait.
They showed this on I think a National Geographic show a long time ago with either lettuce or strawberrys (or both). Well, sort of. The items in question did not have a final destination, but the produce was still routed to a specific location. You just never knew who was going to be picking up the stuff in the car. The brokers would be selling carloads on spec. There would be a final inspection of a box or two of the produce before they would agree to take it.
I would think that the general decline of loose-car railroading would factor in here very strongly.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
"No soup for you!" - Yev Kassem (from Seinfeld)
MP57313 wrote: Greetings, Here's another question from Trains...Sep. 92 in this case. In an article about the short-lived Chicago Missouri & Western, the article mentions that some CM&W traffic was ..."roller" cars of lumber (lading which has not yet been sold - it "rolls" slowly east while awaiting buyers). I've heard of situations where customers use freight cars as portable warehouses - such as hopper cars with plastic pellets - but I didn't know they ever sent freight out on the rails in search of a customer. Does this still happen? If so, how would they decide how to route such freight - just point it in the general direction of potential customers, and move it from one point to another every few days?ThxMP
Greetings,
Here's another question from Trains...Sep. 92 in this case. In an article about the short-lived Chicago Missouri & Western, the article mentions that some CM&W traffic was ..."roller" cars of lumber (lading which has not yet been sold - it "rolls" slowly east while awaiting buyers).
That was done with loose carloads of coal. The sale broker would have the car moved in the general direction of his potential customers. Hopefully, he would have it sold by the time the drag reached the yard where that particular car would have to be interchanged or cut into a local freight consist for delivery.
The practice ended with the decline/death of domestic coal heating.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
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