Your favorite commodity?

[chadrail]

My favorite is LCL freight going to small towns around the US.when we did that.

[ericsp]

I like citrus and citrus products.

[Train Guy 3]

I like a good ol' mixed freight train. That way you get a nice verity cargo and usually see cars from quite a few railraods. I also don't mind a military move. Nothing beats a hundred Humvees rolling by you.

[Victrola1]

Livestock.

You looked between the slats to judge what type. Close up, sounds and smell could tell. If the train was stopped, the cargo often was not. Livestock milled around in their rolling cage. Slack action on start up encouraged an audible reaction.

Unlike the Zephyrs, passengers were rarely seen westbound from Chicago.

 

[wairoa]

Probably a train carrying tanks or any other military hardware. On the civilian side it would have to be passenger trains.

[G Mack]

One of my favorites is a train of steel coils. The cars that carry this product are usually beat up and weary-looking. They evoke images of industrial America; the gritty, heavy industry of big mills that require vast amounts of everything and efficient, powerful ways of moving it. They aren't about the glossy finished product that the general public sees; they're the "behind the scenes", rough-edged, unpainted mover of steel. A commodity truly made to be moved by railroads.

It makes a dramatic point of how well railroads move heavy products when you see a truck with one, or may two, coils loaded and a train gliding by with fifty or more coil cars each loaded with two or three coils of steel.

Gregory

[SS Express]

I have to go for big, heavy, long coal drags.  I love the thunder of the cars and the roar of the engines working them.

 

 

....x2!!!

[CShaveRR]

My favorite commodity at the moment would have to be beer.

No, I don't drink (at all!). But the beer we get at our yard arrives in some of the most exotic box cars you'll see on the railroads any more.  Many are still lettered in the paint schemes of the railroads for which they were built in the middle and late 1970s.  These cars have, for the most part, been relettered and renumbered to the HS 30000 and 75000 series, and most of them had previously been lettered for the Chiapas-Mayab Railroad (FCCM).  My challenge is to get former and original numbers off these cars whenever possible.  Considering that the cars are outside and I'm inside when I see them, it is indeed a challenge!

Some of the beer arrives in Ferromex (FXE) box cars that were built for NdeM.  I can usually obtain a former NdeM number by visually scanning one of the old ACI labels (many of these have been painted over, or have faded so one has to really think about the possible colors on the label).  Sometimes, once you know that the cars were renumbered in order, it's possible to derive some of the intervening numbers between sightings.

So now you know why the job never gets boring...

[CShaveRR]

I also remember the drawing of the "Yak Fat Rack Flat" that appeared with that "Second Section" column in Trains.

[baberuth73]

Talk about a sight to see, when I was with NS we regularly hauled high and wide loads of military stuff like humvees, trucks, and tanks. These were my favorites. 

Ever notice a white tank car with a broad red band painted around its' girth, placed as the last car on an NS train? We called them candystripers. They contained cyanide. When yarded, they were placed on an otherwise empty track as far from other cars as possible. This was my least favorite commodity.

[cherokee woman]

general mixed freights, and the flat cars hauling military vehicles. 

[Ulrich]

Made in China stuff moving along the rails on stack trains. What an efficient way to move freight.  

[Modelcar]

.....Lots of covered hoppers, many probably hauling grain through here on NS.  But for me, as long as the railroads have much of most anything to haul, that seems to be a good thing to me...Keep them in business and more traffic off the open highways.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

Yes - I thought of it as soon as RWM mentioned it (above). 

 You're close with the name - it was actually a "Yak Fat Rack Flat".  John Swatsley (sp?) did a sketch (pen & ink ?) of a herd of them crammed shoulder-to-shoulder aboard a bulkhead-end flat, as a method for the rails to haul all of that commodity that was offered.  CSSHEGEWISCH is exactly right - it was a "Section Section" note from the 2nd half of the 1960's - I would guess at 1967 - 1969.  All of my Trains from then are in storage, so I can't pull mine out and scan it in - but maybe someone else can.

[CNW 6000]

I have to go for big, heavy, long coal drags.  I love the thunder of the cars and the roar of the engines working them.

[Mookie]

See grain, see coal and since we watch very close to a scrap metal yard, see scrap. 

I like the blue kitty litter cars with the paw print.  And if I have to be very serious - the airplane bodies that we see not often enough.

[TH&B]

I ageree with that, perishables as hot shots.... amits slow grain trains

[greyhounds]

Yak fat.  It defined an entire era.

 

RWM 

I remember reading about this case in Second Section when it first happened.  The stated reason for the various and sundry protests of this ridiculous rate was to prevent a precedent being established for the allowance of a potentially non-compensatory rate.

Does anyone remember the Trains cartoon showing their proposed "Yak Fat Rack" railcar?

My favorite is perishables.  They represent heads up, on your toes railroading.

[IRONHORSE77]

General mixed freight cars.

CHUCK

[Cris_261]

This may not qualify as a commodity, but mixed freight trains are fun to watch for reporting marks of fallen flags.

[dldance]

Scrap metal.

It is always interesting to look down from an overpass at gons filled with scrap. 

ed

I concur.  The gons are also very interesting from the ground.  No pristine string of identical aluminum coal cars.  Scrap gons look like they've been everywhere and seen everything (and lived to tell about it).

dd

[blhanel]

I love watching a whole line of flats hauling John Deere tractors roll by...

[TH&B]

I like the grain train scene.

[P42 108]

Favorite commodity railroad hauled hands down was the Southern Pacific sugar beet trains and the composite gondolas used to haul the beets. Second favorite is the Union Pacific sulfuric acid trains from the Kennecott copper mine in Utah. It's one long line of white tank cars, with a spacer car, usually a weathered UP covered hopper, on the head end.

 I was trying to think of which video to watch tonight and I have a video from Pentrex about the sugar beet trains. Thanks for the good idea...

[Cris_261]

Favorite commodity railroad hauled hands down was the Southern Pacific sugar beet trains and the composite gondolas used to haul the beets. Second favorite is the Union Pacific sulfuric acid trains from the Kennecott copper mine in Utah. It's one long line of white tank cars, with a spacer car, usually a weathered UP covered hopper, on the head end.

[nanaimo73]

A unit train of bright yellow powdered sulphur, loaded in black gons, as seen from above, on a sunny day.

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

Yak fat.  It defined an entire era.

 

RWM 

Is this in reference to an incident that Don Phillips wrote about in his Trains column many years ago?  Back when he had a full page.

Jeff

In 1965, the Hilt Truck Line of Omaha, fed up with the automatic protests of its tariff applications and the ponderous inanity of the ICC, one night published a tariff rate for fat derived from the longhaired Yak of Tibet in truckload lots from Omaha to Chicago.  No such commodity exists, of course, and Robert Hilt figured that the railroads would in knee-jerk fashion protest his imaginary commodity.  The Western Trunk Line Committee duly filed a seven-page protest stating the proposed rate on Yak Fat was noncompensatory and should be denied.  The ICC did so.  Hilt then exposed that this was a joke.  The ICC, quite annoyed, dismissed the application, making noises about filing charges with Hilt for his irreverence for the law, but that came to nothing.

The Yak Fat case when exposed was regarded as hilarious or a sign of the pathetic state of U.S. transportation by everyone in the transportation community, railroads, truckers, and shippers alike, and for years afterward it was a poster child for the senselessness of regulation as it was then practiced.  Undoubtedly the WTL Committee members had to put up with good-natured abuse for years afterward, with everyone they knew asking them if they had filed any protests lately against Pixie Dust or Dodo Feathers.

RWM 

 

I remember reading about this case in Second Section when it first happened.  The stated reason for the various and sundry protests of this ridiculous rate was to prevent a precedent being established for the allowance of a potentially non-compensatory rate.

[SilverSpike]

I liked the salad express that Southern Pacific ran from the west coast, a whole train of lettuce and produce going to eastern markets.

[Ted Marshall]

I like when trains haul vehicle frames on open flat cars. What is your favorite railroad commodity? Does it require a special kind of freight car?

Pound for pound, I gotta say that unit trains of rock, either limestone or granite, are the most impressive to observe in action. Here in Florida, on the FEC and CSX, rock is hauled in 100-ton Ortner and 70-ton quad hoppers. While I'm not sure if an Ortner is considered a "specialty" freight car, rock and gravel are the only commodities I've ever seen hauled in them. 

Second to that would be unit coal and third, powdered cement.