I am wondering if the percentage of home-road cars a particular road's freight houses would be a higher percentage than the percentage of home-road cars at a regular industry on the road?
In other words, did the Missouri Pacific freight house in Kansas City (for example) have lots of MP boxcars at its doors - more than other railroads' cars being at the MP freight house?
I'm just wondering if freight houses tended to ship to/from mainly using their own road's cars.
Thanks!
mbowlineI'm just wondering if freight houses tended to ship to/from mainly using their own road's cars.
Yes,home road cars was used in LCL service but,if UP had a half loaded boxcar for Columbus then it would show up at one of the five freight houses(N&W,PRR,NYC,B&O or C&O) depending on the routing.
As trucks started killing LCL traffic these freight houses offered to unload fully loaded boxcars for off line customers but,these customers found it was cheaper for their crew or a contract crew to unload these boxcars or cheaper still have trucks to deliver their freight to their doors.
In the summers of 64/65 I lied about my age and got a job unloading boxcars. The quicker you unloaded the car the more money you made since you got paid by the car.
One could rightfully say I was living in high cotton those two summers.
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
You can think of LCL in three levels. There were the movements between railroads, there were the movements between the large hub freight houses in the major cities and then the local moves between the hubs and the local stations out on line.
The moves between the major interchange hubs and run through LCL would have non-home cars. The moves between major hubs would would have non-home cars. The local moves would be more likely to have home road cars.
In Shorpy, search for "Water Street", there are color pictures of the IC Water St freight house. While the reporting marks on a lot of cars are not identifiable, they are obviously different classes and designs of cars, plus there are a few foriegn cars visible.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
I would say that at least half of the cars would be home road at the freight house. In the post World War Two era some of the larger roads went so far as to dedicate cars and entire trains to LCL moving between their freight terminals. New York Central had its "Pacemaker" cars and trains while Pennsy had its "Merchandise Service" cars. B&O had its "Timesaver" and "Sentinal Service" operation while MoPac had "Eagle Service" and Southern Pacific" had its "Overnight Service", all using specially marked boxcars. These cars generally stayed on home rails and ran in dedicated trains between major freight houses. This gave the owning railroad a sure supply of equipment and avoided the payment of per diem on foreign road cars, since most services were between on-line points. Even smaller lines were more likely to use a home road car because of the local nature of the traffic. Since the cars were not usually interchanged, they tended to be older, smaller cars. LCL also was a staple of the mixed train which may handle the traffic as it meandered from town to town. Larger towns may receive a car that was set out at a freight house, while the smaller burgs got their shipments while the train made its scheduled stop and the car kept moving with the train. Foreign cars did show up at the freight house but they were usually from larger cities that generated enough freight to fill a car. There were carload shipments handled through freight houses for shippers that didn't have sidings or enough warehouse space for their freight. At one time, up until the late 1960s, there were also private carloading firms such as Clipper Carloading, and Lifschultz that operated much like railroad freight houses but, they loaded cars for service nationwide and therefore you would see a wider variety of cars at their docks than the more parochial railroad freight house. In a short answer to your question, using your example of the Mop in KC, at least 50 percent MP cars, with 30 per cent from friendly connections, and the remainder foreign cars from the national carloaders would give you a fairly accurate representation of a by-gone era before UPS and FedEx.
Thank you to everyone for these informative posts! Each reply added new insights to my question and have helped me understand better how LCL and freight house operations worked back in the 60s ina large metro area. My freight house operations are a large piece of my overall layout operations and my op sessions will now better reflect how it was done in the 60s.