Does anyone have information on the percentage of foreign gondolas the CB&Q and BN ran?
Thanks,
John
Ray Breyer
Modeling the NKP's Peoria Division, circa 1943
Probably the only instance I could think of using mostly home road gondolas in a train would have been back in the 'forties or 'fifties, when several western railroads used them to haul solid trains of either coal or sugar beets. I know that C&S and SP ran solid blocks of home-rail gons for beet hauling, and Rio Grande used mainly drop-bottom gons for coal in Utah--they didn't seem to acquire their coal hopper fleet until the 1960's. But as far as gons in a regular freight train--you could see almost any road anywhere. I can remember gons from as far away as the Pennsy and C&O on SP freights over Donner Pass when I was a kid. Orsonroy is right, they're as ubiquitous as box-cars--a very well traveled form of railroad car.
Tom
Tom View my layout photos! http://s299.photobucket.com/albums/mm310/TWhite-014/Rio%20Grande%20Yuba%20River%20Sub One can NEVER have too many Articulateds!
cbqjohn wrote:Does anyone have information on the percentage of foreign gondolas the CB&Q and BN ran? Thanks,John
Railroads absolutely do not want to load foreign-road cars unless they have a shortage of their own of the same type, and will send foreign-road cars to interchange as quickly as possible after they're made empty. Thus loads originating on the home road will almost always be in home-road cars, whereas loads terminating on the home road but originating on a foreign road will generally arrive in the foreign road's car. Gondolas in local service ("local" in railroad traffic-speak means originating and terminating on the home line) will be 100% home-road cars or lease cars (which means the home road gets the per diem) unless there is a serious car shortage. Coal, for instance, will almost 100% originate in home road cars or lease cars, or the shipper's own cars.
Other commodities introduce some wrinkles. Scrap is a low-value commodity and thus usually the railroad will not make empties available unless they're home-road empties, because the per diem on a foreign-road car will eat up the meager profit from the move. If there are not enough home-road cars available to meet the scrap dealer's needs, tough for him; he's not paying enough of a rate to command better service than "when cars are available."
So to answer your question, it depends on where you're standing. If you're on a part of the railroad dominated by inbound moves from foreign roads, you'd see a very high percentage of foreign-road cars. If you're standing someplace dominated by originating shippers, you'd see almost 100% home-road cars. You'll see foreign empties heading out and home-road empties coming in, wherever you're standing.
There are also pooling agreements between railroads that treat all participating roads cars that are in the pool as home-road cars. This is very common with equipped cars, but less so with plain cars. Specialized mill gondolas such as used for originating long steel from steel mills are often participants in pools. Gons used for shippers that cannot tolerate contaminants in the load, such as zinc, lead, or copper concentrate, are often assigned, but are usually home-road cars only because they're contaminated with the commodity itself.
S. Hadid
Once again the group has given me the information I sought, it is most helpful and I thank each of you.
cbqjohn wrote: Looks like I will have to add some gons to my fleet (as well as flatcars), I suspect foriegn flatcars have a a similar pattern of use. John
Flat cars possibly roamed MORE than any other car on the rails. There was always a shortage of flat cars in the national fleet, mostly because railroad were generally unwilling to invest heavily in "special use" cars. Surprisingly, the SP had the largest fleet of flats (in 1950, something like 8,000 cars. That sounds like a lot, but it's not when compared to the Pennsy's 65,000-odd boxcars!)
orsonroy wrote: cbqjohn wrote: Looks like I will have to add some gons to my fleet (as well as flatcars), I suspect foriegn flatcars have a a similar pattern of use. JohnFlat cars possibly roamed MORE than any other car on the rails. There was always a shortage of flat cars in the national fleet, mostly because railroad were generally unwilling to invest heavily in "special use" cars. Surprisingly, the SP had the largest fleet of flats (in 1950, something like 8,000 cars. That sounds like a lot, but it's not when compared to the Pennsy's 65,000-odd boxcars!)
Not surprising if you know that by the 1950s SP originated more lumber than any other road.
As always, the replies to my question are informative. It's nice to have a forum whose members are so knowledgeable and helpful.
Thanks for all the answers.
Speaking of SP flatcars roaming wide, and the use of home road cars....I have photos of an SP flatcar being loaded in Sturgeon Bay, WI on the shortline Ahnapee & Western in 1957 for an INTRAline shipment. Crates of veneer flitches came in by ship (from Africa) to Sturgeon Bay and were shipped by rail 20 miles to a plywood mill.
Now, given that the A&W's only flatcar was in MOW service, this makes some sense, along with the fact that the same plywood mill received lumber from "SP-land" on flatcars so there were empties around to be had, but it is representative of flatcar use none the less.
Andy
I bet SP didn't know about this use of their flatcars, especially since it was probably at least in part not captured by the per diem.
SP always had trouble getting its empties back from eastern roads, who never had enough cars of their own because they were poor.
CNW (UP)
Gons in scrap service - Statistics from the last 3 days in the local UP yard
dd
I tried to equip my layout by the percentage method. How do you assign 1/2 of a boxcar?
If you are modeling BN just after the merger and want to get say two dozen new gondolas, do something like this: buy 1 BN (no weathering), 3 CBQ, 1 PC, 1 UP, 1 SOU, 1 MILW, 1 GN and three of whatever strike your fancy at your FLHS. Run these for a while and see what 'looks right' to you. Then buy the other dozen to proportion the total how you think looks good.
Another way to do it might be to sit by some busy tracks for a day and take note on what goes by, then copy that.
The US railcar fleet was/is constantly in motion (this may be stating the obvious) so there is no 'right proportion' of cars to be had at any one point. Do what looks good to you without being totally unrealistic; this leads to fun. Do not get 'paralysis by analysis' or lose yourself in rivet-counting; those are not fun.
BRJN wrote: I tried to equip my layout by the percentage method. How do you assign 1/2 of a boxcar?
What I did was use MS Excel. Put your info in columns: road name or class; percentange (or quantity to derive percentage); and number of cars. The trick is to set the number of cars column to whole numbers - no decimal places. Somewhere on the sheet put your target number of cars. Now, set up each row to multiply your percentage in the row times your car target. Once you have all the rows set up you'll see - if you add things up by hand (*) - that the sum is usually less than your desired ttarget. What you have to do is start bumping up the number in your target cell until you get the number of cars you want. If there are several percentages that are close, you might find that you are 1 short and bumping the target up by 1 puts you 2 over. In that case, you have to tweak your target even finer, say by bumping it up by 0.1 or even 0.05.
Here's an example: In my period the top owners of 40-ft boxcars - besides the PRR - were NYC, 6.7%; ATSF, 6.2%; UP, 4.5%; B&O, 4.3%; SP, 4.2%; MILW 4.0%; CB&Q, 4.0%, and GN 3.8%. If I decided I wanted seven 40-ft boxcars from Class 1 RRs, I'd start off with 7 in my target box, which gives me 0 in all my rows. Putting it at 8 gives me 1 NYC car. A target of 12 gives me one of each of the top five roads while 13 gives me eight cars. Somewhere between 12.6 and 12.7 in my target cell it switches over to seven cars.
It works.
(*) You can't use the spreadsheet functions to sum them - they count all the rounded-off decimals and your total equal the target.
KL
Kurt,
When you want to sum the cars in question, sum them and have excel round the total down.
In 1950, gondolas represented 21 percent of the national car fleet while hopper cars represented 23 percent (not including privately-owned cars such as many refrigerator and tanks cars). The Great Northern had only 8 percent gondolas, but 26 percent hoppers. Nevertheless, some other western railroads preferred gondolas over hoppers. For instance, SP was 20% gondolas and 3% hoppers, and the WP 22% and 5%. Western railroads also had higher ratios of box cars (nationally 32%, vs. for instance SP's 57% and WPs 43%), flat cars (nationally 3%, SP and WP 10%), and stock cars (nationally 2%, SP 4% and WP 14%) than the national average. Interestingly, cabooses represented 1%. I wish I had this kind of information for more railroads and time periods.
Mark
From the October 1950 ORER, GN had:
open hoppers, not ore 692
ore hoppers 7665
covered hoppers 205
gondolas, drop bottom 3391
total freight all types 31160
From this we can see that the huge majority of GN's hoppers were the ore carriers and that the gons far outnumber the general purpose open top hoppers. A few percentages:
percent gons of total freight: 11%
percent standard open top hoppers: 2.2%
percent ALL hoppers: 27.5%
percent ore hoppers: 24.5%
Note that at that time, all of GN's gons were the GS drop bottom type.
In summary, there's hoppers and then there's hoppers.
Ed