Your favorite commodity?

[Railway Man]

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 

 

[jeffhergert]

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

[emmar]

Apples !!!!!!, cause they taste good and they always seem to be in cars from fallen flags (at least in Washington anyway).

[jeaton]

Sewage sludge.  Well hidden in tank cars.

[Railway Man]

Yak fat.  It defined an entire era.

 

RWM 

[edbenton]

Very simple anything and everything that moves via rail.  Now one thing specific I have to say Class A explosives that way I know someone else is pulling those instead of me like I used to all the freaking time.

[bobwilcox]

VCM aka vinyl chloride monomer.  If the fire and explosion doesn't kill you the cancer will a few years later.  Its the raw material for all of that PVC drain pipe.

[MP173]

Scrap metal.

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

ed

[P42 108]

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?