I have seen photos of different railroads operating anothers engines or the railroad is operating on anothers track… The good example I have found is CSX trains operating in the state of Washington. How does this work, would CSX and UP have a reciprocation agreement or would UP be paying CSX to us their units or would CSX be paying to us UP tracks. I know CSX and UP operate a apple train from western Washington to NY but to have CSX trains in Seattle or Portland would be about 200 miles or more out of the way.
So Im I and can you help me
All of the major railroads in North America have “pool power” and “run through” agreements. I see CSX and NS locomotives and even double stack trains of exclusively CSX containers here in Arizona all the time. And UP locomotives have been reported on CSX and NS trackage back east on many occasions.
I also see Ferromex, Canadian Pacific, BNSF, and Canadian National locomotives intermixed in UP trains.
Each railroad keeps an accounting of the operating hours put onto another road’s engines and must either pay that road or allow that road to use an equal number of hours of their locomotives.
Occasionally a road may have excess motive power so they lease it out to other roads that have a shortage.
Yep “run through”. The neat thing is you get to see loco’s you might not normally see. The last couple of weeks, a coal line near me has had BNSF pulling coal. That’s 95% NS/Conrail line. The few engines I’ve seen is BNSF, a couple of Santa Fe’s. That’s here in the western part of PA. Plus its a good change [:D].
This is one of the great advatanges of diesels and mass production. Steam rarely ventured off home rails for a number of reasons but all diesels operate with the same basic controls. In the early days a home road diesel would lead most of the time because the standardization wasn’t finalized and radios when available were not mutifrequency. One of the big reasons is to reduce delay when handing off trains. St Louis required the TRRA to transfer trains from one railroad to another causing time constraints and higher costs. In the Chicago area I have seen trains from ATSF, BN, BNSF, UP, CNW, WC and several other railroads run east to Elkhart Indiana over the CR trackage to keep them moving through the Chicago mess. That is where CR established the hand off point. Yes when short of power diesels can be borrowed and hours either repaid by loaned engines or $. We would often see DM&IR engines on sister road EJ&E (both owned by USX) when the iron ore season would be over for the year. In the spring they would be sent back home.
The big issue in steam days wasn’t so much controls - they aren’t really that different from one engine to another - but rather distance it could cover.
A steam engine generally could only go a few hundred miles before needing to be sent to the roundhouse for servicing, so it generally was only available to work about half of the time. So in steam days, when a railroad was handing off say a long coal train to another railroad, they would remove railroad A’s engine (like at an interchange yard etc.) and send it to the roundhouse and railroad B’s crew with their fresh engine would couple up to the train and take it.
With diesels, they can just keep running day after day after day with little or no problems, so it was easier just to have RR A’s crew step off and have RR B’s crew climb up into the lead diesel and take control of the train. Takes less time than changing engines, don’t need to re-establish the air pressure in the brakes etc.
There are still places where a “home line” unit must be on the lead, I.E; The UP has cab signals on the Main line from Fremont NE to Green River WY and The Dalles OR to Portland OR, only a CCS equipped unit can lead there, the old CNW had Cab signals on the E-W main from Proviso to Fremont NE. CNW unit had to lead. If a unit is going to lead in Canada, it must be equipped with a working fridge and hot pot with tea kettle and strecher. I’m sure there are lots of other examples, these are just some of the reasons I’m aware of.
I have seen BNSF have units from other railroads in their consists. Today I saw two trains one had a Norfolk Southern unit and the other train had a Kansas City Southern and a CSX. I have always seen the BNSF units in the lead.
Railroads have been interchanging and buying and leasing each others motive power ever since the 4ft 81/4 standard gauge was adopted. Even the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad had shortages at times and needed to either buy or lease locos from other roads. There were Santa Fe oil burners working in Ohio while there were Pennsy engines in storage tracks.
When a line was damaged one road can use an others for movement but needed a pilot in the locomotive. There were FRA rules and agreements between roads in case of emergencies.
Pete
The detour agreements are AAR (American Assoc. of Railroads) agreements (usuually) and not FRA. Some railroads have negoiated their own rates and some railroads charge rates higher than the AAR rate (and in turn get higher rates charged to them). There is normally an emergency rate and a non-emergency rate.
Thank you Dave.
Thanks for clarifying that AAR and FRA thing for me. I was not absolutely positive it was FRA but I knew some sort of emergency interchange rule was established before the FRA was adopted. The ICC established rates for car interchange to keep the robber barons from monopolizing by keeping rates fair between roads. But who kept track of rates before the ICC was formed?
Pete