Here’s a question about the past.
In the 1920’s and 1930’s, if a railroad received LCL freight did they hold onto it at the terminal until enough was received to completely fill a boxcar or did they send it our on the next available train? i.e. did it sit for days/weeks at a small town terminal or did it go out ASAP? I figure the stuff from the big cities would leave either the same or next day but more about the small midwest town.
Thanks
Ungern
I suspect that small.towns may even have put it n a baggage car and moved it to a.bigger town or city for carloading to a final destination.
Here’s how the IC set its Chicago South Water Street LCL freight house in July, 1938 for the Iowa Division:
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Cars |
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It would depend on the shipment. If it as 40 bags of cement, it would be loaded on a boxcar that a local would drop off at a station for unloading or maybe it was unloaded while the local waited. The NP even had converted reefers with 1/2 still set up as a reefer, and the other half was a boxcar. These cars had shipments trans loaded at major terminals and they would drop off LCL at the depot. If the shipment was something like live brooder chicks - it was handle by REA usually in the baggage/express car on a passenger train. REA was the UPS/FedEx of the day!
Jim
Thank you for the insight into how railroads handled LCL back in the day
Ungern
Many of us have forgotten that LCL Freight was a staple item of railroad freight during and after WWII through to the early 1960’s.
Middle to large cities in many cases had Freight Houses and a siding for that service. Many locations had large freight houses to service their local customers. Remember that Sears, Roebuck& Co sold whole house kits to their customers, and their customer purchases were shipped LCL, because the inter city trucking was mainly factory to factory or only store to store (in its infancy). There were others who utilized LCL on railroads: Montgomery Ward, J.C. Penny,
IN Memphis, Tn where I grew up, the Sears< Roebuck Facility at Crosstown had a shipping and receiving facility at their warehouse that had tracks approaching a half mile long on both sides of their location that held their cars which were pulled and worked a couple of times a day, handling merchandise in and out. It was a large retail and catalog center.
Railway Express had a large facility attached to the Central Station that was busy til the very end of their service. REA Green delivery trucks were almost as ubiquitous as are Fed Ex and UPS trucks now a days.
Yes but. No one has addressed how a small town originator got the freight out of town.
The ‘Peddler’ car which contained the inbound freight for the small town, picked up the outbound from the community after the inbound was unloaded…the ‘Peddler’ was then moved on to it’s next scheduled community.
Normally small towns shipped via baggage cars on the local train serving that community. It could be a service strictly of the host railroad (local station agent accepting freight for shipment and then loading it with the help of the Baggage Car attendant-or crewmanm when the local stopped there. Years back pre late 19501960’s in Parsons, Ks. Service was by the MKT RR north and South. The SLSF RR, east and west ( Chanute, Ks to the west and Pittsburg, Ks to the east.
The morning inbound Locals would stop at each flag stop or station, and pick up local farm produce to take into Parsons ( Chickens and Turkeys to Swift’s Packing House, Milk to Meadow Gold, and produce to local distributors. The locals also distributed LCL freight along the way as well. MKT had a huge Freight House and Corporate Office Structure in Parsons, Ks. IT burned to the ground in the 10950’s* IIRC0
Found this photo of the Memphis, Tn. Central Station, I had previously mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
Linked @: http://condrenrails.com/MRP/Birds-Eye-View-Central-Station.htm
[The photo is from Mike Condren’s collection and website.]
Yes but, I did address how a small town originator got the freight out of town. Please see the 2nd to last paragraph of my post of 2/23/2011, the 9:40 PM one.
I’ll go over it again. In a local freight’s consist the railroad would include a boxcar (or boxcars) that would be loaded with LCL for the various stations on the local’s run. (A “Peddler” car.) There were several different shipments going to several different destinations in the one boxcar when it left its orgin terminal.
When the local arrived at a station the LCL destined to that station would be removed from the boxcar. Outbound shipments, those originating in the small town, would then be loaded in to the same boxcar. The car generally stayed in the train and made the journey from the local’s origin to destination. At the local’s destination terminal the freight loaded into the peddler car would typically be consolidated with other LCL shipments and forwarded toward its destination with all deliberate dispatch.
If there was enough LCL volume the railroad would assign multiple (i.e. two) LCL cars to a local. They’d even put freight handlers who normally worked in the LCL freighthouse on the train if need be to speed loading and unloading.
Sam, you’re thinking of passenger train head-end business, not LCL freight. It may seem that there was but a fine line between the two, but there was a line.
This is from “Organization and Traffic of the Illinois Central System.” This is a 526 page hard cover book published by the railroad in 1938. On page 304 they said:
"…The balance of our express traffic consists of miscellaneous merchandise and perishable shipments.
The LCL business was quite labor-intensive and may have been overserved to boot. While I will concede that a large number of intermediate points needed to be served, the number of cars and routes between major endpoints seemed to be excessive.
I remember reading that C&NW’s LCL business dried up pretty quickly when free pick-up and delivery was discontinued.
greyhounds wrote [in part]: “…Sam, you’re thinking of passenger train head-end business, not LCL freight. It may seem that there was but a fine line between the two, but there was a line…”
Greyhounds, absolutely correct! The original poster indicated, I think, (paraphrased) how was LCL freight distributed (handled) in smaller communities. There was a tremendous amount of local originated traffic handled as mentioned as freight for Baggage/Express on local passenger service. The railroad freight houses were the resource where railroad employees brok down LCL shipments incoming and forwarded them to areas of final destination, either by rail or local cartage operators,( railway express was in this category, as well, as railroad owned cartage operations ( as an examples, SP, UP, Mo Pac, to name on three who operated their own truck lines, etc.)
THe Pool Cars and LCL cars from large shippers and catalog operators would send their cars to the closest freight house operator, and the contents broken out for final delivery. Pool car distribution was the tool used by company’s that could not generate a full carload for a specific destination, so they were routed from one shipper to another til they were at a salable capacity to go on to their destination. I think that the Merchant Shipper’s operation you worked with was in that category?
greyhounds, thanks for those histories above - both Merchant Shippers’ and yours - and those insights. I expect that you’re aware of the paper I’ll cite and link to below, but others may not be, and may be interested in seeing it - it’s only 16 pages (approx. 95 KB in size), and not too tough of a read. A big thanks [bow] to Mike/ wanswheel for finding and posting at the current end of the thread here at the bottom of page 2 of 2 on “Question about Gondola Load” at: http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/forums/t/156787.aspx?PageIndex=2
“Saving the Railroad Industry to Death: The Interstate Commerce Commission, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Unfulfilled Promise of Rail-Truck Cooperation” by Albert Churella, Assoc. Prof. in Social and International Studies at Southern Polytechnic State University, as published by the Business History Conference in “Business and Economic History On-Line”, Vol. 4, 2006, at:
http://www.h-net.org/~business/bhcweb/publications/BEHonline/2006/churella.pdf
and/ or,
http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHonline/2006/churella.pdf
LCL freight was freight and not baggage nor was it Railway Express…three different services. LCL was handled by local freight trains either leaving and picking up cars from freight house sidings or by carrying an LCL car in thier consist and which the train crew would have to load and unload piece by piece at given stops (aided by the local freight agent or ticket agent). At some stations or places, cars would be set out at the freight station platform, at others on the team track. Railroads had LCL transfer stations where LCL cars would be unloaded, sorted, and reloaded depending on destinaitons, etc. These transfer stations were usually in a terminal or core city or yard.
Baggage was carried in baggage cars on designated passenger trains usually but not always being things owned by passengers aboard and usually stayed on the carrying railroad. Railway Experess packages were carried on designated trains and cars to and from Express Company agencies and stations. They were also handled like LCL in that packages were sorted at transfer stations and among cars. Agencies were usually the local passenger station and agent but could also have seperate facilities and agents in larger cites.
from what I can understand from all the replies, I see multiple services the railroads provided back in the day
I just want to understand the diference.
LCL - the lowest priority parcel service
REA - higher prioiry but more expensive
Head end service - used for highly time sensitive things like fresh milk which is carries in baggage cars
Is my understanding correct?
Ungern
Wellllll…yeahhhhh…sortof…but you seem to be mixing all together from one source. “Head end service” would be mail, baggage, and express while LCL would be freight and freight and passenger service was not together except on designated “mixed trains” which were usually branch line trains or trains that served more desolate stretches of mainlines and consisted of locomotive, freight cars maybe including an enroute LCL car, maybe a baggage car or baggage compartment in a coach (a combine of full coach) and accomodated passengers although no schedule was guaranteed (often listed as 3rd class trains in timetables). Milk was head end service only because it was usually switched in and out of the train by the locomotive. (DL&W had one car, usually weekends, which was switched out of a diesel hauled train at Dover, NJ and picked up at the hind end of an electric MU train to be pushed into a siding at South Orange, NJ I believe…maybe Orange.
I don’t think the services were seperated because of priority but rather because of weight, sources, and consignees. Maybe better stated as wholesale and retail differences rather than shipment differences. But, then, again, there were no hard and fast rules except the general public did not receive car loads or train loads of merchandise and manufaturers did not normally receive or ship one package at a time. Times were different, and so was marketing and delivery.
You’ve got the general idea. But LCL wasn’t parcels. Think of a family ordering a coal fired kitchen stove from the Sears catalog. Think of a Ben Franklin store ordering merchandise. Think of a grocer ordering things like coffee, spices, and candy. It all moved by rail in LCL service.
These were shipments that moved in lots of thousands of pounds. But they weren’t big enough lots to justify an entire boxcar.
Greyhounds,
You are decidedly showing your age.[;)] There are still few of us around who remember a Sears, Montgomery Ward, or other catalogs that we could order from at the price shown in the book. They have gone the way of the cigar store Indian, and the younger generation has no knowledge of their existence. Sure, we get occasional mailings of catalogs that are much smaller, but the days of catalogs thicker than the phone book are far behind us. If you want to know Sears best price on something you had best have high speed internet service.
First, there’s no free lunch and there was no free pick up and delivery. It had a cost and that cost had to be covered. The railroads had major fights with the economic regulators as to whether they could include PU&D in their rates. The railroads wanted to include it, the regulators didn’t want it included.
LCL was an intermodal service. To be financially successful on a large scale an intermodal freight service must be priced on a door to door basis (PU&D included in the rate.). By inhibiting door to door rail LCL pricing and service, the economic regulators helped drive the LCL business to the highway.
As to being labor intensive and “Over Served”…Well, it was the best system that could evolve in the 19th Century. Remember, to get to or from the boxcar the freight had to be moved by a team of horses in a wagon over a dirt road. The costs of doing such a thing were far greater than the “Labor Intensive” LCL system. So the LCL system developed to minimize the amount of high cost movement by team and wagon.
Obviously , things changed.
When people began converting Henry Ford’s Model T into trucks he took notice and began producing Ford Trucks. Then the dirt roads were improved to gravel roads and paved roads. This changed the equation and the rail LCL system needed to change with the times.
They were doing this quite well, using an intermodal container system that greatly reduced their labor costs (and other costs).&