One thing I’ve been noticing is that I’ve never seen coil cars in leasing company reporting marks. I see lots of coil cars in NS, CSX, UP, and CN marks as well as coil cars from their “ancestor” lines (IC, GTW, CRR, etc.). Is it that leasing companies don’t, for some reason, have a market for that type of rolling stock? I’m curious as to why the class 1’s have kept so many of those types of cars under their ownership?
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Lucrative business and then there is the issue of the coil covers. (parts isn’t parts, interchangability)
My understanding of leasing companies is that they provide a number of services:
Where there is a car shortage they will enter the market
Long term lease for unit trains
Private usage cars
I don’t think there is any shortage of coil cars at the moment and theothers do not apply.
This is not to say that the leasing companies don’t own coil cars. As I’ve mentioned a number of times before, these leasing companies use certain railroad reporting marks to maximize the car-hire on their cars–and you will find coil cars lettered NOKL (First Union Rail), AOK, TR, HS, ATW, and possibly a few more of those lines.
There was a series of coil cars built for CSX (IIRC) and painted black, not CSX’s usual blue with yellow markings. These cars later were lettered FLOX (Flex Leasing, since taken over by someone else), and then CSS, all without being renumbered.