Has anyone here read the book Conrail Commodities? Any comments on the book?
ed
One of the best railroad books ever written. It describes what a railroad does not just what a railroad is (or worse, a list of the numbers of its locomotives). Less than one railroad book in a thousand bothers to tell us why a railroad exists – the other 999 assume it exists for our entertainment.
The other excellent book by this author, Jeremy Taylor, is “A Sampling of Penn Central.” It describes in fascinating detail the operations of the Southern Region, where he was superintendent.
We need more Jeremy Taylors – people who understand railroading, what it does, and why it does it, and can explain it clearly and cogently.
RWM
Thanks RWM. I have contemplated purchasing this for a couple of years but havent pulled the trigger.
I have been going over Conrail and PC freight schedules, complete with blockings and the book came to mind. It is quite interesting how Conrail scheduled it’s freights with blocks of cars set out at yards.
The parallells between LTL trucking and loose car freight operations are so very similar. Both require a local pickup and delivery (local freight / peddle run), terminal consolidation, line haul, break bulk (possibly more than 1) and local delivery.
Most LTL operations are able to load solid trailers for terminals while the rails must set off blocks. What I find fascinating is the network of intertwined related block movements between yards and major yards.
Conrail’s long distance manifest trains would often set out and pickup up to 4 or 5 blocks of cars for intermediate yards. By zeroing in on yards that I am only vaguely familiar with such as Elkhart, Burns Harbor, and Avon and the blocks set off and picked and the connections one gets a somewhat fuzzy view of what a railroad does. It is easy to view the unit trains … simple point to point movements similar to truckload trucking.
Anyway, I ramble. I find the economics of railroading much more interesting than the locomotive numbers, although the old E’s, F’s, and GP’s will turn my head.
Any other similar books you would recommend on actual commodities, operations, etc?
ed
Astonishingly there is very little on this subject. I’ve spent years piecing together a broad variety of sources to learn about historic trends. Current trends thanks to computerized data and spreadsheets are more easily captured and analyzed but the data is largely proprietary.
Some books I would recommend, which range from very rare to obscure, are:
Mine to Market, coal transportation on the N&W (written I think in the 1950s – I’m sort of permanently on the road now so can’t go look on the bookshelves for a couple of weeks)
Freight Trains and Traffic, by Droege – this was published by Kalmbach. Not difficult to find as no one seems to care about it. I guess the lack of market demand pretty much explains why so little is written on this topic.
The PFE book and I think John White’s reefer book do a very good job of describing that traffic.
American Commodity Flows – it’s pretty high-level but it’s a start.
RWM
I wouldn’t know anything about that [;)][8D]
I might add that Fred Frailey’s Blue Streak Merchandise, while not necessarily describing the commodities handled (it does touch on the LCL, freight forwarder, auto parts, and intermodal), does a great job of profiling a scheduled train and it’s mission.
RWM, have you found that most railroads are capable of maintaining their schedules?
One can see how an “event” such as a derailment, flood, or even something “minor” such as breaking a coupler etc would have a domino effect on schedules and thus the plugging of yards, sidings, etc.
Interesting stuff.
ed
Ed, Blue Streak Merchandise is definately one of my all time favorite books [tup][tup][8D]
Kind of depends what the “schedule” is and how one defines “late.” Is the schedule for the train or for the car? And it very much depends on what the customers expect and demand. It’s one thing to run a train on schedule and make the train schedule look good by sluffing off late-arriving cars or over-tonnage, and hold them for the same train the next day. The individual schedules for those cars that don’t make the train is terrible, but if no one is measuring that, or cares about that very much, or asking about it, it doesn’t matter.
The simpler the demands on the railroad, the simpler the network, the easier it is to run on schedule 100% of the time. Suppose you operate a short line and your Class I delivery is at midnight. You call yourself to work at 0600, pick up the inbounds, putter up the line to the lumberyard and the feed mill, pick up the empties, and putter back to the interchange and tie up at 1400. It’s really hard to not achieve 100% schedule compliance. On the Class I, however, those cars have arriving at that interchange might have 6 or 7 handling activities before they arrive. Suppose the railroad does this 99% reliably. The odds of a car being mishandled any one location is 1%.&n
I am under the impression that “scheduled railroad” as the term is used today means that a plan has been made for the on line handling of all “loose” cars from the point a car comes on line to the point where it is delivered to interchange or a business siding. Although I know that at various times and locations, some railroads may have started trains only after accumulating enough cars to make some minimum train size, having freight trains scheduled in the employee time table or establishing blocking for cars destined to intermediate points along the route of a given train certainly is a practise going way back.
During my employment with the Illinois Central in the 60’s and 70’s, the railroad had schedules for manifest trains and established procedures for blocking cars on those trains. Given the resources available today for gathering and processing data, the planning that went into making those schedules and setting up the blocks would probably be viewed as quite primative. That is not to say that the planning was sloppy. The division managers and the HQ staff worked hard at getting out a plan based on a solid feel for what worked, but they did not have the means to test whether the plans set up were the most efficient.
To illustrate, the IC might have had between 50 and 100 cars a day going on a train or trains out of Markham (the main Chicago yard) for points south of Memphis. The question-should Markham classify and block those cars for the main yards south of Memphis, should the Memphis yard do that work, or should the job be split between the two? To get the best answer, it would be necessary to have details on the number of cars moving to the various destinations as well as a means to measure the impact of any plan on the work load of the Chicago and Memphis Yards. At the time, the only way that one could get a summary of the cars by destination would be to get an
Thanks Jeaton for the input. It would be interesting to know how the “scheduling” process has evolved. Your comment about knowing about lane movements (adding machine and paper manifests) is how I envisioned it occuring. Today’s information regarding origin, destination, revenue, tonnage and patterns must be an amazing tool for operations and marketing planners.
I do recall watching those IC manifests (mostly long, long trains) down in Mattoon and Effingham. Trains such as CN-1, SE-1 and a real mixed train CBP. It seemed like CBP had just about everything tied to it’s locomotives. I never gave much thought to the cars, lading, and why they were running.
I took a look at a couple of Conrail trains last night GRIN (Grand Rapids - Indianapolis) and LAEL (Lansing - Elkhart). Now, why would Conrail have ran a Grand Rapids - Indy train? After looking at the connections in Elkhart and Indy it became very obvious this was a major auto parts train. The connections at Elkhart with ELPR (Elkhart - Proviso) with a block of autoparts for Janesville indicated these were very orchestrated movements. Ditto Lansing - Elkhart with a connection with the ELKA (Elkhart - Kankakee). Why Kankakee? Looking further it was obvious that a block of cars was set out at Hartsdale with subsequent movement on to Chicago Heights (ah, the Ford plant in the Heights, hence the coordination of the two trains).
Now, here is a question…who approached who for this kind of coordination? Did the auto makers come to the railroads and ask for help on these movements or did the rails initiate and offer the service? As one looks back on the changes in manufacturing during the 80’s, particularly inventory management (movement to JIT) these movements from auto parts to auto plant to assembly plant became very critical. How much of this did the rails retain and how much (relatively) did they lose?
One can also see the major ship
Did Conrail move commodties in unit trains, or were the distances too short to make that work?
Conrail had considerable amounts of coal, ore and other items out of Pa. and other areas. One of the factors described in The Men Who Loved Trains was the amount of coal on the ex Pennslyvania lines. NS realized their traditional coal traffic had peaked and was dropping and was looking to increase coal handling.
In dividing up the Conrail properties NS purposely negotiated for the ex Pennsylvania line for the coal. They gave up the NYC line across from Buffalo to Boston and NYC. Now I see they are putting a route together with PanAm to reach Boston.
Others would know much more about Conrail’s coal and other unit train handlings and will be able to contribute more to this.
ed
That was a good book, haven’t seen it since the Great Train Store days though. I never read it all but spent good time browsing it.
Jerry Taylor along with Ray Poteat has continued in the same vein with the new book, The CSX Clinchfield Route in the 21st Century (Indiana University Press). I purchased “A Sampling of the PC” after someone on this forum mentioned the sale that IU Press was having. The Clinchfield book is a full course meal in comparision.
I finished reading it today. Almost every major point along the line is covered in this 170+ page full color book. Most of the photos were taken in the 2004-2006 range. It has info on all the coal loadouts and the trains destination(s). Nice maps, track profiles, charts, and short histories of the various Subdivisions.
I highly recommend this book, especially if you have any interest in Eastern railroading since the trains off this route can be seen in nearly every corner of this region.
If we could only get him to do the same for the other former roads that make up CSX.
Jay
BNSF has car scheduling for every revenue car moving across the system. For example, when a car is released from a shipper that car will be assigned to a train (symbol) to pick it up enroute. If, for some reason, the car is not picked up, it then 'fails". The rr brass frown on this when it is a load. An empty car on the other hand usually doesn’t raise red flags unless the shipper complains on why his car wasn’t pulled.