I have been pondering a two sided prototype question and don’t know where else to ask it.
Assuming both cars were suitable for the load …
You would use your car and return the foreign car empty to the nearest connection with that foreign railroad (whether the foreign railroad itself, or a connection to it).
Here’s why. For every day the foreign car is on your railroad, you pay per diem (and sometimes a mileage rate, too). You began paying per diem to the foriegn railroad the day the car appeared at interchange to your railroad, and will continue to pay it until the day it leaves your railroad. Per diem is paid regardless of whether the car is empty or loaded. You’re already into the per diem on that car and cannot reduce it, so why deprive yourself of the opportunity to send your own car to them and collect per diem from them, offsetting the amount you owe?
This system can create a lot of empty car mileage, so many railroads pool cars in services or in lanes to reduce it. In a period of car shortage, you might in fact “borrow” the foreign car and reload it for some customer not on the foreign road. SP, for instance, had a huge problem with eastern roads borrowing its boxcars that moved east carrying loads of lumber, and never giving them back, because the eastern roads were often car-poor. In periods of car surplus you are under extreme financial pressure to get rid of foreign cars and many freight train schedules were designed specifically to get rid of foreign empties before the 12:01 a.m. deadline when another day of per diem would become due.
Don’t confuse per diem with the freight rate; they’re entirely separate though rates sometimes specifiy who supplies the car and may discount the rate if the car is supplied by the shipper, or conversely may make the rate contingent upon the railway furnishing its own car (in other words, the railway is telling the shipper it will only offer that rate on the days it has cars available, and some days it may have no cars.)
Rates can be joint or loca
If the home railroad was going to haul the foreign car toward the foreign railroad anyway, the home railroad would rather send it back with a load so the railroad could earn some revenue.
Railroads sometimes experienced car shortages and there were instances where a foreign car wasn’t returned to its owner for years. Revenue earned hauling loads more than made up for the small per diem fees paid to the owning railroad. Many specialized cars had instructions to return the car empty immediately because the owner needed it to carry specialized loads for its customers.
Mark
Not on any railroad I worked for they didn’t! The revenue from the transportation charge is earned regardless of whether the car is home road or foreign road, it does not discriminate. Per diem is paid whether the car is loaded or empty.
“Return when empty” instructions didn’t always bear a penalty if the foreign railroad ignored them. Often the foreign railroad ignored them.
Don’t discount the revenue railroads earned from per diem. For some railroads it made the difference between a loss and a profit in a fiscal year. At some periods of time per diem was very profitable – recall the huge fleet of short-line XM boxcars that appeared in the 1970s specifically to earn money from per diem. The short lines these cars were registered to couldn’t hope to ever fill even a tiny fraction of them with loads, and in fact hoped the cars would never darken their interchange track.
RWM
RWM’s explanation only makes economic sense if (1) more money is generated from receiving per diem and more money is saved by not paying per diem than one can earn hauling a car loaded (if your’re spending money moving an empty car anyway, why not earn some money on the way carrying a load?) and (2
Here is an interesting story about the McCloud River Railroad’s experience with its “incentive per diem” box cars:
http://www.trainweb.org/mccloudrails/History/History07.html
Mark
The cost to move the empty car is very low. It’s just another 22 to 31 tons of weight on the train, and 99.9 times out of 100 its presence will not overtonnage or overlength the train. There’s a small additional fuel cost to move it, but the crew cost is the same, the switching cost is almost the same, and the overhead costs are almost identical. Balance that against the fact that the home road car will go onto the foreign road and earn per diem. It might only be $20 a day (or $1.25 a day back in the 1950s), but chances are it will be out there for 10-20 days before it returns, earning you $200 to $400 dollars (today) against a cost of moving the empty of maybe $50 if the connection isn’t too many hundreds of miles away. Railroads are often accused of stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime (I have done my share of that internally!) but not in this case.
In cases of car shortage, as I described above, the home road not only reloads the foreign cars, it reloads them for destinations on its own railroad. Or some other point where the car will likely come back
Go to the downloadable articles section of this site and type in “empty car handling” and you will get Tony K’s excellent article on empty car forwarding. I believe this article, which dates from March 1994 explains the subject quite well. You can also search this site for his article on car cards and car handling which draws from several prototype references.
In principle it was fairly simple:
If your road picks up an emptied general service car that belongs to a foreign road, you were supposed to send it back to its home road right away.
You can use an interchang traffic homebound MTY for a load of your own, (but you are not required to do so) if the load falls in one of these categories:
a) A shipment to a location on the foreign road.
b) A shipment routed via foreign road.
c) A shipment going to the zone the foreign road is in.
d) A shipment going towards the zone the foreign road is in.
Were these rules always followed in actual practice ?
Not necessarily. A RR that had a load and a shortage of empty cars would sometimes grab a tempting empty foreign road car and send it in the opposite direction, even though they were not supposed to.
How did the the owning RR try to provide an incentive for other RRs to return empty cars back to them ? From the moment their car was released by the original recipient, the owner railroad would charge the RR which held on to (or used) their car a small per day (per diem) rent, usually assessed by where the empty car was at midnight, until the car was handed back to the home road empty, so they could use it for a new load originating on their road.
Thanks for all the neat info and speedy replies. I will check out the sources mentioned. Much appreciated! John Colley, Port Townsend, WA