Recently,Trains along the Canadian Pacific routes in America have been seeing a multitude of foreign power. Though Northfolk Southern is the majority, other railroads locomotives have been spotted on these tracks too (Two KCS Southern Belles have been on 272/273 for a time, and were recently sent to the Twin Cities via train 285)
Now I do know that the Indiana Railroad has an agreement that, in the summer, their SD9043MACs can run Coke Coal to Minnesota for the price of fuel and maintenance, not trackage rights. They can also be seen in the winter on other trains (recently, they have been on trains 281,282,284, and 285)
With the information given, Has CP made such and agreement with other railroads so as to save the cost of operating their own, or is there another reason?
There are whole departments to keep track of this stuff!
Under a variety of circumstances, a railroad may “rent” another railroad’s power. The payment terms are usually equivalent horsepower hours, although dollars may change hands, too, especially if the borrowing railroad has nothing to offer for in-kind payback.
The borrowing railroad may be power short for some reason, while another may have power to spare. If the two change situations later, they’ll just swap the other way.
It may be easier to simply run power on a unit train through to its destination instead of swapping locomotives at interchange points. UP power usually takes the “salad shooter” all the way to Schenectady, well out of its home territory. You’ll see it on other bulk commodity unit trains as well.
At any given time, a given locomotive on a foreign line might be paying back HP hours its owner owes to the foreign line, or it might be running up a tab for the foreign road that will have to be paid back in kind later to the owner.
The reality of today’s Class I’s is that they have developed to a degree interlocking scheduled train blocking and operations. The days of just ‘dumping’ freight for a carrier on it’s interchange tracks at major junction is long gone. Carriers build fully classified trains to run through the junction location to a receiving carriers classification yard. In running through the junction, the power is not changed - just the crew.
The carriers have computer applications that keep track of the power delivered and received from the various carriers. The calculations are manipulated in the form of ‘Horsepower Hours’ ie a 3000hp SD-40 on a carriers property for 1 hour is 3000 horsepower hours. The horsepower hour accounts get settled between the carriers on a periodic basis (monthly or quarterly - I don’t really know). Money will change hands based upon the net differences of the accounts. Power managers on each carrier will keep track of the running figures in the hp hour accounts and base some of their utilization decisions on the standing of those accounts.
These accounts accrue based upon the carrier a particular engine is received from, not from the actual owner of the particular engine. If UP power gets interchanged to NS on a run through and then NS uses that power on a run through to CSX - that power on CSX is in the NS account, not the UP account. Keeping proper track of the hp hours can be a complex accounting and is facilitated by the use of computers.