Another chapter in the “things I see on train cars” novel:
“Extra charges will apply if car is used in switching service”
This was on a YARR (the pirate road) gondola, but the above phrase was from a previous road name and paint job. Don’t ask me which one, I couldn’t tell. Was pretty ratty.
So what does it mean? As in used for a buffer? Used for a local customer and not the assigned pool?
Being a gon - in some circumstance when a gon would get into a steel mill, it may get ‘trapped’ in to service in the plant - potentially hauling hot ingots from one point in the mill to a rolling mill in the plant or to some other point in the plant. Most steel mills occupied a large foot print and would need cars to move product around in the mill - with the rail service needed within the mill, most steel mills had their own railroad to perform the switching services.
I have never seen that signage applied to a car - but a car getting trapped into intraplant service within a steel mill would be ‘rode hard’ without accumulating much mileage. After being trapped into such service, by the time the car got back to the owning carrier it would be pretty much used up.
Being that good order gons are hard to come by (they get abused badly as well as 85T-100T flats); it isn’t that unusual to see railroads put company-use lading on the cars… on cars supposebly moving empty across a railroad to be returned.
(Many a roadmaster has had a project grind to a halt because there are no available cars to move material or to send material to someplace to be sorted/graded/re-used/recycled. This gets compounded by beancounters and mechanical departments actively trying to shrink the railcar fleet w/o understanding the consequences)
A hot fudge sundae bet tells me that the industry or railroad got a supposedly empty car with an unwanted load in it. Being a gon, probably scrap metal.
If the carriers handled their customers business the way they handle their own company material - they would be out of business, post haste!
Anybody know if that’s in conformance with the AAR Car Service rules ?
How would one know the amount of such charges ?
[:-,] How would they know if the car was only used that way for a few days ? (Don’t get too ‘piggy’ about it, and you might get away with it ! [:-^] )
Link to a lengthy and thorough explanation of various kinds of switching: http://www.protrak.cc/switching44.htm
See also: http://www.protrak.cc/paperwork.htm
Probably a scare tactic more than anything.
Saw another one. This was on a couple CN boxcars: “Canadian built for international service only!”
Made it to the states, so somebody was paying attention. But what makes those cars so special?
That one has a bit more teeth - there are, I believe, parts of the Canadian tax code that cause such use. Reporting marks CNA & CPAA are based upon the statements in that tax code. If one looks at the waybills for shipments carried in these cars, they will be endorsed with Car Service Directive orders for them to be returned to the shipper when empty. I don’t know if they get used on totally Canadian shipments. They are used on Canadian shipments to US (and probably Mexican) destinations.
This is a Canadian Tax Code thing.These cars only handle shipments from Canadian shippers to US consignees and return empty(or are supposed to). CN(CNA) and CP(CPAA) both have cars in this service. I remember ‘DWC’ cars on the DWP that were bringing Canadian forest products to US lumber dealers.
Jim
We get CN, DWC, CNA, and CNIS boxcars all the time.
CNIS = Canadian National International Service by any chance?
That’s what I’ve always understood CNIS to mean.
Jeff
[quote user=“zugmann”]
“Extra charges will apply if car is used in switching service”
This was on a YARR (the pirate road) gondola, but the above phrase was from a previous road name and paint job. Don’t ask me which one, I couldn’t tell. Was pretty ratty.
So what does it mean? As in used for a buffer? Used for a local customer and not the assigned pool?
Some possibilities come to mind:
Could mean intra-mill service. For example, at a large steel mill (say, US Steel Gary Works), semi-finished slabs, ingots, skelp, etc., could be loaded into a gon and hauled to a finishing mill where the lading is unloaded and becomes the raw material for structural products (channels, Z-bars, T-bars, rail, sheet, etc.
Could mean inter-mill service within a switching district (say, the Chicago Switching District). The slabs, etc., are loaded at Gary and hauled down the road to (don’t know what it’s called today) Inland Steel or LTV at East Chicago or Indiana Harbor, IN, respectively. In this case, the rate that applies is the Chicago Switching District one-, two-, or three-line rate. (Yes, Virginia, there are such things.) These moves are different from a shipment routed from Gary to Pittsburgh or Cleveland or someplace else, outside the district, in fact, quite far removed, in which case a linehaul rate applies. Please note the qualifier “quite far removed;” a location outside the Chicago Switching District, such as Bethlehem Steel at Burns Harbor, IN may be accorded CSD rates even though it lies outside the CSD. By the way, there is, or at least used to be, a tariff specifically for switching rates and charges within the Chicago Switching D
Your reference to “company-use lading” reminded me of some pretty unusual lading in foreign (particularly southern roads’) gondolas at Watertown, NY (then the snowiest place on the NYC). I doubt this would qualify as “company-use lading” bu the Watertown Yardmaster would start hoarding gondolas in October or early November. There weren’t any shippers there using large numbers of gondolas, but when the heavy snows hit, three guesses where they put the snow. The gons were then released to move “home” empty.[(-D]