Does anyone use “freight of all kinds” on their bills? I would like to have one or two generic looking warehouses, but don’t want them tied to a specific industry, commodity, etc. my plan is to have a 50-foot box car placed there. The commodity shipped/received would be FAK. Era is 1990s-present. Switching layout.
Something of a package shipping company (think UPS or Fedex) could work well for that. Go back some 40-50 years and call it REA (Railway Express Agency). If I modeled more modern times, I would recycle the Fed-Up name, after a Fedex/UPS merger (totally made-up). Or maybe FlyByNite shipping company. Would be a great place to park several trucks and/or trailers for local deliveries.
Brad
Well no, but most of my “waybills” only provide the destination for the car. This always includes the town and industry name, plus the spot (e.g. “door 2”) if the crew must know this to spot the car. I look at the car card/waybill like switchlist information more than full waybill data that details all sorts of additional things.
I have team tracks and a couple other industries that essentially receive generic car loads. I don’t know what’s supposed to be in the cars, and none of the crews have ever asked.
You can’t go wrong with a 3PL multi-client warehouse - just got one up and running in Dallas last week. 101K sq ft with truck docks and an office on the street side - rail spur and doors on the back wall. We don’t use rail but a 3PL always could - as a cross-dock operation from rail to truck. Use Bing Maps birds-eye and look for Avenue S in Grand Prairie TX for ideas.
I have a copy of a RI freight agency manual and it has some examples of how to fill out a bill of lading and waybill. One of the examples shows a BOL for two trailers (TOFC) and then the generated waybill for them. For description of articles they use the term “General Merchandise.” These examples date from 1971, so a term like FAK may be more in vogue today.
Train lists for intermodals that I’ve seen for trailers/containers (when they aren’t loaded with a single specific commodity) use MIXFRT in the load column. I had a fairly new conductor once remark, “We sure seem to carry a lot of fruit cocktail.” I asked him what was he talking about? He asked, “Doesn’t MIXFRT mean mixed fruit?” I told him mixed freight. I don’t think he was joking, he really seemed to think it meant mixed fruit.
my era is late 1970s, and I have some waybills that I use marked “Merchandise/FAK” for box car traffic. (I have an ACME manufacturing plant that ships a lot of unspecified products to some Wile E Coyote fellow out west.) In all reality, most traffic like this would probably go by TOFC/COFC instead of box cars today and even in my era.
Jeff
There were several freight forwarding or consolidating companies still around when i began railroading. I think their business survived on the remnants of what had been railroad LCL traffic. Universal Car Loading was one of these. There were others.
Back in Memphis when i was a kid, we had Carolina Cartage, Alabama Cartage, and Acme serving our local area. They had a joint facility where box cars were spotted on one side and it had a truck dock on the other.
These companies all had warehouses/terminals that resembled railroad freight houses. Some of them actually were former railroad facilities.
Springmeier Shipping and Acme made the transition from box cars to trailers and may still be around today, among others.
Charlie
Thanks for the ideas.