Were Fox trucks ever banned from interchange service?
If so, when.
Also if banned, would a locomotive with a Fox truck equipped tender be allowed to operate over the trackage of a jointly owned terminal switching company (Specifically asking about the Boston and Maine and Portland Terminal Company), if the purpose was to access the jointly owned passenger station?
Would a locomotive with a tender equipped with Arch Bar trucks be allowed to operate over the trackage of said jointly owned terminal swithcing company, if the purpose was to access the jointly owned passenger station, or to terminate its train at a the jointly owned rail yard?
3./4. If banned, like ArchBar trucks, then no. The jointly owned railroad would still be a separate railroad. An engine or transfer caboose or freight car used only for “on line” service could still have ArchBar trucks after they were banned, but they couldn’t go on another railroad - even if the first railroad was part-owner of the second railroad. So a Great Northern steam engine with ArchBar trucks couldn’t go on the Burlington Route after the trucks were banned from ‘interchange’ service, even though GN owned about 45% of the CB&Q; it also couldn’t go on the rails of Lake Superior Terminal & Transfer, which GN was a 1/6th co-owner of.
Archaic trucks were banned in INTERCHANGE. If the car wasn’t interchanged then it could be used (one of the UP’s rotary snow plows has a Fox truck variant in service today or at least last year).
If the train is operating on trackage rights over another railroad then it hasn’t been interchanged, it is still in the “accounts” of the owning road. For example the UP could haul the snow plow anywhere the UP had track or trackage rights to operate.
As to the first point, I don’t know that Fox trucks were ever banned. From what I could find, they just weren’t great trucks and by about 1950 most of them had been replaced with something better.
Most every reference I’ve seen to outlawed equipment still in use (archbar trucks, trussrods without steel underframe, etc.) has always said something like ‘however it could still be used legally as long as it didn’t leave home rails’. I don’t know if ‘home rails’ really includes trackage rights, where railroad A is paying railroad B to use their tracks sometimes.
Canadian Pacific has trackage rights over BNSF for about 150 miles between Mpls-St.Paul and Duluth-Superior. I can’t imagine if CP wanted to move a couple of MOW boxcars with archbar trucks, outdated brakes, etc. from the Twin Cities to Duluth that they’d be able to use BNSF’s line to do so?
Once again, INTERCHANGE. Interchange is when one railroad gives responsibility for a car to another railroad. It is a legal and financial transaction. It is a reporting, when the waybill is transferred to the other railroad. If a car is in the accounts of railroad A and operates over railroad B on trackage rights the car has NOT been interchanged. The car is still in railroad A’s accounts. Railroad A is still responsible for the car, it pays the per diem, it is responsible for damage. Railroad B doesn’t even know the car is there, railroad A doesn’t have to tell railroad B anything about the car. Railroad A is operating as if its on its own railroad (except it has to comply with the operating rules of railroad B). From an interchange perspective, trackage rights ARE “home” rails.
That’s why Amtrak pays for derailments and not the CSX, because Amtrak, operating on trackage rights, is still responsible for the train, not the CSX.
Caveat: It depends on the on contract between the railroads that establishes the trackage rights, if the contract says that railroad A will only operate equipment that meets AAR interchange requirements, then the archaic trucks would not be allowed.
I have read references to the banning of archbar trucks over the years but have never read the actual text of the ban itself. Nor have I seen the actual text of whatever ban (which came years later) applied to Andrews trucks and Allied cushion trucks (troop sleepers). Did the bans themselves use the words or phrases arch bar trucks, etc., or was it descriptive of features of the trucks that caused the ban(s)?
Depending on how the archbar truck ban is worded it could perhaps extent to Fox trucks which were I believe sideframes bolted to the bolster - and the bolts evidently had a failure rate. They had the use of bolts in common with archbar trucks even if they were otherwise more durable.
Weren’t trucks rather like Fox trucks used as the front truck of even fairly late model rotary snow plows? Perhaps something different about their construction that avoided whatever ban might have applied?
As the other Dave stated, the ban was for interchange service. A plow was not normally interchanged, that was home road equipment, used only on home rails, and such use of arch bar trucks and so forth was not banned. MoW service was a common place to find stuff that otherwise was not permitted on the general rail network since it stayed on home road rails - plus old equipment was reused as much as possible, not too many, if any at all, railroads would buy or build a brand new box car to be a tool car for a track gang train.
“Arch bar trucks were originally outlawed from interchange after January 1, 1938, but this was postponed twice, due to the hard times. The actual ban took place in 1941. Arch bars continued to be common on freight cars restricted to on-line use, such as maintenance of way, well into the diesel era.”
I guess you could argue “outlawed from interchange” and “restricted to on-line use” aren’t the same thing, so it depends on exactly how the regulation is worded. However, in practical terms I think it’s really the same result.
A railroad that didn’t ‘interchange’ (connect) with another railroad can largely do what it wants - archbar trucks, link-and-pin couplers, etc. - but when it connects with the outside world, it had to obey the regulations regarding interstate commerce…which I think means they’d have to keep banned equipment on their own lines. I could be wrong, but I don’t think trackage rights makes the line being used the property of the railroad exercising the trackage rights, so they’d still have to obey the regulations?
(postscript)
Apparently this subject has come up in court cases:
Given all the above, a tender attached to a steam locomotive in service would not be interchanged, and in the case stated (Boston and Maine/Maine Central’s jointly owned Portland Terminal company), the locomotive itself would not be interchanged. The train would terminate and locomotive with tender attached would proceed to the jointly owned roundhouse. In any case the listed rulings happened long after the locomotive in question was scrapped.
The point I was getting at in my previous post is federal regulations don’t really limit themselves to freight cars being “interchanged” between railroads, but rather govern any situation where any equipment of one railroad goes onto the rails of another railroad. Even if the other railroad was partly owned by the first railroad, like a terminal railroad where several railroads jointly own it, the second railroad is still a separate railroad. Any engine or rolling stock coming onto the terminal railroad from another railroad would have to meet federal regulations regarding equipment allowed in “interchange service”, which would indeed bar a steam engine with archbar trucks from entering the other railroad.
And yet steam locomotives with, presumably, solid bearing trucks under the tender (such as the Soo Line 1003 2-8-2) go from railroad to railroad, and solid bearing trucks are now similarly barred from interchange. perhaps they operate under special temporary exemptions?
You have to separate “interchange” from “trackage rights”. Two completely different things. You have to separate engines from freight cars, two completely different things, different rules, different laws.
The entire section quoted above for the CFR is for FREIGHT CARS, not for locomotives. There are separate rules for locomotives. There is NO ban for arch bar tender trucks. For example:
As someone who works every day with federal and state tax laws, I can assure you that just because one law doesn’t mention some specific item doesn’t mean there aren’t a dozen - or a hundred - or a thousand - that do. [;)]
Back to questions 3-4 in the first post…if the OP will forgive me rephrasing the question, this is the issue:
Railroads A,B,C and D each own 25% of terminal railroad T. Railroad A has a piece of equipment that doesn’t meet federal safety requirements (outlawed trucks, brakes, etc.) and so by law can only be used on Railroad A’s own tracks. Since Railroad A is part-owner of Railroad T, can it run it’s banned equipment on Railroad T, since it’s in a way running on it’s own (Railroad A’s) tracks? The answer as I see it would be no. Railroad A and T are legally two separate railroads, and any equipment crossing from one to the other would have to meet all relevant federal regulations regarding equipment used as part of the national interstate railroad system.
As far as steam engine trucks…I find it hard to believe the government would outlaw something like archbar trucks, whose failures caused derailments that injured and killed people, on freight cars but not on engine tenders or other equipment? I’d think a steam engine derailing pulling a train of tank cars with toxic chemicals would be at least as bad as one of the tank cars derailing - probably worse.
What I remember about a Fox truck ‘ban’ is that it was very early, and had to do with being fabricated from riveted pressed sections (IIRC with the holes often unreamed before riveting). This made them prone to cracking and sometimes catastrophic and relatively unpredictable failure. Look for the response here to be similar to that for paper car wheels (another technological innovation that had nonlinear failure characteristics!
The Allied Full Cushion cracking was another matter, from a much later date, but (as noted) FRA regulations can neatly identify truck components that have been proven prone to fail and ensure that they are ‘illegal’ to use in interchange service (again, interstate, as befits a Federal agency, and safety-related, which is the FRA’s mandate).
For clarification, and I should have put this in the original post, but the time period in question is late 1930s to at the latest 1954.
I conducted a search of 49 CFR 2xx series, with the following results:
The words “arch bar” appear only in chapter 215. The word “tender” does not appear in Chapter 215. Chapter 215 is not referenced in Chapter 230. Chapter 215 is applicable only to freight cars.
Above MOW equipment was mentioned. 49 CFR 215.3(c) specifically excludes MOW equipment from the requirements in 215.
The ICC and court cases cited in the links above are not applicable to the discussion. An ICC ruling that occured long after the time period can not be used to argue the point. By the very fact that the ICC had to make rulings, means that before the rulings occurred, trackage rights were not considered to be interchange. The earliest ruling I saw in the list of related rulings occured in 1961.
Also,
Maine Central Railroad in color, volume 3 on page 37 shows a color photo of MEC 367 with arch bar trucks on the B&M turntable in Groveton, NH this photo was taken in 1950.
We are conflating alot of things trackage rights is NOT interchange. Interchange requires an exchange of car information. Trackage rights does not. Railroad A operating on Railroad B on trackage rights does not give any car level data to railroad B. Railroad B only knows train sheet data. Railroad B doesn’t know what cars are on the train, doesn’t know which are loaded or empty, doesn’t know what’s in them, doesn’t know who the customers are. Railroad A’s consist unknown to railroad B except for loads, empties, tons, feet, engines, crew, on and off duty times, symbol, on and off junctions.
Part of the issue with interchange is that it may be protracted: there would likely be no ‘return to’ instructions and the car might circulate for many months receiving only as-needed maintenance from roads it passes over before getting back to its owner. This is very different from tender trucks, which will be inspected and probably at least serviced much more often and with more care.