Freight trains entering yards

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

I am a model railroader, and I would like to get some prototype information that would be helpful to me. What I would like to know is something about the interaction between the crew of a freight train and the yard crew that breaks the train down when it enters the yard.

Specifically, I would like to know about any interactions between the train’s conductor (the person in charge of the train) and the yard foreman (the person in charge of the yard switching crew). For example, are the waybills for the cars handed off from the conductor to the foreman? Also, do the conductor and the foreman walk along the train to inspect the seals on the cars to check whether a theft may have occured? I am thinking in terms of a “chain of custody” here. If mechandise has been stolen, what repsonsible person was in charge during the theft?

I realize things may be different today from years past. But I would still be interested in any information about this topic regardless of the era.

Thanks!

Jean

2

No to all that.

Usually the yard crews are at lunch or sitting around taking a break while the road crews are inbounding their train.

For the most part the road crew doesn’t interact with the switch crews, they usually receive their instructions from either the dispatcher, yard master, or trainmaster on how to yard their train. If it’s a small yard or not staffed by managers then the switch crew might be responsible for giving road crews instructions on how to inbound their trains, and when they do this it is usually planned out to make the switching easier.

If there are RCO zones then the road crew might talk to the yard job to verify it is okay to enter the zone limits if zone doesn’t have to be deactivated first by rules.

Sometimes the yard crew might handle switches for the road crew and even tell the road conductor to stay on the power while the yard crew makes the cuts and protects any shoves…but that depends on how lazy the yard crew is.

3

Yardmasters control the yards - in the present day, a single Yardmaster is place in control of several yards. The yard crews in those yards will report to and get insctuctions from the Yardmaster that controls their individual yard. Yardmasters contact their crews via radio and telephone. Yard crews will normally be ‘set in the clear’ when a Road Train works the yard or will be sent to an area of the yard where the Road Train will not be working. The Yardmaster issues instructions about the tracks for the Road Train about where to yard, set off or pick up.

Today’s railroads, for the most part, have done away with Conductors carrying physical waybills. Conductors are provided ‘Train Documents’ that are computer printed for their train - when making pickups or setoffs they will then update the computer with the work they have done, this includes placing and pulling cars from industry. Some carriers have equipped their Conductors with ‘terminals’ so they can update the computer, where ‘terminals’ are not provided the Conductor will update the computer at their tie up point.

Today’s railroading is about manipulating cars in the yards and car records in the computer.

4

Thanks for the great information. This tells me how things work in the age of computers. But how did things work in the days before computers? Say, in the 50’s and 60’s?

Jean

5

Some of the mechanical car- or space-tracking systems that were ‘high-tech’ in the 20th Century long before the advent of CRTs and general-purpose computers were fascinating; we’ve had a number of threads on these including some from the fabled Mike MacDonald (forum handle ‘wanswheel’) that are worth looking up even though the Forum software can’t do community search properly. There are some very good tech sites dealing with older ‘business systems’ used in railroading – they can be hard to find, but some members here (BaltACD comes to mind) may remember details of some of them.

6

In the days before computers - each yard had a Yardmaster and generally one or more clerks. Trains would contact the Yardmaster from a designated point to get yarding instructions at the yard. Yardmaster would generally have his crews ‘clear’ of the road train and the tracks it is working, unless there was some form of a special move that was required. The Road Crew would deliver the waybills and the Conductors ‘Wheel Report’ of the train being yarded to the Yard Office. The Yardmaster may have dispatched a Clerk to check the car initial and numbers of the cars as they are arriving, or the Clerk would be sent to walk and check the tracks that the train was yarded on.

In the Yard Office after the Clerk returned from his checking duties, the Clerk would start making a ‘Switch List’ with the car initials and numbers of the cars on the track and destination or classification notations to be used when the track gets switched. The destination/classification information is taken from the Waybills.

Depending on the yard and special instructions that pertain to that location, the Car Dept. would be sent to do an arrival inspection of the cars, applying ‘Shop Tags’ as necessary and generally bleeding the air off the cars to make them ready to be switched - either flat switching or getting shoved over the hump in a hump yard.

The Yardmaster will assign his yard crews the tracks they are to switch and the order in which multiple tracks are to be switched. The yard crews will use the Switch List that the yard clerk prepared, the Y

7

When I was a clerk in Atlanta yard, if possible I would stand in one spot and write down the car reporting marks and numbers as the train pulled into the yard, but if the train came in too fast and I got behind, then I’d have to walk the train. (Or if the train came in while I was doing something else.) In the yard office I’d make a switch list from reading the routing on the waybills the conductor gave me. Then I’d go back out and chalk the classification on the cars, based on the next destination. Generally speaking, each classification corresponded to a specific track in the yard. At our yard (GARR) one classification was Augusta. That meant a car going to an Augusta business, a car going to a foreign road in Augusta, or cars headed to towns near Augusta, which would get there by way of a local out of Augusta. Other classifications in Atlanta were L&N, SOU, SCL, Montgomery, etc. The yard crews would switch the cars by reading the chalk marks. Before we started chalking cars, the crews would work from a switch list.

8

Two interesteing and informative posts. Brings back memoriew of my B&M days 1952-53.

9

Wow. Great replies! Really appreciate all the detailed information. Now I know a LOT more about how it worked in the days before computers.

Jean

10

The switchmen had been getting things screwed up when they just had a paper switch-list in hand. I think they’d stick it in their back pockets, think they were remembering where the next several cars went, but got it wrong a fair amount of the time. They couldn’t work with one hand, so it was a question of constant in/out of the pocket, a nuisance … OR Try To Remember. But these guys were not Barbra Streisand.

So the suits came up with the chalk idea, and in typical GARR fashion, bought the cheapest chalk known to mankind. So after the first good rain under this new plan … well you get the drift. More like the drip.

So after a brief return to switchlists, they bit the bullet and got us this waxy yellow chalk, and it worked great. Now, if the same car came back soon, and was headed elsewhere, we had to cross out these “legacy” markings. At times I felt like who’s worse: us or the graffitti artists?

It was all very high-tech.

Shortly before a train was about to, say, depart for Augusta, I’d walk the train, making up the consist, so as to pull the waybills and give them and the consist to the conductor. Personally, if I noticed there was, say, a Montgomery (opposite direction) car in that train, I’d keep my mouth shut. Because, depending on where it was, having to dig out one errant car could be a real production in our relatively small yard. You wouldn’t make many friends by being too conscientious. I’d pull the waybill, so it would travel with the car, but I would not point it out to the conductor. Heck, the car would eventually get to Montgomery. If I’d noticed an errant reefer with the motor running, I probably would have said something, but I don’t remember that situation coming up.

GA/A&WP/WofA ran as basically a single railroad. I can’t really remember, but I’m guessing Atlanta (Hulsey) yard was a dozen tracks wide.

BTW, apparently GA was the actual official repo

11

I’ve heard stories of sending a car, or cars, to the next yard because of lack of room, or possibly a lack of info on where it was supposed to go. Reportedly, some cars might make such a trip several times…

12

I think in the case of “mystery cars,” the inclination was to let the next yard figure it out.

13

We used to ship out cars that were emptied by the customers, but didn’t have billing yet. The billing would catch up to them down the road. Inprecision RRing changed all that. Stuff must have be billed in the system to be pulled anymore.

14

Of course it’s also good to have a system of checks and balances in place to try and contain any problems that occur from time to time. One technology created towards that end was KarTrak. An effort to automate field level information into centralized management systems at the bridge between eras

15

My understanding that in the Penn Central days there was a ‘mystery train’ that operated between Buffalo and Collingwood for several months.

16

Was it the same cars going back and forth?

17

In the early weeks following the Conrail split back in '99; NS yardmasters in PA became fairly adept at ping ponging cars back and forth between yards across the state. That was a nightmare I hope to never see repeated.