Group hello I have several freight cars from verious road names in H.O scale that were given to me by a friend, my question to you is this were /are freight consist all run from the same road or can they be a mixed bag from sereral diferent names example if im running a U.P engine do all the cars in the consist then also have to be Union Pacifiic or can they be mixed , he gave me over a dozen cars and I really dont want to have to strip and repaint/renumber them all. any help you could provide would be appriciated.
I always thought railroads transferred freight from car to car when the traffic crossed from one railroad to another. So, that way only cars lettered for a particular run on that railroad and railroads don’t have to pay others for the use of their cars.
I have a question. Do railroads commonly have two parallel rails? I’ve seen photos of a railroad track with three rails, so is it correct to presume the railroad cars running on such track had three sets of parallel wheels?
Let’s say a industry on the CSX loads a car load of plastic pellets bound for a plastic manufacturer in Huston,Tx located on BNSF track…Of course CSX doesn’t go to Houston so this load of pellets will be interchanged with BNSF at(say) St.Louis…BNSF will deliver the car to the plastic company in Houston…
Interchanging of freight cars is and was a common practice. For a general merchandise freight, it would be unusual to have all the cars belonging to the home road. In the days before we had just a handful a major railroads, a freight car might travel on several railroads on a cross country trip. A realistic consist might have 60% of its cars from the home road, 30% from neighboring roads, and 10% from distant roads. Of course it will vary but you get the idea.
Although it was less frequent than freight interchange, there was also interchanging of passenger cars. Long distance sleeping cars might be passed from one railroad to another so passengers would not have to change accomodations when traveling across country.
Easiest answer I can give you is go down to a railroad track somewhere, sit and watch the trains go by and you will see how they mix up. There have been exceptions, such as special tofc trains that remained on the home rails from start to finish and had only home rail cars, but the number of these is small.
When the railroads changed from mileage to per deim charges in the early 1900’s the Ma&Pa built a coal tipple in Baltimore to transfer coal to their own cars to avoid the per deim charges.
But, We all recognize Mark as a real good guy, however the longer you are here you will realize that his FIREBOX isn’t quite level and he blows alot of smoke. Lol.[(-D]
And yes, the answer is that railroads interchange cars. So don’t worry about your ‘foreign’ railroad cars, just mix them in and have a good time running them.
Actually, before the “Mega-Railroad” take-overs in the 1980’s, you could give yourself a GREAT ‘geography’ lesson by watching a train full of what are now “Fallen Flag” railroads. Out here in California it was common to see an SP train full of cars from the New York Central, Pennsylvania, Great Northern, Burlington, Santa Fe or any one of dozens of then-existing railroad lines. It was fascinating to think of where those cars originally came from what kind of freight they were hauling and where they’d eventually end up in further interchange.
I model one of the very few railroads where the freight cars were all home road cars. Of course, it’s the pre-privatization Japan National Railway - aka, “The only game in town.”
Where cars originate, the home road prefers to load their own. Next choice is to load a ‘foreign’ car going in the right general direction. However, if cars of the necessary type are scarce, anyone’s empties can be loaded for any destination. Thus it would not be unusual to see a Union Pacific box car loaded in San Diego rolling through Pennsylvania on its was to Maine.
Some cars have special fittings for handling one specific product. Such cars usually shuttle back and forth from one producer to one consumer, in accordance with instructions painted right on the car - “When empty, return to XYZ Company, East Noplace, (insert state of choice.)” The loaded move would have a regular waybill. This practice was very common when automakers shipped subassemblies from a central manufacturing complex to outlying assembly plants, but it was hardly exclusive to auto makers.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - when the JNR was a government-owned monopoly)
The short answer is yes; trains can contain a mixture of cars with different railroad names. Nevertheless, the composition of the train will depend on the era, season, railroad, specific location on that railroad, and purpose of the specific train. Cars on a train are not simply a random collection of cars. Actually, there is a lot of “science” to it. The following is a “tip of the iceberg.”
Generally speaking, railroads much preferred to use their own cars. They don’t want their own (home-road) cars to sit idle while paying for the use of other railroads’ (foreign) cars. Of course, if a railroad had a shortage of its own cars, it would make use of other railroads’. So, a foreign car leaving a railroad would be much more likely to be empty, and while there were exceptions (like SP automobile-parts cars), a home-road car would certainly be loaded when leaving its home rails. A large number of trains on their way out of a railroad’s system would likely contain many empty foreign cars.
And then there were small railroads that had no revenue freight cars of their own. Their revenue trains consisted entirely of foreign cars.
Foreign cars would more likely be from adjacent railroads than far away. But then if the neighboring railroad was a competitor on a certain route, one was less likely to see a competitor’s car in the train.
Also, foreign railroads which had large fleets of cars (like the Pennsy and NYC) were more frequently seen than railroads with small fleets. For instance, you would be much more likely to see a Pennsy or N
I’m happy to see a hodge-podge of non-home-road cars in a train, but I would not call that a “consist.” In general, it’s just going to be a “train,” or maybe more appropriately, a “mixed freight.” When I think of a “consist,” I see a group of engines or cars which remain attached and stay together from one trip to another. For example, you might speak of an F7 ABBA consist which would be reversed at the end of the line by walking the engineer to the other cab, but would otherwise just hook on to another train for the next leg of its journey. Or, you might consider a “unit train” of 100 Tropicana cars running up and down the east cost delivering orange juice. A set of passenger cars is often spoken of as a consist as well.
With a mixed freight, the cars will be broken up and switched to destinations, often a different one for each car. As for re-assembling the same set of cars? Highly unlikely - never the twain shall meet, as they say.
Get your razors out, we’re gonna be splittin hairs.
On at least two of the modern major freight lines a “consist” (used as a noun) is :
A. The group of engines on the train.
B. The train list, the list of the standing order of all the cars and engines on the train.
If I walk up to a conductor and ask for his “consist”, on at least two major railroads, he will hand me his train list. The engine “consist” is a subset of the “train consist”.
So I would use the term consist to describe the list, the group of cars and the variety of cars (or actually shipments) on the list could be termed mixed freight (or manifest freight). In some era and areas a mixed freight is a freight that has both passenger and freight service.
Always happens then there are more definitions than words.
See, that clownish DCC computer-speak is destroying our railroad lingo. A “consist” is the make-up of a train, not a lash-up of MU’d diesels under the control of a guy with a keypad.
Now, back to researching that question about the realism of three wheelsets under those three rail trains.
Well the problem with a single-track line is the railroad has to run both directions on it. The railroad sets up passing sidings so that say an eastbound train can pull to the sidetrack to let a westbound train go by (the origin of our term “being sidetracked”).
With a doubletrack line, it’s like a two-lane highway. Each direction has it’s own lane. If the RR has enough traffic, more lines could be added - the New York Central had extensive sections of four track mainline for example.
Also, you could be seeing two railroads running next to each other. Going to and from work I drive next to what appears to be a three-track mainline, but is actually two railroads (BNSF and CP, originally the CB&Q and the Milwaukee Road) running next to each other along the Mississippi River, one is doubletrack and one is singletrack. In this case, they share the tracks so you can sometimes see BNSF on CP track or vice-versa.
Dual gauge! I knew I could remember what I thought I’d forgotten.
The three rails are to fit narrow gauge and standard gauge using a common rail. I used to do that trick with an oddball-gauge British Railways Fowler 0-6-0T on my non-powered Lionel track that I used for my Marx O gauge, two-rail windup trains (and the hand-pushed Kusan Cannonball FA-1). Never mind that the British engine was in OO, except for the gauge (smaller than HO). I was 8 at the time.
