I was in the process of laying out a track design on my benchwork and came up with a bit of a dilema, well atleast in my head. My RR is a shortline with a csx interchange. It has 2 large customers(each recieves a few cars and will ship 3 or 4 daily) that moved in that reinvigorated the line. I wanted the RR to have(and will either way) its own rolling stock(box cars and a few gondolas).
Now granted shipments come in on other RR’s cars but where does a home road keep their cars for their shippers to load? Do most have a storage tracks on a yard somewhere or do they simply reload in to the other RR’s now empty cars?
Like I said want to have my own RR cars on the layout just to give me something to make of my own and paint and whatever granted still waaaayyyyyy into the future. I am only goin to have a small yard 3-4 yard tracks around 3’ long. My actual question I guess since I have some space left over would it be worth or even somewhat realistic to put a storge track or 2 for my own RR’s cars waiting to get loaded at a shippers site?
Any and all ideas, comments, suggestions appreciated, good, bad, or even I’m thinking about this way to much.
There was one brief period (the Incentive Per Diem boom) when otherwise insignificant short lines fielded vast fleets of box cars, most of which never saw home rails. Then Railbox came in, Incentive Per Diem went away and intermodal traffic exploded. All those cars came home to roost. I recall driving along mile-long cuts of McCloud River Railroad box cars in the 1980s. Allegedly, there was one line in the southeast that had more cars than it could park on its own rails. I wonder what they did…
Modeling 2013, you could field a dozen or so box cars, enough to handle most of the outbound loads, and claim they’re the last dregs of a once-vast IPD fleet.
If a car rolls in with a load, when it’s unloaded, it’s ready to reload. Moving empty cars does not generate revenue. If the person assigning cars and loads can, they usually head the car toward it’s home road. However, if there is a load to go in the other direction and that car is ready to go, it usually does. Effeciency saves money, corperations like that.
As for home road cars, as mentioned, some had many cars on the move, years ago. Now there are some connectors and short lines with very few, if any home road cars.
If your railroad has cars to load, it should load them and send them on their way. It doesn’t matter whether it’s you own railroad’s cars or some other railroad’s. You would likely have more home road cars in your empty tracks than other railroads, but that’s just because railroads are sorta supposed to aim a car towards the owning railroad. I emphasize “sorta supposed to”. Also, some of your home road cars might be around recovering from repairs, and are ready to be re-used.
So, you’re going to have to figure a ratio of cars from various railroads. For example, at a certain time, you might have 25% your railroad, 25% of one connecting railroad, 25% of the other connecting railroad, 15% of nearby railroads, and 10% of far away railroads. Now in reality, the ratios would fluctuate. But, ya gotta stat somewhere.
What type of cars are your industries loading? There are basically 2 types. General service cars and assigned service cars. General service cars are plain cars with no appliances or special attributes. Plain sliding door boxcars, mill gons, plain flat cars and bottom dump hoppers are general service cars. Insulated boxcars, boxcars with load dividers or cushioning devices, tank cars, covered hoppers, reefers covered gons, coil cars, centerbeams, intermodal cars are all special cars. Plain cars can be reloaded when empty. Special cars are generally in an assigned pool and can only be loaded in that pool. In most cases they have to return empty.
if your industries loas special cars, your shortline would be more likely to have leased special cars for your industries to load because those cars would come right back to you. General service cars could wander around for months or years before they return. There is no gaurantee they would be available.
In any case you could have a storage track to hold empties for future loading.
Dave,As point of interest NO&W(Northern Ohio & Western) uses a run around track to hold cars or the old second main line.
Trains Magazine has had several articles covering the woes of short lines getting empties for their customers and needless to say its not a pretty picture for some short lines so,savvy short lines order empty lease cars from TTX(Railbox/Railgon) CROX,SRLX,GATX to name a few.
Some times their connecting partner road requires unit trains for grain cars and if the short line can’t handle unit trains then their customer will truck the grain for transloading and of course the short line is left holding the bag while their “partner” road gets the loads through transload.
my real life experiences from years ago allow me to only tell you of two things concerning empty car storage. the old PRR had 6 tracks at Rose Lake (E St Louis) that were dedicated for empty car storage and cleanout. they later became intermodal ramps.
when i worked on the Southwest division of the NYC in the 60’s, all general service system empties went to Avon (Indianapolis) and were distributed from there as needed by customers on the division,
a lot depends on the era you are modeling and you have already received some good information. during my time, general service empty cars could be loaded back to or toward the owning road, they could be returned empty to the owning road, the could be loaded to a destination that was closer to home than where the were at the time.
old Railway Equipment Registers have a wealth of info on car service rules and there may be some stuff on the net if you are interested, especially in how it is done today.
again, i am speaking about years ago. csd 145 and 150 (car service directive) required the return of the empty via reverse route to the point of assignment. these rules applied to specially equipped cars and the cars were stenciled accordingly. mtys went home for free with each road that received part of the revenue movement being responsible for their fair share of the return haul.
as a general rule, empties would be held around pending loading rather than miss the revenue. after a while, per diem started to eat up the money and that changed things.
keep in mind, some equipment was not suitable for all commodities. for instance, if a box car had been loaded with tires, you would not want to haul cereal in it unless you wanted the corn flakes to taste and smell like Akron Ohio. once a car was loaded with hides or tankage, it was as if it had come down with HIV and was contaminated for life. never to haul anything else.
I’ve seen boxcars that had “Hide Service Only”.“Return to Chicago via reverse route”.
Another PRR boo-boo was the time we was to spot a empty Santa Fe boxcar…The other brakeman was suppose to make the cut while I walked ahead to unlock and open the derail and proceed to the switch in order to unlock it.The conductor waved for me to join him and the other brakeman and upon arrival I seen why the pow wow was taking place.There was a sticker by the door that read-Do Not Load…Return to home shop for repairs.[banghead]
hey, larry. we come from an era when empties ran around with the doors open. you could look inside and see what was what… another favorite tag of mine was the Rear End Only. that was when the underframe or draft gear was so crapped out and weak the car had to travel in the rear 10 cars of the train.
i even have a few of those in HO scale.
the car department had a bunch of interesting little tags besides the usual bad order card. remember DSA? set back account defective safety appliance.
Yes,Charlie I sure do…I also recall placing one of those tags on the back of a engineer’s jacket…He kept wondering why everybody was chuckling when he walked by…
Here in North Florida we have a short called the First Coast Railroad. (FCRR) They interchange with CSX twice a day in Jacksonville. I always see FCRR cars coming and going to and from FCRR home rails. They serve a number of industries in Fernandina Beach Fl so the FCRR cars are always in demand there. FCRR has a small yard but I don’t think their own cars spend too much time just sitting there. Always moving.
