I enjoy modeling them but I know almost zip how the prototypes kept track of their home road freight cars. This question applies in the pre-computer age and is more along the lines of a question regarding a railroads ability to be able to ascertain the where-a-bouts of thier freight cars as they travel around the country. I guess that it must have had a lot to do with the Railroad telegraph. This information would also be nessesary for a railroad to know who to bill, how much and what for as well as how much to pay other roads for the use of their cars.
This probably seems like a question that would be asked by a dumb a**, but there you go.[D)][:I]
Actually they didn’t care where they where to a certain point. They cared where cars were on line and that was done by the conductors and clerks keeping manual lists of where the cars were. Cars that were interchanged had the road they were interchanged to recorded and then it was that railroad’s responsibility to track that car. The recieving road was charged for the time the car was on their railroad (per diem or car hire). Whatever road had the car at mignight paid the per diem to the owning road.
The bill for moving the car was always sent to either the shipper of consignee. the division of revenue was always sent to the roads listed on the route on the waybill and was based on the tariff (rate) for the car. Didn’t matter how it was actually moved all the road got was what the tariff allowed.
Car accounting was nowhere near real time until the 1970’s when computers and EDI became commonplace.
I have seen a bunch of old videos ( I think one was N&W,one was Milwaukee for sure) showing how wheel reports were sent into the main offices. Each wheel had of course the cars in the train and if and where they were set out.So these reports were sent to the owner roads so they could keep track of the cars. Companies had car tracers back in the day. If a car came up missing they would go out and try to track it down.I do believe they or maybe a different group, would go out and make sure industries and oterh roads were following the rules in the handling of cars. I had a book on car rules but can not find it at the moment.
please don’t feel like a dumb a**. i spent over 20 years on the railroad and i still don’t know what all was going on. as for car reporting, this will get a bit long winded but i will walk you through it if you are interested. although i worked in several departments on different railroads this is what was going on in the late 60’s on the New York Central at E St Louis. We were using IBM at that time so everything was sent to a central computer but the actual paper forms and procedures were the same in earlier days. Most of our eastbound traffic was received from connecting railroads through the TRRA or A&S both of which were local switching and industrial lines. We did receive cars directly from the GMO,L&N,Southern, and Burlington but the bulk of the traffic came off the Terminal Railroad Association of St Louis.
When a cut was delivered to our yard, the yard clerk would make a list of the cars showing Initial, Number,type of car, load or empty and other pertinent information such as flammable, explosives, perishable etc… This switch list had the delivering road, engine number and date and time of arrival in the top header. Then using the waybills that came in with the cars, he would mark each car with a “spot number” indicating the destination. At that time we only ran 2 major eastbound blocks, Avon and Selkirk. Of course there were other classifications such as local and transfer cars, bad orders for the rip track, (this information was furnished by the car inspectors) and God forbid, an occasional hold-no bill. etc. This list was in triplicate and given to the yardmaster who would mark the designated track beside each car for the switching crew. This original list was then checked back against an interchange report sent to us by the delivering road and everything was kept on file at the freight office.
The clerk would sort the bills into a pigeon hole rack in the same order the cars were placed in the corresponding track. Mak
Basically it comes down to a paper trail. Joe at ABC calls up his local railroad and orders a car. the railroad records when he got it. he now has a set amount of time to load it and call the railroad it is ready for pick up. As long as it is on the home road they can track it through the train reports. there is a very complex formula listed in the ORER for demurrage and use of a car by both the sender and the final recipient beyond what is usual and customary. He unloads the car and calls his railroad for pick up since he doesn’t want to pay any of that extra billing. The local railroad informs the car owner when they got it because they don’t want to pay for it either. As stated eventually all this paper winds up in some poor schmucks hands who goes through it all and bills the right people the right amounts (most of the time). Obviously this is also dependent on the US Postal Service or some other means of getting all the paper to the right location. Prior to computers I can remember the accounting department in the steel mill I worked having just enough people to finalize the previous quarters books as the next quarter was ending so everything had a three month lag for results. I suspect the car billings were similar in timing.
Basically it comes down to a paper trail. Joe at ABC calls up his local railroad and orders a car. the railroad records when he got it. he now has a set amount of time to load it and call the railroad it is ready for pick up. As long as it is on the home road they can track it through the train reports. there is a very complex formula listed in the ORER for demurrage and use of a car by both the sender and the final recipient beyond what is usual and customary. He unloads the car and calls his railroad for pick up since he doesn’t want to pay any of that extra billing. The local railroad informs the car owner when they got it because they don’t want to pay for it either. As stated eventually all this paper winds up in some poor schmucks hands who goes through it all and bills the right people the right amounts (most of the time). Obviously this is also dependent on the US Postal Service or some other means of getting all the paper to the right location. Prior to computers I can remember the accounting department in the steel mill I worked having just enough people to finalize the previous quarters books as the next quarter was ending so everything had a three month lag for results. I suspect the car billings were similar in timing.
Well I’m sure they would care where their cars were, since the railroad would be paid a per diem charge for their cars that were being used on another railroads line. It seems to me there was once a small railroad who owned so many freight cars that if they had all been sent home to the railroad at the same time, they would overflow all the railroad’s tracks!! But getting paid the per diem was a lucrative enough part of the operations that it justified having all the cars out there being used by other lines. (BTW I think that was part of the deal with Railbox cars - since in effect everybody owned them, there were no per diem charges for their use.)
For per diem they care “where” they are but only to the extent of which railroad has them. So SP doesn’t really care if they are at Albany or Cleveland, loaded or unloaded, just that they are on the NYC. So the only thing the SP tallies is when they change roads, not the individual movements on other roads.
RBOX cars would accrue mileage charges but not per diem since they were private owner cars (they were owned by TTX, which was in turn owned jointly by numerous railroads.)
The shortlines with all the boxcars were back in the late 1970’s and 1980’s were part of the “incentive per diem” (IPD) cars when the AAR allowed a higher per diem than a regular boxcar for new plain boxcars. The idea was to incent railroads to build new boxcars since there was a critical shortage of plain, 50 ft boxcars. A holding company would be established by investors who would buy new boxcars and then lease them to a shortline who would supply a road name. This lasted until the end of the 1980’s when the IPD payments stopped and the per diem (actually car hire, an hourly rate by then) dropped to normal rate, which made them less attractive as an investment. About that time a lot of the IPD cars were sold off and were res
Others have noted that any railroad was VERY interested on where cars were on their property, both home and foreign road. OTOH, their main interest about cars interchanged off home rails was which railroad owed them per-diem.
A brief comment about those ‘incentive per-diem’ boxcars. Shortly after that bubble collapsed, I visited the McCloud River RR and saw several miles of rather new boxcars lined up on unused trackage along the line. Also, IIRC, the, “Too many boxcars for their track,” shortline was the Bonhomie and Hattiesburg Southern. (Edited to remove erroneous data.)
Then there is the only Virginia & Truckee freight car with a six digit number. It belonged to (I think) the Wabash, and was damaged while on V&T rails. Rather than pay per diem on top of the repair bill, the V&T management contacted the owning road and bought the car. It retained its original number.