I have also seen pictures of the PRR car accounting department before computers. Women sat at desks with huge lazy susan racks of manilla cards about 8"square that I assume each one had car information for a specific car and were kept numerically. This thing was about 4-5’ in diameter so as information came in it was entered on the cards. If you didn’t work before desk top computers the steel mill I worked at had two floors of accounting people who manually entered the quarterly data. The number of people needed was just sufficient that the previous quarter books were finished just as the current quarter data started to arrive. With computers those two floors are now virtually empty and the quarter is finished up in a couple of days at most. The PRR picture I saw must have had forty people or more doing the work and probably was only one location. Yes it was a mightmare compared to today but it was the only way
Can you imagine the paperwork filing system this generated ? Two floors of workers, before computers! Wow I am still trying to take in all of the comments by the people who have posted to this post. What an amazing process !
Brakie
Lease companies as in rental units? Like renting a vehicle ?
No, like leasing a vehicle. Not short-term renting. Long term (like for periods of years).
Most railroad equipment that is “owned” by the railroads is really leased from a bank or trust, but leased by the railroad for their purposes.
Cars that are owned or leased directly by shippers the owner/lessee has control over it’s use and routing. Shippers could conceivably also contract for one time or short term use of private lease equipment that the railroad can’t provide (like for specialized equipment types), or maybe the lease company provides a more favourable rate for providing the car.
I don’t remember all the buzz words used at the time, but in the mid 1960’s I worked for Santa Fe in the general offices at Topeka KS in the Supt. of Car Service. I had been there a few years and had to take a test for IBM qualification. I passed and went to IBM schools all around the country. At the time I was also the pastor of a small church outside of town. I had to give the church up but went to IBM schools, when I completed everything I was "profecient in BAL or Assembler programming language, and found my first assignment was to develop the program(s) to store car info. A lot of time has passed since then, but, the system was run on an IBM mainframe, the input was about 15 drawers of punched cards, and all this mess ended up on a BDAM file, the last digit of the car number designated the disk pack the movement records for each car was to be placed, then the next criteria was if the car was a Santa Fe or foreign car.
Each BDAM record contained up to 7 moves per car, if the car number was a Santa Fe car, it was the first record on each track, followed by foreign cars, all containing up to 7 moves. The system testing of the system took about 4 hours, I slept in my car while runs were made, then came in and looked for a variety of things to tell me if the programs were working correctly, punched correction cards, reloaded the drawers of program cars and off to the races. Don’t ask about mileage cars, they ran under a different set of programs and a different programmer.
Oh input for data records came on green punched tape from the telegraph department, tape records verified and loaded to punch cards, and the whole stinking mess started again.
That is about as much as I remember about it, but by 1970 I was working as a project leader for the Federal Reserve Bank in KC, had a good team, and we were not keeping freight car records. I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking about those days. I moved on to Cobol and RPG programmi