I’ve heard a story where a major railroad purchased a batch of new box cars. Instead of having the cars delivered to the home-road they just released them into interchange from the factory. They were thinking to generate some car hire revenue while they worked their way home. The story is that some fairly large percentage of the cars didn’t make it to back to the home road for nearly 10 years.
Is this the railroad equivalent of an Urban Legend or is it true? If so where is it documented. I am doing a paper on railroad impacts to accounting practice and would like to use this story if it is true. Specifically, I would like to know the statistics in general of how long the cars took to get home.
I have read that the Western Pacific had a class of box car in a pool service that did not run on WP rails.
During the box car shortage (1970’s) many short lines bought or leased large numbers of cars to be free runners so that they could earn per diem on them. It is possible many of them never saw their home road.
Read about this some time ago on the forum. I believe after NYC, PRR and others merged, the LaSalle & Bureau County RR would receive cars from the Penn Central. Instead of returning the cars to interchange, they would repaint the cars and apply their reporting marks, LSBC. In essence, stealing boxcars which, ironically enough, stands for “Let’s Steal Box Cars”. Don’t remember how long ago I read this, but it seems to be true.
The LaSalle & Bureau Co. bought about 2 dozen 40ft. boxcars from Penn Central in the early 70’s. They receved the cars and then some, the PC records were so screwed up that they just kept sending them cars for a bit. The LS&BC tired to tell the PC whats was goin on but no one seemed to know or care ( too busy with a bankrupcy?). So the LS&BC did what any frugal short line would do and they reletter the cars and sent them out there. There a link on the RR-Fallenflags web site that has a photo of one of them in Iowa. Long live the Rock.
Probably some truth to it. At one time the AAR instituted “incentive” per diem rules in order to build up the car fleet. New cars got higher per diem and many of the smaller roads invested heavily in such cars whose sole purpose was to collect per diem for the owner. Things worked great as long as the cars didn’t all come home at the same time.
This was apparently a big problem during WWII, when the vast RR traffic translated to a huge need for railcars. A former director of the Atlantic Coast Line told the story of the RR’s first purchase of roller-bearing cars during the war, when the excess profits tax made it advantageous to spend as much money as possible on RR improvements rather than keeping the cash as profits. Good RR cars were in such demand that the Board of Directors knew if the cars were ever interchanged it might be years before they returned to ACL rails. They hit on the idea of buying phosphate cars for service between the mines (inland from Tampa) to the Port of Tampa.
The ‘urban legend’ part of this story does not take into account that the owning railroad gets paid ‘per diem’ every time the car is not on it’s home road at midnight. Even if another railroad did not pay it’s per diem, there is a ‘paper trail’ from the last railroad that reported the car, and to who it sent it. It may take several months of chasing the paper, but the ICC & ARR would not be happy with a railroad that failed to report foreign cars still on their line.
On the other side of the coin, there have been instances of ‘lost’ cars - I remember a CB&Q car lost in the Daytons Bluff yard for over a year. The ‘Q’ had already paid off the shipper for the merchandise by the time it was found. The merchandise(Playtex under garments) was sold to a local discounter in St Paul and he had an ad in the paper. Quite a different crowd showed up at his store the next Monday!
The Trailer-Train Corp was a joint Corporation venture of the PennsyRR, N&WRR and a company that had a large TOFC operation. It was started around about 1955. Primarily a leasor of TOFC cars. It’s growth through the 1960’s and 70’s was amazing. I has a large number of reporting marks that track the cars it ownes. Currently the count is acknowledged to be about 200,000 cars.
Their on car lettering was a logo that contained the statement "Any Road, Any Load’ I think the whole premise for their existance was the stated tariffs that have been discuseed in this THREAD?
Well, there’s certainly “truth” to the notion that people buy cars, and get them under short line reporting marks, with the expectation that they will stay out on other railroads and never come “home”. If you want a modern example of this, just look at all of the intermodal stack cars with “NOKL” reporting marks. NOKL is a small short line that doesn’t have anything to do with intermodal traffic. It also has nothing to do with the cars that bear its marks. Rather, the cars are owned by various investor interests, and NOKL simply allows its marks to be used on the cars for a per car fee. It then designates the real owner as the car hire receivable agent, which collects the car hire for the owners.
There are a number of short line railroads that allow their marks to be used like this (AOK is another). They are called “rent-a-mark” or “flags of convenience”. The very last thing the railroad with the marks (or the car owner) would want is for these cars to come “home”. The “game” is to keep them on other railroads so they keep earning car hire. You see these “rent-a mark” arrangements most frequently with cars designated as “free runners” (ie., cars that don’t have to be sent home after a loaded move, but can be reloaded to any destination), since these cars are the least likely to ever go “home”.
This may be a little off topic, but I’ll say it anyhow.
Back in the early 70’s, my art teacher was working as the head foreman of track maintenence for the Penn Central. He was working in a yard in the Chicago area on some faulty switches (not an uncommon thing for PC) when they came across a couple of old wooden boxcars in the back tracks of the yard. Intrested in the find, him and his crew went over the old cars and cracked them open, to find two 1957 Chevey’s still in their boxes, un-opend. I do not know what happend with the cars or who took the auto’s.
I’ve often wondered where the cars were headed and why they were in wooden cars. I thought that wooden cars were not used in the 50’s. Perhaps it’s one of Mr. groovers “tall tales”… Who knows…
In the late 1970’s I worked for a company that manufactured Plastic containers in Memphis,Tn. ( on a MP RR siding). We loaded a 40 ft boxcar with a full load of plastic jugs to go to Phoenix. After a year the RR paid for the loss of the containers ( no one ever owned up on a story of where the car went. or what had happened to it). After a couple of years the L&N RR reportd that they had the car on a RIP Track in Louisville,Ky. (and would our company like to negotiate to buy back a load of plastic bottles?) The car was still sealed with our seal and notes on the packing list allowed them to track back to the shipper. I went to Louisville, and picked up three loads of containers which had been sold to a customer of our in Louisville,
The car that was loaded was an old NC&StL Car, which explained why it went back to the L&N?
That is a very popular story told all over the railroad. Same with the hopper cars full of silver (or gold) that were accidentally dumped into some pit as fill…
I’ve heard lots of versions of the “lost car” story, involving various railroads and makes of autos. Myths like this often have some truth behind them. and something like this could well have happened.
Even today, with all of the fancy computers railroads have, railroads “lose” cars, sometimes for long periods (I know of one TTX car that was “lost” for over 5 years, before it was “found” on industry trackage where it had been the whole time). It would probably have been even easier to do that in the good old days, before there were AEI tags that could at least give some idea as to a car’s last known whereabouts. Sure, railroad personnel might see the “lost” car every day. But it’s a question of connecting the dots. The people who would “see” the car wouldn’t know it was lost and that the railroad was looking for it. Eventually, the railroad would pay the freight claims on the car’s contents, and it would be forgotten until some distant day when the railroad had to move the car for some reason.
Never Drove for a True Mega Fleet like Scheinder or JB but Most of them are Qualcom Tracked and can tell you where they were last dropped. Only once did I find a lost trailer and that was because the Shipper was saying OH we do not have it here your driver pulled it out. Yet I saw it sitting there. The Shipper was using it for Storage and when my bosses found out Lets just say the shipper had to UNLOAD it damn fast or face theft charges. They had had it there for OVER a YEAR.