While cleaning up the train room, I came across on of MR’s Workshop Tips magazines, this one about operations. I browsed through it and an article caught my eye about freight stations and LCL operations. While reading through it I wondered how these operations related to REA service. Were they redundant services? Did their customer base overlap? Or did they serve a completely seperate clientelle?
REA Express was more along the lines of today’s UPS and FedEx, whereas LCL would have been oriented more toward shipments of larger, heavy items such as machines, refrigerators, washers and dryers, etc.
There are also a couple of pictures in Balls book the PRR in the 40s and 50s of a tombstone being delivered in New Jersey. It is being slid out of the caboose to the freight house dock on a 2x10. Several crew Members were involved due to the the weight.
LCL simply meant ‘Less than car load.’ So if shipper A had 25 tons of widgets going to Kalamazoo and shipper B had 20 tons of raw rubber going to Kalamazoo both shipments would be loaded into a single box car and each shipper would be charged a rate more than half a full car but less than the rate for a full car.
REA was the railroad-owned equivalent of FedEx. Fairly small individual parcels, moving in express box cars or baggage cars on passenger trains. LCL was handled as ordinary freight.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with LCL service)
NYC tried a service for lcl Called Pacemaker and the PRR matched it with Service Merchandise cars. In 1954 PRR had 11 dedicated timetable trains assigned to lcl. By 1957 there was 1. By 1958 there were none. The PRR cars were x29 with a white horizontal band with service merchadise written in it.
Chuck there is an exception to what you wrote. The St. Louis Southwestern Railway started an LCL train in 1931 called the Blue Streak Merchandise. It worked expedited LCL freight from St. Louis to Pine Bluff, Arkansas as first class train #3. This was done in close cooperation with Southwestern Transportation, SSW’s trucking subsidiary company founded in 1928. A northbound schedule #4 offered LCL service, but the trucking company and railroad could not fill the cars. The REA complained that #4 was cutting into its business and the schedule was withdrawn. Northbound LCL service was then offered in a baggage car. Check out Fred Frailey’s Blue Streak Merchandise for additional details on this exception to the conventions of railroading.
I have often wondered about Lcl cars that a railroad would have owned that were not rea cars . For instance the southern rr would run a car from Louisville to corydon jct for the lnac rr that they forwarded to corydon in. . What type of car would this be? A box car or a baggage car?
The vast majority of LCL cars were just regular boxcars. There were several different types of LCL opertions, which often confuses modelers. A shipment might be tendered to the railroad at a local freight house, the railroad bundles all the LCL shipments into one car and send it to a bigger freight house, at the bigger freight house the car is unloaded, the shipments sorted. All the shipments going in the same direction are loaded into another boxcar and sent to another freight house. The shipments are sorted by destination, then forwarded to another freight house, where the shipments are sorted and reloaded again. Eventually the shipment ends up in a boxcar going to the local freight house at the destination. When it gets there the agent notifies the consignee they have a shipment and its picked up.
If you ever see pictures of a freight house with several tracks with the boxccars all lined up in multiple parallel tracks with all the doors lined up, that is one of those big freight house operations. The railroad would put bridge plates beteen the cars on adjacent tracks so the loaders could go through 3 or 4 cars to reach the car on the 4th or 5th track over.
So you can model the big freight house operations, you can model the local freight house or you can model the LCL boxcar on the local freight that stops for a bit at each station to unload a couple shipments of LCL. All parts of the same operation, but look very different.
Those specially painted cars were intended to be used in services between the big freight houses and not interchanged.
LCL lettered cars could sometimes “escape” from dedicated service and wind up anywhere. The NYCs red and gray Pacemaker cars were deliberately lettered with some of the capacity data omitted to theoretically make them unsuited to interchange, but that didn’t matter, and there are photos of them all over the country. Especially after LCL was discontinued, PRR Merchandise Service cars were visible all over as well.
I’ve seen proposed artwork from Raymond Loewy’s office showing a design of PRR LCL service calling it “Liberty Bell”. Didn’t make it to production.
In 1939 the IC started it’s own truck service for LCL shipments in Southern Illinois. In an area bounded by Centralia on the North, Cairo on the South Eldorado on the East and East St Louis on the West, all LCL freight was shipped to the freight house in Carbondale. From there it was loaded on IC owned and operated trucks and delivered to the local freight houses.
An article in the September 23, 1939 issue of Railway Age described it like this:
"Carbondale has been selected as the distribution point for merchandise throughout the area and the various truck routes fan out from this station in all directions. Shipments from the St. Louis metropolitan district, 96 miles from Carbondale, arrive in solid cars on regular freight trains shortly after midnight.
From the Chicago area, 307 miles from Carbondale, shipments are handled on M.S.-1, the fast overnight merchandise train operated from Chicago to Memphis as described in the Railway Age of November 27, 1937. This train, leaving Chicago at 7:45 p.m., averages 44 m.p.h. on it’s run from Chicago to Carbondale, arriving at the latter point at 2:50 a.m."
The cars were unloaded at the Carbondale Freight House and the merchandise loaded on IC trucks, which were on the road to the 66 local freight houses they served by 5:30 am. This eliminated local freights switching the other freight houses and speeded up delivery times because some of the freight houses were only served by a local freight every 48 hours.
Customers brought their outgoing shipments to the local freight houses where the trucks picked it up and delivered it to Carbondale for loading on the merchandise cars. This system pretty much eliminated switching railroad cars at 66 local freight houses.
The article says that the system provided direct delivery to some larger customers so they didn’t have to go to the local freight house to pick up their s