I know what reporting marks are-- what I want to know is how would an ambiguity be resolved?
Let’s say I have a railroad that would work out to be the same reporting mark as another railroad. How would the reporting mark be altered to reflect that?
Example: Southern Pacific Railroad versus South Pennsylvania Railroad
And both would nominally be “SPRR”. How would the marks for one or the other be changed?
You’re in luck. Reporting marks for Southern Pacific are SP, not SPRR.
Nope. Assigning the same reporting marks to two different railroads would defeat the very purpose of reporting marks. So they would not be assigned the same reporting marks.
Don’t know - but I assume they would do it in the most obvious way: first come, first served.
Southern Pacific had reporting mark SP, btw. SPR and SPRR both seems to be available for your “what-if” South Pennsylvania Railroad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reporting_marks:_S).
Smile,
Stein
maybe that’s why the South Penn was aborted and became the Pennsylvania Turnpike instead.
grizlump
Oh excellent. never mind then! 
The reporting marks’ first letter is the same as the first letter of the road’s name. Railroad owned railcar reporting marks may not end in X, U or Z. Marks ending in X indicate private car ownership, U a container, and Z a trailer.
After that, pretty much anything goes as long as the sequence of letters hasn’t already been used. Whoever gets there first gets the reporting mark.
Nick
Another example to your question would be between the Missouri Pacific (MP) and the Maryland & Pennsylvania (MPA)
So your South Pennsylvania could be SPA versus the SP for the Southern Pacific
The railroad is seldom abbrevaited in the reporting marks.
Gene
What about PRR; CRR; BCLR; CPR (well, maybe not CPR)
Reporting marks are assigned by the Association of American Railroads. They are not made up by the railroad company. The company can request certain marks and the AAR will assign those marks if they are available. The marks do not neccessarily have anything to do with the railroad’s name. The AAR will not assign marks to two companies. When the Seaboard System was formed, they requested the marks SS, which were in use by the Sand Springs railroad so Seaboard was assigned SBD.
Years ago one or two letter reporting marks were used; today the AAR assigns 4-letter marks. A company may use fewer letters if it pre-dates the 4 leter rule.
The marksthat have been assigned are listed in The Official Railway Equipment Register.
One example of an obvious collision:
Boston and Albany
Bangor and Aroostook
settled when B&A was assigned to the Boston and Albany, while Bangor and Aroostook got BAR.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with car numbers, no reporting marks)
Canadian Pacific is CP not CPR.
Southern Pacific is SP, not SPRR.
As mentioned before, reporting marks are centrally assigned to the railroads by the AAR; get a copy of an Official Railway Equipment Register and it lists all the reporting marks assigned to different railroads and car operators. (Not all cars are actually owned or operated by a railroad.)
Ambiguity isn’t an issue because the AAR actually assigns the reporting marks, so if a railroad already has that mark, another new railroad would be assigned a different one. Most new reporting marks that get assigned are 4 letters; older reporting marks are 3 and 2 letters. Marks that get assigned to an non-railroad company (leasing companies or shippers that own their own cars) alway end in “X”. (That’s why’s CSX’s reporting marks are CSXT, not CSX.)
A few other examples of railways with the same initials, and the reporting marks they’re assigned:
Algoma Central (AC (also ACIS)*)
Amador Central (AMC)
Arizona & California (ARZC)
Canadian Pacific (CP (also CPAA, CPI)*)
Clarendon & Pittsford (CLP)
Camas Prairie (CSP)
Then why is it i’ve seen it CPR? I know I havem cause I asked myself why they did it CPR and not CP.
Railroads can “own” more than one set of reporting marks too. If a RR buys another RR, they buy the other road’s reporting marks too. C&NW for example had new freight cars built in the nineties using reporting marks MSTL for the Minneapolis and St.Louis, a RR they bought in 1960. They also used CGW (Chicago Great Western, a RR they bought in 1968). (These weren’t old cars hanging around in old lettering, they were new ones built after the merger / acquisition of the railroads.)
Union Pacific has continued using some of these reporting marks since they took over the NorthWestern in the nineties. Some people have speculated UP used the reporting marks just so they could be sure of ownership re their licensing agreements with the model railroad hobby industry, but I think it has more to do with just having a lot of cars, and being able to keep track of them better. That way you can use the same no. series for a certain type of car, but with different reporting marks.
It could be Canadian Pacific ‘owns’ both CP and CPR reporting marks, and uses both in particular situations.
I found out almost over a year after I’d started modeling the freelanced White River Southern Railroad (reporting marks WRS) that there was both another modeler modeling a railroad with the same name, and also a real railroad using the WRS reporting marks… Wilmer Rail Service…
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=298917 - Not my photo.
CPR is not an official reporting mark (despite what most people on RailPictures.net like to label their photos as). Canadian Pacific primarily uses CP and SOO reporting marks, and they’ve also used CPAA, CPI, EN and QC reporting marks on cars in the past. CP actually also owns CPRS (I’ve never seen this used) and CPT (used on EOT/FRED units, not on rolling stock)
Perhaps you saw a piece of work equipment that was incorrectly lettered “CPR”?
Edit: now that CP has taken over ICE/DME, they own those reporting marks too. Perhaps in the future we may seen brand new DME cars with Canadian Pacific paint and lettering.
We’ve already seen SOO line reporting marks, as you’ve noted, so why not?
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1499039
I knew all that stuff about reporting marks, but after reading this thread, I started thinking (shocking, I know!)…
What about SEPTA? The reporting marks are SPAX, but SEPTA is a railroad, not a railroad car-owning private company. Just doesn’t make sense to me.
I checked up on SEPTA, suspecting that the equipment was owned by the state, and the tracks owned and operated by the railroad. But nope, they’re listed as purchasing equipment at the same time as tracks, so unless I missed a major reorganization of theirs, their reporting marks actually are SPAX. I have no idea how that works.
Maybe you should post it on the TRAINS Magazine Forums?
You see the same pattern for several other companies which presumably originally was organized to subsidize and coordinate commuter traffic (rather than operate trains). Pure guess, but they probably initially only needed reporting marks for stuff like MOW equipment (that might be transported in regular trains across regular railroads to get to their location).
A couple of examples from a quick scan of the list of reporting marks:
| MBTX | Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority |
|---|---|
| METX | Northeast Illinois Regional Commuter Railroad Corporation |
| SATX | City Public Service Board of San Antonio Texas |
| SCWX | South Carolina Public Service Authority |
| SDRX | Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority |
Smile,
Stein
I’ll ask in the SEPTA forum on another website.
Since it seems that you guys are interested, I’ll post back once I get an answer.
EDIT: I found the answer in an existing thread. Here’s what I pulled up:
SEPTA was created as government owned service, and therefore was not subject to regulation. Because they were not required to become a “common carrier,” they chose not to. So they are not registered with the AAR as a common carrier, and the reporting marks are SPAX.
So if I understand this correctly, a government owned “railroad,” such as SouthEastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, Massachussets Bay Transit Authority, New Jersey Transit, and Amtrak, along with many others is not required to become a “common carrier.” Amtrak and NJ Transit are registered “common carriers” with the AAR, hence the reporting marks of AMTK and NJTR, respectively. SEPTA and MBTA are not registered “common carriers” with the AAR, hence the reporting marks of SPAX and MBTX, respectively.
There were several other explanations in that thread, but this one made the most sense.
If you want the link to the thread on this, PM me.