I found the MR article about freight operations in The Operators column to be very interesting. One question that occured to me was how LCL operations differed from REA shipments. Were these competing services or did they cater to different clientele.
Also, articles I have read in the past indicate that most REA cargo was shipped in baggage cars in either regular passenger trains or mail and express trains. The REA facilities were usually located adjacent to passenger depots. Almost all the model cars I see for REA are reefers. Did the typical REA facility receive perishables as well or did these get shipped directly to the customers who had cold storage facilities?
Another thing I found interesting was how reefers were used for LCL. If I understand what the article said, empty reefers would often be used as regular box cars rather than sending them back to their point of origination as empties. Did I understand this correctly?
Unless they were in designated service, most reefers probably logged as many miles carrying products not requiring refrigeration as they did for that which did.
LCL could be handle in baggage cars, reefers, or boxcars. The CNR carried a lot of LCL in boxcars, as outlined in Ian Wilson’s book “Steam Over Palmerston”, a great resource for anyone modelling branchlines, CNR or not. Palmerston was the transfer point for a number of branches in southern Ontario. I’m not sure if U.S. roads handled their own LCL, or if REA was the agent for some or all of them, though.
As I understand it, LCL was handled at railroad-owned freight houses, was forwarded on a non-priority basis and moved in ordinary freight trains.
REA had dedicated facilities and moved in REA cars, “head end” business in the consist of regular passenger trains. Since the trains it moved in were scheduled, REA shipment times were faster and much more predictable than ordinary LCL.
The present-day equivalent would be FedEx versus non-priority Parcel Post.
So if I read this right, if you were shipping something cross country, and it absolutely, positively had to get there 3 days from now, you shipped it by REA.
The article also mentioned, that in the 1950s, some railroads began running merchandise express trains but it also mentioned that these tended to be retail rather than wholesale shipments. Would that also be a different characteristic between regular LCL and REA shipments with wholesale freight going through LCL while retail shipments would more likely to go by REA. If that is the case, it sounds like the merchandise express trains would more directly compete with REA. In any case, it sounds like there might have been some overlap of service between these various types of shipping methods.
Possibly, but the Merchandise Express trains handled a lot more. Look at the Pacific Fruit Express, or in modern times, the Tropicana. REA was mor for the entropeneur, as I understand it.
LCL are shipments that are less than a car load, as the name implies. Today if you wanted to ship five pallets of books from New York to Pittsburgh, you would call an LTL carrier and ship them. They would load them into a truck, take it to a distribution center, unload it, consolidate it with other loads going to Pittsburgh and send it to Pittsburgh.
LCL is the same idea. Only they used trains and boxcars instead of trucks.
REA is the equivalent to parcel post and UPS. If you want to ship 5 books to Pittsburgh, you’d use UPS/REA.
REA was primarily used by retail customers, LCL was primarily used by commercial customers.
There was a railroad that started its own trucking line in 1928. It began a first class freight train during the Great Depression that coordinated these trucks with the train service to carry the LCL freight. The freight train ran on an expedited schedule. This railroad did this because it saw the competition from trucks and reacted to that competition with this train-truck combination. Other railroads reacted unfavorably to this new service and said it was unneeded. The name of the railroad was the St. Louis Southwestern Railway and the train was called the Blue Streak Merchandise. The train made its first run on October 1, 1931. Cotton Belt had a winning combination on its hands and safe to say the train was well ahead of its time.
About the only thing I can add at this late hour regarding using reefers in non-reefer service is the following. During a time of car-shortage for shipping express (as in winter holiday period), railroads frequently used reefers to haul express shipments (as when assisting Santa Claus), but this was always with the permission of the reefer owners, which were usually private companies. Reefer owners’ primary concern was serving its customers. Signature Press’s book on Pacific Fruit Express is probably the most singly useful reference on reefer operations, but of course its subject is the joint SP-UP PFE operation.
And, of course, an emptied reefer could be reloaded for return to home rails, unless it was in designated service. A loaded car makes more money for the car’s owner than does an empty one, so a reefer loaded with oranges, destined for New York, could be re-loaded with canned soup for the return trip to home rails. The New York railroad would, naturally, prefer to use one of its own cars for the soup, though, if one were available. This isn’t LCL, though. [swg]
A car’s owner get no more money (per diem or car hire) if the car is loaded or empty. The railroad HAULING the car gets more money if the car is loaded.
If I am the UP and load a PRR boxcar in Los Angeles with a load for Kansas City (which conforms to AAR rules) the PRR gets ZERO revenue for the load. The only thing the PRR gets is per diem on the car. which is the same empty or loaded. The only way a car owner gets a piece of the revenue for a shipment is if the shipment travels over the owner’s rails. So actually it is better economically to load a foreign car home than use one of your own cars.
I’m not so sure. While what you say appears logical and is probably true for freight cars, there could be a difference in the way railroads are compensated for express cars which are usually handled in passenger trains as compared to freight cars carrying LCL. The SP had more express going in the westward direction (toward home) rather than eastward, but preferred to use its own express and baggage cars for shipments east, and foreign cars were often returned empty. Railroads were compensated differently between freight versus express and mail…
That’s the whole point as I mentioned in my first post on this subject. LCL is a freight rate. It is charged by the pound or hundred pounds. Often it was cheaper for a shipper to pay the whole carload rate and ship a car loaded to only a fraction of its capacity than to pay the higher LCL rate on a large shipment. It might be cheaper to load 5 tons in a 40 ton boxcar and pay the minimum carload rate than it would be to ship the 5 tons on an LCL rate.
LCL was typically shipped in freight cars. Express was commonly shipped in baggage cars. Regardless of what the car carried, if anything at all, the same per diem was charged for any given car, and the LCL rate is independent of the car type. If you are shipping LCL you pay LCL rate regardless of whether its in a 40 foot boxcar or sitting in the middle of in the solarium of the 20th Century Limited. The rate is the rate. On the other hand the carolad rate could vary depending on the car type.
Passenger cars are paid by a mileage rate as well as a per diem. According the the 1956 ORER a 60 ft baggage car earned $0.057 per mile . If the 1956 UP ran a CNW baggage car from Omaha to N Platte it would owe the CNW a whopping $16.19 for the mileage and $12.35 for the perdiem. Assuming it was a day out and a day back, the whole round trip would cost the UP $57.08. Railroad owned freight cars were charged at a rate of $2.40 per day (reefers also earned $.035/mile). mexican and Canadian cars had a perdiem of $3.40 a day, payable to the US Gov’t (the extra $1 covers taxes).
REA was usually shipped in baggage cars or their own express boxcars, usually with high speed passenger car trucks. REA carried a lot of perishable freight. I remember making the trip down to the REA office in Detroit, back in the 50s, to pick up some live bees, that had been shipped from Louisiana, in the spring. There were hundreds of crates of bees stacked up in the REA warehouse, along with baby chicks, crickets, live plants, and nightcrawlers. There were even a few dogs in crates. That stuff was all shipped in baggage cars, with an attendant, to make sure it didn’t get overheated, and got plenty of ventilation. I can recall passenger trains going by, with the baggage car doors open in warm weather.