The title is “Authentic Open Loads for Gondolas” and Switzer shows how a New York Central gon gets routed EJ&E to the Monon, then Monon to the Peoria & Eastern, then P&E back to the Monon, which does not route it back to the EJ&E or the NYC but uses it itself for two loads. The car is “confiscated” in other words.
The article is about authentic loads but it ends up also being a pretty good tutorial about four cycle waybills.
First an observation. Due to an obvious editing error the author’s discussion of Waybill 1 on page 43 is truncated in the middle of a sentence. Based on the photo which shows brushing the load with pastels, which is not mentioned in the text, I assume Switzer went on to simply observe that coil steel loads get mildly rusty.
The first question is to ask how the coil steel wire, which tightly packs all but the end foot or two of the gondola, would be unloaded in this situation. I have seen coil steel unloaded using a sort of pincher but there is no room, even for the last coil. An electro magnet? I have seen that for scrap but not for loads of value.
Second question is about freight car forwarding rules. Under the author’s scenario, the Monon sends the NYC car to the Peoria & Eastern and then gets it back from the P&E so it can be confiscated. But the P&E was the NYC, more or less. Is even a subsidiary obligated to reverse the routing? I would have assumed the P&E would not return an NYC car but evidently the return of empties rules are more literal than I thought.
The fourth cycle of the waybill by the way is to return the car to the “NYC c/o IHB” – now the IHB was also an NYC subsidiary so again, wouldn’t giving it to the P&E be the equivalent of “NYC c/o P&E”?
Dave Nelson