(Not rural electric association)
How did the REA work? I understand it was owned by one entity, but it would have had to deal with lots of different railroads. How did they handle and coordinate freight that moved along several roads?
Murph you shoould read a couple of books on this subjest Moving the mail and express by rail and ten turtles to tucumcari both go into how and why Rea worked Larry
…It was “the way” to move sensitive electronics equipment back then, such as stereo equipment, etc…Probably the last I used it was in the mid 60’s to have a component stereo system sent from Long Island, NY to our home area here that still had pasenger trains thru here…{On the NYC}.
I remember picking it up {the boxes}, at our local REA depot right across from our Union Station here in Muncie. Now, even {both}, buildings are history.
I think it was the other way around, IIRC Railway Express was joint-owned by maybe 40+ railroads together. Having one company that they all were part-owners of made it easier to move parcels over different railroads compared to if each railroad had their own express company.
I suggest you by the book Railway Expess by V.S. Roseman, if its still in print, the whole story is told from its inception to its buyout by Fed Ex…There is also a section on how to model the REA…
Happy Reading
AHA! Lafayette in Syossett, LI. I got some stuff from them that was busted 40 ways from thursday when it got to me, also via REA in the 60s
Express shipments by rail were another thing that was working just fine until the dang government decided to get involved. Thanks to our friends in Washington a system of competing, successful, private companies was turned into a single unprofitable agency that didn’t have the ability to respond to changing times and eventually fell into corruption and bankruptcy. But that’s another story.
Railway Express faced a problem common to rail transport, and to air transport, and to sea transport, and to any transport mode where the unit of sale doesn’t match the unit of production. REA had to aggregate its small packages into economical carload lots for the railroads to handle. The railroads then had to aggregate the carloads into trains. (UPS and FedEx have to do this same aggregating, which is why FedEx flys a whole lot of stuff through Memphis. It’s more economical to take most everything to Memphis where shipments from all over can be aggregated for one destination airport. The efficiencies in the centralized aggregation process outweigh the ineffiencies of the extra air miles.)
A book that would help you understand how REA did it would be Fred Frailey’s “Twilight of the Great Trains”. The book contains diagrams of passenger train consists from the 1960’s. The book’s diagrams demonstrate how the railroads dealt with the aggregation problem for passenger and express business and will probably answer your questions. (Passenger tains were realy passenger, mail and express trains.)
For example, Santa Fe didn’t have enough passenger business between Chicago and Tulsa to justify a Chicago-Tulsa train. But they did have enough business to justify Chicago-Tulsa cars. We all know that the “Chief” was a Chicago-Los Angeles streamliner. (I rode it in its heyday.) But it also handled other cars. This helped ATSF aggretate business into a
…Tom, you’re so correct…!! I even remember the name of the fellow I dealt with…A Mr. Lubby…He had some question about method of payment, it was all messed up and they held my order and I had to call and Mr. Lubby and we had quite a conversation. Eventually we got our equipment…An HH Scott receiver…AR Turntable…and a pair of AR-3 Speakers…all really good stuff at the time. I sold those great speakers much later to a friend and they still are in this neighborhood…!! That transaction took place in 1964. By the way Tom, I managed to save one of their catalogs and still have it…