Here’s another question from Trains…Sep. 92 in this case. In an article about the short-lived Chicago Missouri & Western, the article mentions that some CM&W traffic was …“roller” cars of lumber (lading which has not yet been sold - it “rolls” slowly east while awaiting buyers).
I’ve heard of situations where customers use freight cars as portable warehouses - such as hopper cars with plastic pellets - but I didn’t know they ever sent freight out on the rails in search of a customer. Does this still happen? If so, how would they decide how to route such freight - just point it in the general direction of potential customers, and move it from one point to another every few days?
That was done with loose carloads of coal. The sale broker would have the car moved in the general direction of his potential customers. Hopefully, he would have it sold by the time the drag reached the yard where that particular car would have to be interchanged or cut into a local freight consist for delivery.
The practice ended with the decline/death of domestic coal heating.
I don’t know but it makes sense with perishables. Fruit and vegetables need to be picked and shipped at the strategic time. What else can you do tell them to stop maturng? So it is highly possible to my way of thinking that on a four or five day trip to the east coast some could leave without having a buyer. Market forces may also influence this since the closer to destination the car gets the more likley the broker is to come down in price and it is to the buyers advantage to wait.
They showed this on I think a National Geographic show a long time ago with either lettuce or strawberrys (or both). Well, sort of. The items in question did not have a final destination, but the produce was still routed to a specific location. You just never knew who was going to be picking up the stuff in the car. The brokers would be selling carloads on spec. There would be a final inspection of a box or two of the produce before they would agree to take it.
The practice is still takeing place on perishables and lumber originating on the West Coast and in general destined to markets in the East. The cars are shipped to the Shippers account at an Eastern destination city…while the car is still enroute it gets sold to the ultimate consignee…the Shipper then executes a reconsignment and diversion order to the appropriate carrier naming the final destination and route as well as the actual consignee that has purchased the car load.
A lumber wholesaler I work with confirms to me that this is still how he operates; he loads the lumber and moves it whether he has it sold or not at the time.
I don’t know; they didn’t discuss that level of detail. Maybe the other responders know? I would think with perishables, even if they are refrigerated, you would have a “sell by” date at the wholesale level…
I do not know if they still do it so will accept Michael Sol’s testimony. I suspect is a lot less common than it used to be.
I used to keypuch waybills for cars off the Wenatchee/Oroville line in Washington State in late 1960’s. There was a big mill in Omak and other smaller ones. Most of the lumber cars were rollers. You could always tell by the route. The rollers had branch to branch interchange points. Oakes ND or SD, can’t remember which state, to CNW was a favorite. I suspect but don’t know that Oakes got less than daily service from each road so it was probably good for a least a week’s delay. I remember one car went to CNW three times but thay gave it up twice. Deregulation had to put a crimp on this because carriers tended to close these wilderness gateways.
The unsold lumber loads situation could explain the frequent sight of Center Partition Flat Cars loaded with lumber sitting on the CN Pavilion Siding in Michigan. The Lumber loaded Flats have sat on the siding for 5 days. The other possibility is that the warehouses are full of lumber.
Some brokers work an on-going deal with a wholesale lumber receiver: If push comes to shove, Mr. Receiver will accept the car of lumber, at a bargain price. Mr. Broker then does a good job of selling the car before that happens. If he’s not good at that, he doesn’t stay in business long.
RRs have (or had) “rate zones” where all shipments consigned to an area between point A and popint B got the same rate. I used to work as an opr on the SP and Saugus was the last stn in particular rate zone before you got into the one for LA. We would periodically get a call from LA that they had a car consigned to Saugus and what industry should they route it to…a case of a car out distancing the broker before he could get a diversion for it.
In the 1960’s–1970’s, my father operated a small manufacturing lumber company in Erie, Ks. Its main feed stock was Northwestern Pondrosa Pine lumber from which the plant made wooden burial vaults [casket boexs], and from the waste there was a tidy business in parts for the toy industry–Lincoln Logs were made from irregular blanks, as well as parts for various wooden toys for the likes of ‘Playschool’ were made from the scrap off the main product line of wooden burial boxes, the scrap was bundled, and then shipped in boxcar quantities.
The plant’s existance in Erie was due to its two RR’s crossing there, the KATYwhich was N-S and ATSF was E-W at Erie; as well as a railroad freight rate called **“Milling in Transit”–**said rate allowed a thru car rate on carloads of lumbe which could be routed to a stop off and processed into a product and then reloaded into the railcars on the through car rate-- as long as there was a directional balance in the number of cars processed under this rate.
The local KATY agent helped to keep this balance of inbound and outbound, between the ATSF [which was an East-West operation at Erie, on the old Pittsburgh-Sub of the Santa Fe; while the KATY was the North-South component of the balance.] This was primarily boxcar freight of loose diamension Ponderosa Pine lumber in-bound, and K-D [Knocked Down/ or disassembled] wooden boxes and diamentional wood parts out-bound.
That lumber was produced and loaded at mills in the Pacific Northwest was loaded and shipped to speculative destinations in the Midwest.
Reference above by Michael Sol and samfp1943 and Mack and Jim Rice… (at least)
Just a bit more information. The transcontinental rate structure prior to Staggars had SIT (Storage In Transit), MIT (Milling in Transit), and “Roller Routs” which provided both the railroads, lumber industry and certain agricultural parties with certain economic incentives to load a car, do something with the contents and then “further” the contents to other buyers. This system started in the depression era and was designed to keep both local manufacturing and producing industries in business but also provide traffic to the railroads. Other types of cargo (such as steel and coal) were also included.
I am going to leave out what happens rate and paperwork wise at the stopoff points - simple in concept and complicated in application! MIT and SIT movements were (almost always) from the originating mill (XYZ Lbr) to the sorting or milling operation. There the Sorting and Milling operations would take place and the contents would be shipped out on a billing showing (in our case) the “final” owner as shipper and the “final” owner (SuperDuper Lumber Stores) as the consignee. SuperDuper would have several lumber stores and would divert the car to one of their stores, or perhaps sell it to another retailer, say in NY (HandyDandy-Manhattan), and the car would be rebilled and diverted thusly.
The reason that all of this could be done is (ONE) that the long haul transcontinental rates were usually lower on a per ton basis (say, Oregon to NY) than on shorter distances and (TWO) that industries along the route could do their value added work to the product. The roads in the diversion route would pick up a bit of cash for simply being on the original bill (depended on how the original movement was billed), and more cash if the car actually rolled over their rails. There were several of these railroads and, collectivel
As you said, kenneo, Transit, rerouting, stop overs, and such are all very complicated in practice. This is a great discussion topic.
I have come across a whole series of original waybills from 1962-1966 for a shortline in Wisconsin. There are many stop over and Transit waybills in the bunch and they are complicated. The Transit concept seems very strange to me, since the ‘second leg’ of the journey (mill to final customer) was done at a rate discount of almost 90% in most cases. The ‘first leg’ from raw material source to the mill was standard rates, but the Transit waybill freight charges were almost a joke. It was a great service to the shippers though! On most of those Transit bills, the original raw material shipments were referenced including the car #, date, and weight of the load. Very interesting stuff.
BTW, the commodities I’ve found that used Transit priveldges include lumber, feed, meal, railroad ties, logs, and telephone poles…to name a few.
Thanks, for the explanation,Kenneo. A number of years ago, the gentleman who was the KATY agent at Erie,Ks. too efforts to explain the paperwork and practice to me…your use of complicated is right on the mark. My father’s mill would process approximately 500 boxcar loads of Ponderosa Pine in a years time. The KATY agent helped him maintain the balance needed in the MIT freight rate.
The customers for the burial boxes were in the Southeast and Southwest, while the customers for the toy parts side of the business were North, Northeast and East. You can see that balance was truly a balancing act to comply with the MIT tariff and rate structure. All the inbound cars were unloaded and reloaded to destinations as full car loads in compliance with the MIT rate/tariff specs.
I seem to recall that it was also specified by the MIT rate- the prouct produced [the value added] at the stop-off could not be completely finished; additional operations to make the saleable product for consumption were equired. Which is why the burial boxes my father’s plant produced were shipped unassembled [K-D/ knocked-down] to the final user who would put the box together and then sell or use it. Back then the caskets were shipped in the wooden box to the mortuary where it would finally wind up as a burial vault for the casket at the cemetery.
What you didn’t see was the reclaim paperwork which never went with the car but stayed at the transit point. Or more than one transit point. The burial vault account which started this conversation could easily have been one of a series of SIT or MIT operations.
For instance, you could have had a MIT operation from saw logs to lumber, then to a SIT where the lumber was sorted and reshipped - and perhaps combined with an MIT operation to surface and/or shape ore re-size the boards, then to various manufacturers (such as the vaults) (MIT); next to a warehouse for distribution (SIT); finally to the retail outlet.
To illustrate your rate notation above, without transit operations, the cheapest transportation rate would be to ship the raw logs all the way to the mortuary where they would be cut and milled into the proper stuff for the burial vaults. I know, the picture of your favorite funeral house attached to a lumber mill.&nb
This situation depended on specific tariff provisions and was true only part of the time. The normal cause for your father’s situation was probably that he also did “toy blanks” for the various major wooden toy makers as you have explained above. That required a secondary (or subsequent) operation which, if it also had a transit standing (which it probably did), would require that all of the items shipped out by your father under inbound transit priviledges would also need to have an additional “something” done to them elsewhere. Espicially if the “finished product” that your father shipped went “back West” instead of continuing East - the Double Back Provision.
I was seldom so glad to see something disappear as I was transit. I couldn’t understand the upsetness of the customer – until I saw them be put out of business and all of their employees with no jobs (and no replacement jobs available). Traffic dried up. Not good, overall. It wasn’t long before two Telegraph positions were pulled off.