Good morning, I hope everyone had a good weekend.I was wondering about the names on your rolling stock as compaired to the road name on your loco. For example…Say you are running BNSF, do you run all BNSF rolling stock or is it Ok to mix some other road names along with the BNSF? Also when you have a boxcar for example, with ‘‘Keebler’’ on it, does Keebler own the car or is it leased to Keebler by BNSF. How big does a company have to be to own there own boxcars etc…? Who maintains the cars? Mike
I basically model the Southern Railway and while I may have a few more Southern freight cars than others I have cars from most of the eastern railroads and a few from western railroads.
About your second question I have no idea.
I mix mine up. And I do not worry what others think/say about it [}:)]
I model CP Rail but include lots of Pacific Northwest (ie GN, BN, SP&S, UP etc) as well as CN and BCR.
Very little of the eastern roads.
Ops, misse dthe second question.
All I know is that currently CP does lease some of its cars. And almost all the cars used to ship lumber in BC (like the CanFor and M&B all door boxes) have been/are leased.
For your first question, the answer is that most railroads handle rolling stock from practically every road name there is, all mixed up, because they have lease and/or run-through agreements with the other roads, as required by the Federal Railway Administration. As a general rule, I see more non-Union Pacific road names on UP trains than there is actual UP rolling stock.
In the case of a company like Keebler (now owned by Kellogg’s) they probably rent the car from a leasing corporation such as Trailer Train Corporation (TTX) or General American Tank Car (GATX) for a monthly or yearly fee, and are charged according to how many miles the car travels and on which railroads.
Mike,
Personally, I’m a New Haven fan, so I have a lot of NH equipment because I collect NH as well as run it. In reality, you really don’t see too many “home road” freight cars on your “home road”. After all, they are out there making money on other railroads, supposedly.
Oh, sure, you’re more likely to see “home road” cars than any other single RR, as any originating load on your RR should be in a “home road” car. But anything coming in loaded will most likely be a foriegn road car.
There are exceptions, of course. The modern era Class I’s are so large that many cars originate and terminate on the same RR, meaning a lot of “home road” cars are on the “home road”. Add in unit trains and the like, and you are far more likely to see a BNSF car on BNSF tracks than you ever were to see NH cars on NH tracks.
Paul A. Cutler III
Weather Or No Go New Haven
Mike,
Most all railroads are ‘common carriers’ - they freely interchange freight cars between all lines. Before the mega-mergers this was very important as originating and receiving points usually were on different railroads, and they may need a 3rd railroad to act as a ‘bridge’ between them. A railroad owned freight car can be routed over several lines, and they ‘share’ the resulting revenue. They all ‘share’ the expense of returning it empty through a ‘per diem’ charge. If a freight car is owned/leased by a private company(Keebler, as in your example), it follows somewhat different interchange rules(Keebler pays for it to be hauled loaded or empty). If you have $40K-$60K laying around, you too can own a freight car! The trade off is can you keep it busy hauling product to justify the cost of the investment/payments for that car?
A good general ‘rule of thumb’ for modelers is the following mix of road names:
50% - Home Road(BNSF for example)
25% - Connecting Railroads(CP/UP/CN/NS/CXS for example…)
25% - Non-Connecting Railroads or ‘Private Owner’ cars(FEC, Guilford, UTLX tank cars or your Keebler example).
This ‘mix’ can vary depending on the region you are modeling and the type of rail traffic through that region. The type of freight cars can also vary. I like to model the MILW road in SW Wisconsin in the late 50’s. A review of the 1959 ORER shows that about 40% of the MILW fleet was box cars. Today, that percentage would be a lot smaller.
Jim
From my current observation of the prototype the following was noted on the NS:
NS 48%
Connecting roads 30%
Other roads GATX,UTLX and other private owners 22%
This does not include unit grain trains,coal trains and pig/stack trains.
By far and away, the vast majority of my locos and multiple unit cars do NOT have a road name or other ownership identification. The same can be said for passenger and freight stock.
No, I am not operating the Undecorated Central. I AM operating the Japan National Railways in 1964, when the government-owned JNR was the next closest thing to a monopoly and all rolling stock belonged to the JNR until and unless proven otherwise. If you own everything, it isn’t necessary to signify ownership.
Otherwise, in this context, is the coal-originating Tomikawa Valley Railway, which exhibits the kanji Tomi and kawa inside a circle, white on whatever the base color of the equipment might be. Of that line’s rolling stock, only the unit coal trains to Minamijima and a few hoppers in captive service to other destinations ever leave home rails. (Most of the coal loaded into loose cars at the on-line mines is loaded into loose JNR drop-side gondolas.)
Do I miss the plethora of road names, heralds, “When did class (fillintheblank) come into/go out of service,” things I see on these forums? Hardly. It’s really nice to pick up ONE reference book to determine whether or not (my fillintheblank) was in service in 1964.
As for the TTT, it operates by the golden rule - I put down the gold, so I get to make the rules.
Chuck
As of currently, I 1 home road car, now I am just getting started, but if you look at any mixed freight train, and a majority of it is home road, But its otherwise all cars of forieghn(I know i slaughtered that one). I like the 50% 25% 25% idea, Thats a really good idea, Now my HO scale unit grain train is made of 50% CNW Cars(home road) and the rest are private or connecting RR cars.
Before I escaped to God’s Country I lived in So Cal and would take my boys on camping trips to Tehachapi and Cajon. I noticed that, on Tehachapi, if you came upon a train after the engine had gone by you could figure out the RR by the ownership of the cars. SP trains were made up of maybe 2/3 SP cars while Santa Fe, in addition to ATSF cars, had a lot of WP, NP, SP&S and GN cars. The reason being that Santa Fe was at the south end of a joint operation of SP&S from Wishram Wash. to Bend Or, GN to Bieber Cal, and WP to Stockton Cal where Santa Fe took over. While you can generally figure on “home road” cars being the most prevelant in any given train, special circumstances can skew things substantially.
Not only is it OK to mix road names within a consist, it’s basically mandatory: it’s how a load moves from Tacoma to Tunkhannock. Moreover, some roads had huge numbers of cars (100,000+) while others had tiny rosters (less than 50 cars). As there was no way for smaller roads to supply all the car needs of their customers, they HAD to use other road’s cars. Finally, roads made a LOT of money on the “per diem rate”; the amount of money shipper or other roads had to pay a road while pulling their cars. Roads preferred that their cars (especialy boxcars) never came back to home rails, since they didn’t make as much money rolling on home turf (for example, Trains magazine tracked an LV boxcar (the 10,000th PS-1, IIRC) for a year, and it was only on home rails for about 30 of those days. So mix up your car roadnames!
My freight car roster is about 400 cars large. Out of those, only about 50 of my cars are lettered for my home road (NKP). The rest of my cars are equally divided (more or less) among various regions: upper east coast, NY/NJ/PA, southeast, deep south, midwest, upper midwest, plains, southwest, west and northwest. My reefer fleet is dominated by the big three: PFE, SFRD and MDT.
In almost all cases, those cars are leased by a cover leasing firm. That’s why the car may have “Keebler” written in giant letters on the side, but instead of “KEBX” as reporting marks, it’ll have “GATX”, the initials of the leasing firm. As for repairs, minor rolling repairs are conducted by whichever road discovers the break, and will
Heck Chuck, I can do that for the Pennsy or any other RR for my model year of 1961: The book is called the ORER. 
KL
Don’t forget that tank cars are a special case – there are almost no RR owned tank cars and most of those are used for RR purposes, not carrying customer loads. Tank cars are either owned (or leased to) the company providing the load or by one of the big tank fleets like CGTX.
Besides all of the other confusion in earlier replies, don’t forget that different trains on the same railroad will have different mixes of car ownership. Ignoring the obvious example of unit trains, a BNSF train scheduled to make a connection (in either direction) with NS traffic will have a larger proportion of NS cars than would a BNSF train scheduled to make connections with CSX traffic. Of course, NS here means NS plus all of the roads that have recently been merged to form NS. The same thing applies to the CSX cars.
I believe Tony Koester addressed this in one of his Trains of Thought columns a while back.
There is NO confusion in my reply…As I stated my reply was based on OBSERVING the NS.I railfan 2-3 hours each day PLUS I live 1500 yards from the track and see 90% of the trains that roll through town simply by looking out my window.I won’t mention my 9 1/2 years working as a brakeman either.
Gotta watch what Tony says…He’s like all the other “experts” and changes his “train of thought” a lot and a lot of what he says is dated.Still I am a fan of TK.
My major freight carrier on my line is a freelanced belt and terminal railroad; it interchanges with the Canadian Pacific, Canadian National and CSX while being located in a fictional metropolis on the eastern end of Lake Ontario. As such almost all of the freight cars on my line come from other railroads. In fact the only cars lettered for my line are a few reefers, some coil cars and some 50’ ex-railbox boxcars. These local cars serve on-line industries and mostly stick around within the line itself or only go as far as Toronto or Montreal. Since the portion of the belt line I model is closer to the CP and CSX yards than to the CN, there are slightly more of the first two roads cars than the last. When I make waybills and such I assign the cars based upon what railroad they’re going out on. Since the grains for Obbink’s Brewery come in from an elevator on the Canadian Pacific, then the covered hoppers are usually from CP or one of it’s merged railroads (Soo Line or Milwaukee Road.) However I do also have about a quarter of my rolling stock is from lines that do not directly connect to my belt line but instead connect to the railroads that my line connects to. Some Norfolk Southern, BNSF and the like find their way onto the layout from time to time. Also, since I live near the CP and CN lines here in Milwaukee, I looked at what cars they have in their trains and build from the trends I see, as such I’ve bought a few International Bridge & Terminal (IBT) 60’ boxcars for paper service since I see them all the time on mixed freight here. It’s probably not a perfect system but it’s good enough for my line. Cheers! ~METRO