I’ m modeling a short line in 1979 and I was wondering how much it would cost to ship a carload of freight as well as the average salary of a short line worker. I figure that benefits would be 15% in addition to the salary.
For shipping rates, I’d think it would depend on what you’re shipping - a carload of bananas, or automobile parts, or iron ore??
Sorry about that. That’s a good point. I was thinking of manufactured products. Toasters, small appliances, toys, fabricated metal products, or pinky rings.
prior to deregulation, freight rates were rather complex. every commodity had a seven digit code number or STCC code and this along with the Rate Basis pretty much gave you the calculation for the charges after you knew the weight. Rate basis was the distance between the origin and destination via the shortest practical rail route.
other factors were minimum weight, car size, special car usage, etc. etc.
when i was rating rail shipments, i had over one hundred file drawers of tariffs taking up one whole wall of the freight office. it was just a matter of finding the right book and looking for the dirty pages.
best i can remember, back in the period you are interested in, a tri-level load of autos from St Louis to the East coast would run about $2000.00 just the switching and river transfer charges from the Terminal Railroad were around a hundred bucks a car. this charge was paid by the road haul carrier.
federal regulations resulted in all railroads charging the same rate between the same points. for example, you had several choices when shipping from St Louis to Chicago but they all cost the same. this meant that the freight sales departments pretty much just gave out ash trays and such and begged for a fair share of the business.
there were special tariffs for certain commodities between specific points for certain shippers but they required ICC approval before they were published.
charlie
My dad was the head of pricing for the Burlington until he retired in 1981. I remember him telling me in the early 1960’s, when everyone was trying to put stuff into computers, stone age by today’s standards, that they Q had tried this but there were too many variables. They gave it up and stayed with their books and tables.
In late 81 or 82 they repealed the Stoddard Act which, I think, gave the Interstate Commerce Commission oversight of what railroads charged. My guess is that things simplified considerably after that.
I do recall him saying that if a shipper used the terms “best way” it gave the RR a lot of autonomy as to what equipment, car length, and route might be chosen to get something to somewhere.
see ya
Bob
I don’t have examples from 1979, but have a few from a year earlier.
A waybill for a 100ton covered hopper of corn from east-central Iowa on the RI (Victor, IA, now on the IAIS) to Corpus Christi, TX on the MP shows a rate of $1.10 cwt. 20l420 lbs for a charge of $2215.62.
A mobile home manufacturer in Marengo, IA received a carload of lumber from Libby, MT (BN) for a cost of $1845.60. The total weight of the shipment was 78000 lbs. The first 75000 was at a rate of $2.37 cwt while the remaining 3000 lbs was at a rate of 2.27 cwt.
A farm service company (again in Victor, IA) received some carloads of Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer. One was from Roseport, MN (CNW) at a rate of 8.75 per ton, $884.54 total freight charge. The other was from Hoag, NE (BN) at a rate of 10.65 per ton, $1061.70 total freight charge.
Somewhere I have an open job bulletin notice for RI clerks on the Iowa seniority district for 1977. The wages for the various jobs as I recall were around $7.00 hour +/- depending on job. Note that was for a class one carrier with union contracts. A non-union short line, especially if it wasn’t overly prosperous, would probably pay less. A short line’s pay scale would probably be more tied to the local general wage rates.
Jeff
For salaries, you might try www.census.gov
If you meant that benefits effectively added 15% to the salary of an individual, that’s probably a little on the low side. When you figure in paid time off (vacation and holidays), employer-paid disability and life insurance coverage, health insurance subsidies from the employer, and any retirement benefits paid by the employer, the benefits typically approach 30% of salary. This would be for union shops and larger companies. Small companies, and non-union or unregulated manual work areas tend to have smaller benefit packages.
If you look at the employer’s side, an employee typically costs double what he/she is paid. It’s actually more than double at the lower end of the scale, and less than double when salaries approach six figures.
I have not seen any appreciable change in these percentages since I started working with contractors in the mid '80s.
just my experiences
Fred W
$7.00/hr won’t come close to my pay scale as a C&O/Chessie brakeman.
At $7.00 I’ll been better off to getting a 40 hour week factory job.
I went railroading for the pay-not because I like trains.
In what year?
From a quick look at an old Time Book.
On Conrail
Nov. 1978 Local Freight Conductor Day $61.83
Jun. 1979 Conductor Yard Day $72.26
Jun. 1979 Brakeman Yard Day $68.41
Sep. 1079 Brakeman Road Day $60.52
These are actual earnings. IIRC the yard days include a 48 cent arbitrary for air hoses. The road days were less than 100 miles, no arbitraries.
(never throw anything away)
'78…
Thanks for the help. I was asking because I’m modelling a short line in 1979 and I wanted to know how close to the bone I was cutting it. I was figuring on $40per day plus benefits.
One of the things that I’m also trying to figure out is if it’s better to have 3 employees (2 trainmen and 1 maintenance / office position) working 5 days per week with 1-2 cars interchanged or 2 employees working 2 days per week (Monday and Thursday).
If I remember your layout correctly, it’s more of a switching terminal operation than a shortline. That’s a great concept for a model railroad, but the economics of real life were really different for this sort of operation
In any case, the cost for shipments was allocated among all the carriers that handled the car, often in proportion to the mileage on each carrier. By that measure, your terminal switching company would receive only pennies for its work in hauling the final mile or so from interchange to customer.
In many cases, there were special agreements to pay for the delivery within terminal areas that increased this amount a bit, but still only a fraction of the total shipping cost. The Staggers Act of 1980 changed a lot of railroad tariff calculations, I don’t know what effect it would have in the case of your imagined prototype.
If a real railroad company was only interchanging a car or two per day or week over a few miles of track, it might not be able to afford any employees. Luckily, that doesn’t apply to the model world, so you can do what you like – and just (happily) ignore the economic realities.
Byron