Back in the day, meaning about 1960 through 1970, how common would it have been to see a foreign road named car being switched at an industry served by the home railroad?
Taking a cue from present day, my (limited) railfanning says that its not very common to see, say, a string of NS hopper cars being switched by a CSX local on tracks served by the CSX. Nearly all of the cars would be CSX owned (or an old faded name of a fallen flag now owned by CSX)
I think back in the day it was more common, but how much so?
A big difference is now what you’re seeing are often “unit trains” - trains of cars kept together as a unit - like carrying oil or coal from one place to another over and over. That didn’t become ‘a thing’ until the late 1960s.
As far as regular industries / businesses, you would see a lot of different railroad cars being picked up and dropped off regardless of what railroad the business was located on. I lived for many years (starting in 1958) on a branch line of the Minneapolis Northfield and Southern Ry. I saw cars on that line from Union Pacific, Pennsylvania, Norfolk & Western, New York Central, Southern, and many many others.
Yeah, unit trains, but even the locals around here keep the equipment on their own rails. Mixes of cars, but an NS train is an NS train, and CSX, CSX for the most part…or lots of generic leasing like GATX or UTLX.
It would make sense that with so many different railroads serving smaller footprints, it would be nearly impossible to keep cars captive on your own rails and still serve customers.
Just trying to justify having a string of SOUTHERN cars being spotted in what otherwise would be a ATLANTIC COAST LINE train. Predecessors to NS and CSX, IOW, pure competitors, never related.
My copy of the Official Railway Equipment Register from 1954 (maybe 1953) has rules for spotting cars to be loaded.
I can’t access it right now, but basically, the home road needs to give preference to using foreign freight cars to get loaded and send them back home.
Of course, cars being spotted for unloading could be from anywhere.
I believe it must have been very common to see foreign cars being spotted, at least in my era.
I don’t know if this would have changed in the 1960-1980 era.
If the industry on the ACL consumed a commodity from an industry located on the SOU, why would the shipping of it in SOU cars be an issue? Car service rules require the use of suitable ACL equipment-if REASONABLY available. In otherwords, if there are no suitable ACL cars in town, ready to head back to ACL, SOU is free to use its own cars. If no ACL or SOU cars are REASONABLY available, any suitable foreign road empty may be used.
In the latter half of the 1960s (1967-1970) I was fortunate enough to observe three industries on the C&O in Hampton VA. Located on the north side of the tracks, between N. King St., and N. Armistead Ave, east to west were Southern Plant Food, Lee & Coston Plant Food, and Chisman Ready Mixed Concrete. Southern Plant Food being the busiest, received scrap leather from the shoe industry in boxcars from roads such as IC, GM&O, NYC, and others as well as gondolas of the EL, NYC, PRR and B&O. Lee & Coston, the only one to ship products by rail used homeroad (C&O) covered hoppers. Chisman received cement in Lehigh and New England and, CNJ covered hoppers and sand and aggregates in SAL, ACL, SOU and CG gondolas. These were not the only road names seen, just the more constant ones. Note that only the outbound shipments traveled in home road cars. That’s why in the loose-car railroading of the era, train watching was a lot more interesting! Most industries of today, using rail, ship and receive blocks of cars or, unit trains. You cannot in any way equate what you see today, to what was common then.
As someone from the U.K. this is a very interesting thread to follow.
Without wishing to deviate from the thread we had/have the same challenges here.
Any ‘foreign’ boxcars etc were sent back as soon as possible from where they came. A ‘No foreign stuff on our lines’ policy.
Even before Privatisaton of the Railways when everything was owned by British Rail, a locomotive was very often quickly sent back to its home depot. I say very often, because sometimes some were deliberately ‘borrowed’ by other depots.
Class 47 47404 ‘Hadrian’. was a well known one that was ‘borrowed’. Although it was a Gateshead locomotive, they hardly saw it as it spent its time around the Birmingham area.
In the modern era you not likely to see a cut of NS hopper cars being switched by anybody since most of coal business is in unit trains wheich aren’t switched, they stay together as a unit. Open top hopper cars have alsways been somewhat of an exception, as coal, ore and rock tended to be hauled in home road cars in bigger blocks. Back before the 1970’s there was a lot more small shipments of coal and there would be a lot more interchange of open top hoppers, but not to the extent of boxcars and gons.
Look at pictures of trains or yards. There will be a rainbow of cars from other roads.
The other phenomenon that was starting in the 1970’s was the rise of the private owner cars in general service. Prior to the 1970’s most private owner cars (initials ending in “X”) would have been tank cars, chemical cars or specialized commodity cars. With the rise of unit grain and coal trains, and the rise of intermodal, the number of private owner hoppers, gons, covered hoppers and flat cars skyrocketed. If you are modeling the current era, generally about half the cars on the railroads are private owner cars.
Yes, if you live along an isolated iron ore line, all you’re going to see are that railroad’s ore cars going back and forth. That doesn’t hold true for ‘regular’ freight trains, particularly the locals dropping off a couple cars here and picking up a couple there. Yes you might see more BNSF cars in a BNSF train in Wisconsin than you’d see on a UP train in southern California, but wherever you go you’d see a mix of railroads - now and in the past.
Remember that everything starts with a customer requesting an empty car of a particular type – and that gets down to specifics such as what types of load restraints it comes equipped with and that sort of thing. The ORER has the “rules” for how foreign road cars are to be handled, and yes, as I understand the directive a railroad is to first do its best to find a foreign road empty provided the ultimate routing takes it to, or close to, the home road of that empty. Only if there are no such cars is the originating railroad OK’d to use its own car for the load. It is a priority thing, not a firm rule that would leave the railroad powerless to serve the customer. Years ago Andy Sperandeo wrote a great article on this topic and he included details on what was meant by “close to the home road” – the US was divided into numbered regions and if you as originating railroad got the region right (even if no part of the routing touched the home road of the car) you were following the rule.
Moreover, if the only types of the requested empty are foreign road but the routing takes it nowhere near the home road of that car, the shipping railroad can confiscate that car and use it. I have read that sometimes it took years for a foreign road car to get back to home rails due to repeated confiscation.
If a railroad is holding a foreign road empty and there is no call for using that type of car, then it is to be routed back to the home road using the routing it took to get there, even if more direct contacts between the two railroads exist. The intent is to make it “fair” – that if an intermediate railroad made a little money on the bridge traffic for that car, it had to share in the “pain” of hauling the empty to its final destination.
As pointed out above the rise in per diem cars in the 1970s (where the last thing the “home road” wanted as all those cars to return to home rails - often there was no room!)
Well, hoppers was a bad word to use. What I see down my street are long freight drags of various types of cars. 60 to 100 cars long. I hardly see any unit trains here in Central GA, I suppose since traffic here isn’t single commodity based- in terms of shipper or user. No big grain producers , no coal, no ore.
The closest thing is long strings of woodchip hoppers, and I think they tend to head to the paper plants a few hundred miles away, so that’s captive traffic probably.
I see mainly CSX on CSX, with plenty of cars that are not CSX too. But those are not a competitors car, they are private named companies like DOW or PROCOR leasing pools too; but never, and I mean as close to never as absolute, do I see an NS car.
That observation is what led me to ask the question about the 60s and 70s. Many more railroads back then.
So would it be generally accurate to look at it this way?
Local freights obviously have a mix of outbound goods and inbound goods. The cars with outbound goods, the shippers, would be switched with predominately home road cars. And the inbound goods would be switched very frequently with foreign road cars.
So when planning ops, it does matter what road name is on the outbound (and inbound empty) shippers car more than it does on the consumer’s car.
Assuming that the whole train can be handled by the terminal. I know of at least one facility in Pittsburgh that does break up unit trains because of the length of the spur.
There are other factors in returning cars empty, to be considered. First, is the car in captive service? Is it marked “When empty return to…” If it is, you must comply with those instructions. The car may be specially equipped to serve the needs of a particular customer, and is assigned to ithem. Another factor and one that was in evidence in Hampton was, the car was unsuitable for anything other than what it hauled in–cement. No way C&O was going to use a car that had just dumped 70 tons of cement for a load of fishmeal. No one was going to accept a C&O car that had hauled a couple of loads of fish meal for loading with anything else. Tankcars are usually single commodity cars as are covered hoppers. The cars that brought in the leather scrap may require sweeping out but, were ready for a return load to their home district. The big “if” in returning a car recently emptied under a load is suitablity. IF it is suitable for its intended load. Otherwise, it is foreign empties before home road cars. You don’t have to pay per diem on home road cars, which led to the popularity of Railbox whose cars were at home on “any road.”
A word or two about these districts. As mentioned by an earlier poster, the Association of American Railroads divided the U.S. and Canada into 23 “districts” to ease the requirements of return routing of freight cars. A map of these districts appears in the car routing rules section of the Official Railway Equipment Registers and also an old but very valuable book for anyone interested in freight car routing, entitled “Freight Cars Rolling” by Lawrence W. Sagle, of the B&O traffic department. It was copyrighted in 1960 by Simmons-Boardman Publishing Corp. with a Library of Congress Number of: 60-53409. I’ve actually worn out one copy and had to get a second one on Amazon.
No, not necessarily. Actually if the railroad is complying with the car service rules 100%, the shippers would be spotted with foreign road cars, since the car service rules say they should be given preference for loading.
In reality its way more complicated than that.
For example we had a a paper mill. All the inbound wood chips were in home road wood chip hoppers. All the inbound chemical tank cars were private owner. All the inbound scrap paper was in foreign road boxcars. Outbound paper was either in 50 ft IPD boxcars, Railbox cars or a series of home road cars that were built to roughly the same specs as Railbox cars. Outbound bag paper was exclusively loaded in home road 60 ft hi-cube cars.
We had a cotton seed mill that loaded cotton seed hulls and meal in 50 ft IPD or equivalent home road boxcars, except if they had a shipment of product going to Oregon via the SP, then they loaded “Golden West” 50 ft boxcars.
When I worked in car control there were certain series of covered hoppers that we couldn’t load to Mexico. We only loaded system cars to Mexico as a last resort (except for 40 ft grain boxcars) and never loaded a home road mill gon to points on Conrail. The reason for the covered hoppers was they had aluminum hatch covers and they had a habit of “disappearing” in Mexico (being sold as scrap aluminum). Boxcars tended to go on magical mystery tours in Mexico so If it was a choice of a home road car spending 6 months in Mexico or somebody else’s car, we used the other car. Conrail was critically short of mill gons at that time, so if we sent a mill gon to Conrail it could be months before it returned.<
Mr Husman triggered another pair of memories concerning freight car utilization. First, some roads had periods of intense activity such as the granger roads at harvest time. Before the switch to covered hoppers for grain movement, any 40 foot boxcar in good condition routed to one of those railroads did not come home until after it was all over. Sidetracks and yards were full of boxcars and a good number were not homeroad. During harvest time railroads did their best to keep their best cars on their rails as much as possible. If you were a smaller railroad it could be very difficult because you didn’t have a long enough haul to be profitable. Which leads me to the second memory.
In the early 1970s, I was engaged in conversation with a fellow who was working for the Boston & Maine. We were looking at a gleaming, freshly shopped 50 foot PS-1 boxcar in the 77000 series, in a passing train. The running board had been removed, ladders cut down and brakewheel lowered. Now, these were plain-jane boxcars with no cushion underframe or load restraints-nothing special at all. He gestured toward the slow moving train and said “We got 1000 of them, brand new from Pullman-Standard and sent them off line loaded, on their first trips and didn’t see the majority until four or five years later. Once the other roads got their hands on them–that was it!”
The B&M’s longest haul is from Portland, Maine, to Mechanicsville, New York, or about 300 miles. At that time, New England still had an industrial base and B&M was heavily involved in the forest products sector, especially paper which meant off-line movement. When these cars began returning home they were badly in need of a trip to the shops. It was very plain to see why they were coming home worn out. The 50 foot car was supplanting the trusty old forty footer. Piggybac
Northern Pacific and New York Central needed a lot of reefers during certain times of the year, but each needed them at different times of the year. They worked out an agreement to so during the time one railroad needed cars, they could use the other’s reefers. So it wasn’t impossible to see a set of NYC reefers in Washington state, or some NP cars in New York.
Keep in mind too that in the steam/transition eras, most manufacturing in the US was done in the northeast, so freight cars with appliances, autos, hardware, etc. would be loaded in the northeast and then sent throughout the country. There was enough traffic that New York Central and the CB&Q set up a run-through agreement c.1960 so a NYC train from the east could run from Chicago to St.Paul on the Burlington. From St.Paul, cars continuing west could be transferred to GN or NP or other railroads.
This has been very helpful. I appreciate the detailed explanations.
I never would have thought that the Foreign Road car would be the priority car to load.
Although I had a loose idea of what the car composition would be on a 1970 based ACL layout, this discussion helped.
Since the locale would likely be Central FL, I’ll acquire equipment that will be about 50% ACL/SCL (they were officially merged by then), 20% SOUTHERN, and 30% everything else with smaller railroads in the “district” being a big part of that.