Read Bill Stephens “A train with no name is just not the same” in the September 2024 issue of Trains. Names have been used in freight carriers in addition to passenger.
Chessie System in the time BEFORE I hired out in 1965 and up until the creation of CSX Transportation in 1988 used names on a large number of its scheduled freight trains. As I recall the first train order I copied when I worked my first day to establish my seniority on the Order of Railroad Telegrapher’s roster at the Shops office in Washington, IN was to be delivered to the train ‘The Northeastener’ that was changing crews at Shops on its trip to Cincinnati and beyond to its ultimate destination of Buffalo, NY. I am not sure of the train’s route beyond Cincinnati, however, I believe it ran through Washington Courthouse to Columbus and Newark to Willard and then on to New Castle and on the P&W subdivision to Eidenau and the making the turn up to what was the Buffalo Division to Buffalo.
As I progressed through my career and got the opportunity several individuals in Sales & Marketing and got into conversations about trains and their identities. Those personnel felt that having train NAMES and not numbers made it easier to relate the transportation services they were selling to the people in industry they were selling too. I don’t know if there are any defined data sets that show the effectiveness of names vs. numbers, however, my own observations indicate that people more easily remember names as opposed to numbers.
When I went back to Dispatching in 1990, CSX had a number based train identification system. From the computer side, I found that both Chessie & CSX were using a four space train name and a two digit origin date identifier. However, where Chessie had the train name be up to four alpha charac
CSX reimagined it’s train identifiers a couple of years ago. Where virtually every train was a “Q” train (with the occasional X, S, P, B, and some others) the letter now makes a little more sense.
“I” is for intermodal, “M” is for manifest, “L” is for local, “G” is for grain, etc.
I’m no expert on the system, for sure, and for those who had pretty much memorized the symbols, it was almost back to square one. I say almost because some trains simply changed their letter, particularly the intermodals. Q009 became I009.
Off of what I have seen posted on line - it looks like the Divisional letter for locals has been changed to L for all locals, no matter the division, road switchers and yard jobs (either that or some yard jobs have been redesignated as locals [jobs operating on the Sparrows Point branch between what is now TradePoint Atlantic and the yard at Bayview seem to be designated with an L instead of the Y the previously had.]
Not being on the ‘inside’ leaves one out of the loop in understanding the nuances.
Some of our trains, because of their alphabet symbols, get informal names. Usually it involves not including the first letter that identifies the train type.
Some that have been used over the years, some still being used-others discontinued, include:
MPRCB/MCBPR, the cowboy.
MNPPR, the nipper.
MHOBO, the hobo.
MHOSS, the hoss.
Some years back, they ran an Autorack train from South St. Paul to Kansas City. SS is usually the symbol for So St Paul. Kansas City has a few different ones depending on where the train is going to in KC. The symbol proposed was ASSKS. At the meeting of union local chairmen with the carrier where the proposed signal was announced, one of them asked if they really wanted to use that. They ultimately used a different alpha symbol once the train started running.