This prompts a question in my mind and that is was there a limited number
of railroads who delivered heating coal to coal dealers? In other words
would I be more apt to see a N&W or B&O hopper at my local coal dealer in
say Sanford NC or Richmond VA? Or would I have seen the local railroad,
assuming they had hoppers, be the deliverer of that product? Sanford NC
should either be SAL or A&Y(Southern), direct or from a NS(old) hand
off or perhaps even A&W or ACL up from Fayetteville. I realize
the industry serving railroad would deliver the car to the coal dealer. Or
would I see a Reading or NYC hopper down here delivering home heating
coal? What prompted this question was the fact that this weekend I found
out that in the mid-1950's the Durham and Southern RR largest product
category , by car load was coal and it apparently picked up from the N&W in
Durham and delivered to the SAL near Aberdeen. I was very surprised. I
don't know much about the car routing and delivery of certain products so I
would welcome opinions from anyone who does.
Fenton Wells

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 2:28 PM, Bruce Smith <smithbf@auburn.edu> wrote:

**

Bruce Smith wrote:

Another issue we discussed earlier this year was the impression that
C&O cars never left home rails and how wrong that really is. I was
reminded by the recent publication of the new PRR book on Columbus
(PRRT&HS, Rick Tipton) that the C&O routinely interchanged full
trains of coal for great lakes ports with the PRR at Columbus and
this traffic accounted for a reasonable percentage of C&O's total
coal traffic at one time.

On Oct 31, 2011, at 1:04 PM, Anthony Thompson wrote:

That this single "unit train" operation was a significant
fraction of all C&O traffic sounds to me like the exception that
proves the rule: not a lot of C&O hoppers went off line--EXCEPT the
lake coal via Columbus.

Absolutely (but that wasn't the original "rule" <G>). I'll add the
somewhat obvious comment that, because these were handled as complete
trains, there was little opportunity for individual cars to get diverted
and mixed into the general population, although it did happen from time to
time.

Regards
Bruce

Bruce F. Smith
Auburn, AL
https://www5.vetmed.auburn.edu/~smithbf/

"Some days you are the bug, some days you are the windshield."
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Fenton Wells
3047 Creek Run
Sanford NC 27332
919-499-5545
srrfan1401@gmail.com