Tony is quite correct in noting that "overlooks" was probably a poor choice of words on my part...
Railroads reported what they were required to report to the two tariffs, and in some cases chose to report things that they were not required to – and could differ.
For example, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific chose not to report their tank cars to either tariff after mid-1932 (one historian assumed that they had sold their cars at that time to the newly-formed Canadian General Transit, but I have never found any evidence to support that contention – I believe that there was an agreement between the railways and CGTX that the latter would be the source of cars for non-railway shippers).
I remember seeing a note in this thread that WP did not list their tank cars in the 1950 ORER, however, did list 215 cars in the 1955 TCC, and I expect that they were not the only ones to choose to list in one tariff and not the other. I assume there was some reason for this choice, but would only be guessing.
Ian Cranstone
Osgoode, Ontario, Canada
lamontc@...
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On 2020-05-19 22:39, Tony Thompson wrote:
Ian Cranstone wrote:
The list gives one an idea as to just how large the lease fleets (UTLX, GATX, SHPX, NATX, and for Canada, CGTX and TCLX). The ORER has always been a little shaky in tank car information, and frequently doesn't cover railroad-owned cars — mostly because railroad-owned cars were employed in the service of the railroad, and not generally available for other uses.
Remember, the ORER didn't seek out anything. Each car owner sent in a report, as often as they thought necessary (some would remain unchanged, with original date, for multiple issues). Whatever the owner sent in, is what was in the ORER. Ordinarily, these were cars in revenue service (the ORER had the status of a tariff document). You cannot expect company service cars to be in there -- unless, as some roads did, a particular railroad CHOSE to include them.
Even the Tank Car Capacities tariff (TCC) overlooks a number of railroad-owned cars — for example, both Canadian National and Canadian Pacific owned a number of tank cars for company use, and none of them were listed in either the ORER or TCC.
Again, the TCC is a tariff to facilitate charges for car movement. It has nothing to do with cars not in revenue service, and the TCC can hardly be said to "overlook" anything.
I am sure Ian knows all this, and speaks of these two documents as we modelers see them and their "deficiencies." But let's make sure we remember what those documents WERE.
