On 30 Sep, Marty McGuirk wrote:

[ ... ] In other words, a 40-foot boxcar
may be spotted at the freight house with cargo from Cities A, B, and C,
be completely emptied, and leave the freight house several hours later
with freight bound for another terminal consisting of cargo ultimately
going to Cities D, E, and F.

Or, right back to A, B, and C. I'm thinking that railroads
tend to route LCL cars onto their home road, so that from my
PRR freight house in Wilkes-Barre the D&H and B&M boxcars
will generally be sent back to Mechanicville or beyond, and
the PRR Merchandise Service cars will tend to go the the
online freight houses (Pittsburgh, Chicago, etc). Note my
careful avoidance of absolutes; freight managers apparently
would load and dispatch any physically appropriate boxcar
anywhere they wanted one to go when they needed to.

[ ... ] I'm still trying to figure out a way to
imitate the "consolidation" of LCL freight in the freight houses --
without creating a paper nightmare for the operators.

The operators don't care about the destinations of the
packages; the whole car is routed to another freight house
(in general; Tim has given some exceptions).

Also, don't forget the peddler LCL boxcar that picks up and
drops off a package or two at each station along the line.
Put it next to the caboose or loco for easy crew access.

I'm torn over whether the outbound cars are directed by spot
(ie, track 3 spot 1 *always* goes to Chicago, handy for the
guys pushing handtrucks) which necessitates either careful
car sorting or a waybill change while the cars are being
loaded, or just letting cars bounce back & forth with an
occasional change of waybill while in staging.

I'll probably wind up doing both, dedicating the first few
spots on the platforms with spots beyond that less
predetermined. After all, the crews have all night to pull
the outgoing cars and spot the incoming...

Most likely, the LCL freight would have been transferred at the freight
house (Willimantic) or the transfer shed at the south end of New
London. If I understand how this worked, the schedule shows routing
--and does NOT necessarily mean the freight stayed in one car from say,
St Albans to New York City, or LA, or St Louis or whatever. It might --
but not necessarily -- Correct?

Right; individual packages may be transferred from boxcar to
boxcar at each freight house, much the same way freight was
transhipped between railroads of different gauges.

As always, I'm interested in clues to mysteries. LCL isn't
covered very well in the PRR documents I have available.

Dennis