On Tuesday, March 15, 2005, at 06:57 PM, Bill McCoy wrote:

The open an prepay station list does not do any thing other than
identify stations, their location, station number and whether it is
an "open" ie. can receive colect and COD shipments and a station that
can only receice prepaid shipments. In earlier days "open" roughly
meant a full service station with agent and "prepaid" meant no agent
to be able to handle collect shipments. Open and Prepays, especially
old ones are interesting in that they have a section listing stations
by line segment many of which don't appear in timetables.

Each terminal or group of terminals has a tariff that deals with
industry status including what constitutes switchable traffic.

Bill McCoy
Jax

On the Santa Fe and UPRR that I worked there was never a closed station. To start all stations had an agent. As cost started going up the RRs closed some stations by getting rid of the agent. But the station was not closed. The agent from an adjoining town handled the worked at the station that had no agent. So for a practical purposes the station could still handle COD freight bills. This was back in the 40s/50/ and early 60s.
At Salina Ks on the UPRR if we got a car in for a company on the MOP we would interchanged it and the MOP only got a switching charge. The same if the MOP had a car for Salina but the company was on the UPRR they they interchanged it to us and all we cot was a switching charge. We had a flour mill that was jointly switch by the UPRR and the CRI&P. The RI only had a local that came to town once a day. We had 5 yard engines in a 24 hour period. If the mill needed a switch while the RI was in town, they did the work and set their cars in and remover any cars needed to come out. They would take their cars (loads and mtys)But if they had handled any of our cars they would leave them first out on the the tail track leading to the mill. If we switch the mill we would take out our cars and leave the RI cars first out on the tail track. Neither road charged the other for handling each others cars.
One night we had more cars for the MOP than could fit on the interchange. So our switch crew left them all coupled and hanging out on our tracks. When the MOP crew pull the interchange they saw what we had done and they turned in a time slip or 8 hours of switching our RR. They got paid and our crew caught H**L. We were trying to beat the 11:59 PM time for getting cars off our RR and avoid and extra day of charges.
If you could get a car onto the interchange by 11:59 PM and call the clerk of the other RR then it was not on your RR any more.

Thank you
Larry Jackman
ljack70117@...
I wish the buck stopped here as I could use a few