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Re: Freight car distribution

Tim O'Connor
 

Tom

Interesting enough, but since the PRR and other roads probably never had
an average "dwell time" of under 24 hours in their yards, your description
begs the question of how long those empties sat around before someone
realized they weren't needed for return loads. And any road that had more
loads one-way than the-other is going to have to conduct some 'balance'
movements. If you've got to balance stuff, then it makes sense to move the
stuff that is costing you rent.

Tim O'Connor

-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: <tmolsen@...>
I have been following this distribution business for quite some time and there
is one thing that I did not see that happened daily on the Penn (and other
roads) each day.

Each day, the yardmasters at the main terminals each day gathered the foreign
road empties that were not spoken for to be loaded and placed them into outbound
trains that were destined to the nearest point of their home roads to get them
off the property.

Reason: Per diem charges. These cars cost the company money every day that they
were on the property without a load to generate income and you might say that
they turned into pumpkins at midnight (every 24 hours).

At Philadelphia every day, a large portion of P9's consist was made up of
foreign road equipment moving to their home roads. There was a train out of
Enola each day called the "Buffalo Boxcar" that was made up of empty box cars
moving o Buffalo to be returned to their home roads as soon as possible.

Regards,

Tom Olsen
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