No problem, if before hand you had negotiated a rate with the railroad
tariff bureau for the shipment of $100.00 dollar bills with a stop privilege
for the conversation to pennies. Your rate with stop privileges would be
published in a tariff and you could have shipped it. Everything that the
railroads hauled was covered by a published tariff rate.

Not knowing anything about tariffs I'm going to assume that the cost would have been for paper and copper? :-)
--
Jon Miller

Tim:



First you need to know is the industry located within the switching limits
of a city or out on the road. If in a city you didn't have a conductor but
a switch Forman. With in yard limits you had switchman working outside the
limits you had brakeman and conductor. Within the city the switch Forman
would spot the car from a switch list. In road territory the conductor
would have an empty car waybill, the same for moving an empty car across the
railroad to deliver to another city or connecting carrier.



Paul C. Koehler



_____

From: STMFC@... [mailto:STMFC@...] On Behalf Of Tim
O'Connor
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2010 10:47 AM
To: STMFC@...
Subject: [STMFC] Re: Freight car Distribution






Paul, what kind of paperwork is handled by the conductor who is
delivering the empty car to the industry? Is this just called a
Car Order? Or maybe an "Empty Waybill"?

When an empty car is moved to another (distant) location (e.g. to
return to its owner) is that called a Waybill?

Tim O'Connor

Jeff:

Not so. Customer ordered a car/cars from the Car Distributor. Car
Distributor issued an order to the yard for placing an empty/empties at a
given industry. Car/cars were spotted. After loaded Industrial Clerk
signed for the bill of lading and ordered car/cars pulled. Bill of lading
was turned in to the Agents office and a waybill was typed out.

Paul C. Koehler


From: STMFC@yahoogroups. <mailto:STMFC%40yahoogroups.com> com

[mailto:STMFC@yahoogroups. <mailto:STMFC%40yahoogroups.com> com] On Behalf
Of

Aley, Jeff A
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2010 9:01 AM
To: STMFC@yahoogroups. <mailto:STMFC%40yahoogroups.com> com
Subject: RE: [STMFC] Re: Freight car Distribution

Tim,

Tony Thompson can answer better than I can. But if I understood his clinic
correctly, the Agent wrote the empty car order and waybill BEFORE the car
was spotted for loading. So the waybill, with the car # typed on it, was
already completed.

Therefore, I conclude that if the industry randomly loads the car, the
paperwork would have to be changed.

On the other hand, concepts like "milling in transit" or other "diversions"
can certainly have no a' priori knowledge of where the car will end up.

Regards,

-Jeff

Not to belabor this point, but let's suppose the railroad agent/clerk
follows the AAR rules and sends a PRR, WABASH, SP and UP box car to a
single shipper on the SP for loading -- with the intention that the
PRR box car will be sent to the PRR, the WABASH car to that railroad,
and so on.

Now all four cars get shoved up to the shipper's dock. The shipper
asked for four cars, and has his loads all prepared at their doors.
The ORDER of the four cars is random -- the railroad certainly did
not sort them according to each load's destination.

So the shipper loads the 1st car, the 2nd car, etc -- without any
regard to the ownership of the car!! How could it be otherwise? Can
you imagine the shipper worrying about whether AAR rules are being
followed properly? He just wants to get his shipments loaded.

I don't know if the above scenario is true, but I've never heard any
contradictory evidence. Looking at photos of railroad freight houses
in the Chicago area, it sures looks like a dog's breakfast of cars
was shoved onto the loading/unloading tracks, taking care only to
line up the doorways for crossing via ramps between cars.

Tim O'Connor

Tim O'Connor said

"You say your data show "dominance" of SP cars -- but isn't it just 201 or so SP cars in 34 random trains over a period of a month? Now, that might show "dominance" but it might just also be random luck. If the UP ran 3 trains a day, I'd say that was a great sample. But even if UP only ran 20 trains a day... Well, it's not much to go on."

The 201 SP cars represent 15.4% of all non-UP boxcars, whereas according to the G-N hypothesis it should be 3.3%. The expected number of cars is 44 according to G-N. That sounds like SP dominance to me, but of course it could be due to "random luck". That would make the many discussions on this list of the presumed anomaly pointless. Perhaps someone more statistically gifted than I am can tell us how likely the dominance is due to the luck of the draw.

The train books cover 120 trains, not 34. (A large number of the trains are Roseville Fruits and other trains with few or no box cars, as Mike Brock has pointed out in the past couple of days.) I wish I could believe they were "random trains" – that would give me much greater confidence that my results are valid and not some sampling fluke.

Best wishes,
Larry Ostresh
Laramie, Wyoming

Tim:



No problem, if before hand you had negotiated a rate with the railroad
tariff bureau for the shipment of $100.00 dollar bills with a stop privilege
for the conversation to pennies. Your rate with stop privileges would be
published in a tariff and you could have shipped it. Everything that the
railroads hauled was covered by a published tariff rate.



Paul



_____

From: STMFC@... [mailto:STMFC@...] On Behalf Of Tim
O'Connor
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2010 9:11 AM
To: STMFC@...
Subject: Re: [STMFC] Re: was LCL - Stop Off traffic






Ah, but Dennis, suppose I shipped a box car of $100 bills to the bank,
and withdrew it again as pennies?

:-) Tim "infungible" O'Connor

I've heard of storage in transit for grain, but milling in transit??
Wouldn't the transformation of bulk grain into bags of flour involve
an entirely new tariff?

Tim O'Connor

No, it was a single tariff designed to keep the flour traffic on the line

that had originated the grain move. It goes back a long way; here's a link
to a nespaper article from 1890:

http://query.

<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9802EED8153BE533A25752C1A962
9C94619ED7CF>
nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9802EED8153BE533A25752C1A9629C94619ED7CF

Keep in mind that grain is fungible, like money is. When you go to the bank

to make a withdrawal, you don't get the same money you deposited back; you
get different but equal money. Grain is the same, you don't get your grain
back out of the elevator, you get different but equal grain. Same with
milling in transit. You don't get the flour that was milled from the grain
you hauled in; you get equal flour milled from different grain. So, the car
just emptied of grain can be immediately refilled with flour and sent on its
way.

Dennis

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

"Lumber definitely could be diverted before it reached its final
destination. And diversions could go in any direction, as long as
someone paid for it (the diversion, that is)."

Lumber cars could be billed for orders to destination such as Savage on the NMS, and other recognized hold points. There was a charge made for the diversion as well the cars would incur track storage charges after a specified time period. As to your options for the new destination you would have had to picked a hold point that would protect the thru rates which were published in TCFB 17  (NE/SE), 18 (TX/OK,KS etc),  28 (IL/MO etc) from western origins, Savage worked to destinations in these tariffs. Other western hold points were available but depending on how optimistic the lumber broker was they may have been reached too quickly.
 
I believe Marshalltown on the CNW was also lumber hold point.
 
Ross McLeod Calgary 



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Do You Yahoo!?
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Hi Tim

You said "It has nothing to do with the number of trains Larry".

My comment about fewer trains raising my percentages was in the context of increasing my sample percentages. Mark Amfahr's data showed that 30 – 33 freight trains per day crossed Sherman Hill in 1949. This implied that the 120 trains in my data represented a sample of about 4.5%, not the "less than 1%" that you had previously asserted. If there were fewer than 30-33 trains per day, then my sample percentages would rise. For example if there were only 20 trains per day my sample percentage would be 7% instead of 4.5%. The sample percentage has everything to do with the number of trains – it is the denominator for calculating the percentage.

And then you said:
"Tim Gilbert pointed out that the percentage of home road cars staying on-line greatly increased throughout the depression years, and so the distribution of cars nationwide was quite different in 1949 than in 1938. The more-or-less uniform distribution of plain box cars is far more apparent in the late 1940's than in the late 1930's. The year 1938 was a severe recession. Industrial output declined sharply. I assume that means there were a lot fewer PRR and other eastern cars on the SP and UP than would be in normal economic times."

Agreed!!! That is exactly what I said in post #89909:
"I think I recall Tim Gilbert writing that the G-N hypothesis fits the data well during economic prosperity but does less well during recessions and depressions. The year 1938 was during the Great Depression, of course. The high proportion of home cars (41%) is another indication that companies may be keeping their cars close by. It might be that modelers wishing to have a realistic mix of cars on their trains should pick an era first – or perhaps even a specific year and season, and then check what was happening in the national economy at that time. The choice of the G-N vs. a regional (or any other) model for an accurate freight car composition may well depend on such ephemera."

Best wishes,
Larry Ostresh
Laramie, Wyoming

For the modelers, there are number of great Paul Winters photos of box cars
with doors open, on RIP or clean-out tracks, with the intact or remains of
grain doors, waiting for them to be restored to general service condition,
coated with flour, including over the door where the spout was located. It
appears that the grain doors were just as good for holding in the flour, as
they were for grain, and were only removed after the car finished the trip to
the flour end user/Wholesaler/bakery and was routed back into a yard for
clean out. It makes an extremely interesting modeling aspect.

Elden Gatwood

"Per diem was a fixed daily charge. I don't think railroads paid mileage
on other railroads' cars. I think the only time railroads played per diem
games was when cars were near interchanges, and then they shuffled cars
to an interchange before the midnight hour, so the receiving railroad
would be saddled with the per diem for the next day. Per diem was quite
low in those days, and was the same for all cars, around $2/day. Some
railroads (like GN) had a per diem surplus and HATED it, because it
amounted to a subsidy to other railroads (i.e. they rented cars out at
less than the cost of ownership)."

In my experience mileage charges also applied but this was after the dates covered by this list, I need to dig out some old Equipment Registers. Ross McLeod Calgary



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"Ah, but Dennis, suppose I shipped a box car of $100 bills to the bank,
and withdrew it again as pennies?"
 
Less the charge for transit - transit would be considered a priviledge.
 
Ross McLeod Calgary
 

 

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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

This would make perfect sense since (cents?) the SAL purchased controlling interest in the MD&S in 1907, and MD&S remained under SAL control until being absorbed (into SAL) in 1958... only two years after these cars were built (or there abouts).


John Degnan
JohnnyReb69@...

Tim O'Connor wrote:

It would be a very interesting fact to find out: For each railroad,
what percentage of loads ORIGINATED on that railroad also TERMINATED
on that railroad?

Tim, the numbers seem to be all over the place.

Rutland in 1950 had 1.96% of all cars handled were purly local traffic and a
third of that seems to be LCL.
Western Pacific in 1950 had 11.5% of all cars handled as purely local
traffic and about 40% of those cars moved gravel.
Rio Grande in 1948 saw 23.57% of all cars handled as purely local traffic;
about 40% of those cars were carring minerals (coal)... and about a quarter
were used for Products of Mfg... But digging into the details it's iron
pipe, gasoline, automobiles, manufactured steel (e.g., coil, beams, etc)
before finally getting down to something clearly in ordinary boxcars: canned
food, which was ~ 11% of all local shipments. So what is that... 2% of all
cars handled?
Santa Fe in 1956 had 35.08% of all cars handled were purly local traffic...
A quarter of those each to Products of Mines and Products of Agriculture and
a third to Products of Mfg. Of the later category, I see ~10% of those cars
were tank cars (e.g., gasoline, lube oil), 5% cement... The remaining 85%
scattered all over... Steel, houshold goods, fetilizer, scrap metal,
whatever.

I dunno if you can see a regional pattern but to my eye it looks very much
like it's telling us whatever happened to be big business on each specific
route... As well, perhaps, why the percentages of the types of owned home
road cars were what why were (e.g., why the Rio Grande had lots of GS gons
on no ventilator boxcars).

Dave Nelson

If there is enough interest, I will produce resin castings of the whistle
post and "no trespassing" signs (and others, if requested) in HO. They
would consist of a cast duplicate of code 70 rail (for the post) and targets
with raised lettering (if possible) that would be highlighted with a
permanent black market. If text is too small to create using the rapid
prototyping process, decals will be used instead.



Let me know what interest you have in these (and other) N&W signs.



Jim King

Smoky Mountain Model Works, Inc.

Ph. (828) 777-5619

<www.smokymountainmodelworks.com>

Victor;

I came across an "O" scale list that recommended Johnson and Johnson
paper tape (for bandages). I bought some but have not as yet tried it.
Also tissue set into fresh paint or oversprayed with paint.

Bill Pardie
On Apr 15, 2010, at 1:19 AM, jerryglow@... wrote:

On some brass cabooses, I stippled on artists acrylics to get a
textured surface. Works well for tarred roofs on buildings too, in
fact, that's how I started using the technique.

Jerry Glow

--- In STMFC@..., "wabash2813" <reporterllc@...> wrote:

Assuming that some wood freight cars and cabooses had roofs not

unlike that on passenger cars, what techniques and materials are you
all using to model that?

Victor Baird
Fort Wayne, Indiana

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

--- In STMFC@..., "Aley, Jeff A" <Jeff.A.Aley@...> wrote:

Dennis,

Could you please expand upon this topic?

For example, who is it that has his wheat milled in transit: the farmer, or some intermediate elevator? Is the "milling in transit" done between the grain elevator and flour consumer (e.g. bakery)?

You imply that the exact same boxcar gets used for the flour as was used for the grain. Is this always the case, or was that a simplification?

Thanks much,

-Jeff

I'm getting near the fringes of my knowledge, but I'll start, and someone who knows more can chime in and correct anything I've mis-interpreted.

Milling in transit appears to pre-date the formation of the ICC. In the rough-and-tumble pre-regulatory days it was a way railroads could induce millers to locate on their line; offer a single through rate from source to customer. It appears to be the reason that both the M &St.L and Soo Line were built; the millers in Minneapolis were tired of paying two local rates to move grain in and then ship flour out, when the same RR's they were shipping on were offering better rates to mills located further east. The Minneapolis milling interests started building a railroad to St. Louis, but lost control, they later started two other lines, the Minneapolis & Pacific to bring grain in from the west, and the Minneapolis, Sault Ste. Marie & Atlantic to ship flour to the east. When these roads were finished, they were consolidated into the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie. Then Pillsbury and the other Minneapolis Millers could also enjoy the the advantages of milling in transit.

Since this was the entrenched way that the flour trade was being conducted, it continued under ICC regulation; the tariffs were published, and all the ICC concerned itself with is that the rates were equally available to all.

Who was the Shipper? As I understand it, it was the miller, who bought the grain delivered at the elevator, and paid the freight from there to the customer, with the priveledge of a stop-off to mill it into flour somewhere along the way. The combined rate was less than the sum of the local inbound rate on grain and local outbound rate on flour; it was advantageous to the railroad as it gave them a longer haul on grain that was captive to their line.

Did it have to be the same car? I'm not sure, but I don't think so. I think most tariffs had a provision for changing the cars en route; there are instances of railroads who would reload coal into home road cars back in the days when labor was cheap.

In reality, it may well have often been a paper transaction, with fifty tons of inbound grain simply matched with fifty tons of outbound flour for billing purposes. You will notice the 1890 newspaper article I linked to concerns itself in part with the outbound loads being heavier than the inbounds :-)
However, since the same class of car was used for both grain and flour, back in the day, I would suspect that from track side, it looked like the same cars being used.

Dennis

I'm sure I don't need to point out 1949 was a very different year
than 1938, in which the US economy was still deep in recession.

Yes, of course. I would expect therefore that there would have been fewer trains per day in 1938 than in 1949, which would raise my percentages. If you have data showing that the Great Depression led to more trains across Wyoming, I would like to see it. Or if you have better data than Mark provided, please make that public.

It has nothing to do with the number of trains Larry. Tim Gilbert
pointed out that the percentage of home road cars staying on-line
greatly increased throughout the depression years, and so the
distribution of cars nationwide was quite different in 1949 than
in 1938. The more-or-less uniform distribution of plain box cars
is far more apparent in the late 1940's than in the late 1930's.
The year 1938 was a severe recession. Industrial output declined
sharply. I assume that means there were a lot fewer PRR and other
eastern cars on the SP and UP than would be in normal economic
times.

You say your data show "dominance" of SP cars -- but isn't it just
201 or so SP cars in 34 random trains over a period of a month? Now,
that might show "dominance" but it might just also be random luck.
If the UP ran 3 trains a day, I'd say that was a great sample. But
even if UP only ran 20 trains a day... Well, it's not much to go on.

Tim O'

Paul, what kind of paperwork is handled by the conductor who is
delivering the empty car to the industry? Is this just called a
Car Order? Or maybe an "Empty Waybill"?

When an empty car is moved to another (distant) location (e.g. to
return to its owner) is that called a Waybill?

Tim O'Connor

Victor,
Some freight cars did indeed have canvas roofs that were painted
several coats of paint. The June 2, 1928 issue of Railway Age (Page 70) had an
ad for "Mule Hide" roofing which read as follows:
"Why lay up your cars while you wait for several coats of paint to dry
on canvas?
MULE-HIDE canvas car roofing is made of the same raw duck that you are
accustomed to use on the roofs of passenger cars, saturated and coated
both sides with pure Mexican Asphalt, permanently waterproofed.
Your men can lay it as quickly as the canvas alone, and as soon as it
is applied the car is ready for service.
Widths and weight to meet your specifications. Standard on many
railways."
The product was offered by the Lehon Company of Chicago.
Incidentally, the car illustrated in the ad was a CV "Green Mountain Route" milk car,
#567.

Rich Burg

Dennis,

Could you please expand upon this topic?

For example, who is it that has his wheat milled in transit: the farmer, or some intermediate elevator? Is the "milling in transit" done between the grain elevator and flour consumer (e.g. bakery)?

You imply that the exact same boxcar gets used for the flour as was used for the grain. Is this always the case, or was that a simplification?

Thanks much,

-Jeff


From: STMFC@... [mailto:STMFC@...] On Behalf Of soolinehistory
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2010 8:36 AM
To: STMFC@...
Subject: [STMFC] Re: was LCL - Stop Off traffic




--- In STMFC@...<mailto:STMFC%40yahoogroups.com>, Tim O'Connor <timboconnor@...> wrote:

Ross

I've heard of storage in transit for grain, but milling in transit??
Wouldn't the transformation of bulk grain into bags of flour involve
an entirely new tariff?

Tim O'Connor

No, it was a single tariff designed to keep the flour traffic on the line that had originated the grain move. It goes back a long way; here's a link to a nespaper article from 1890:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9802EED8153BE533A25752C1A9629C94619ED7CF

Keep in mind that grain is fungible, like money is. When you go to the bank to make a withdrawal, you don't get the same money you deposited back; you get different but equal money. Grain is the same, you don't get your grain back out of the elevator, you get different but equal grain. Same with milling in transit. You don't get the flour that was milled from the grain you hauled in; you get equal flour milled from different grain. So, the car just emptied of grain can be immediately refilled with flour and sent on its way.

Dennis



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

--- In STMFC@..., Tim O'Connor <timboconnor@...> wrote:

Ah, but Dennis, suppose I shipped a box car of $100 bills to the bank,
and withdrew it again as pennies?

:-) Tim "infungible" O'Connor

Tim,

Your point?

Dennis

Tim O'Connor wrote

Larry Ostresh wrote

I think 2,267 box cars represent three or four days of UP freight traffic across
Wyoming in the late 1930s. (Data from 1949 provided by Mark Amfahr show 30 to 33
trains a day between Laramie and Cheyenne.)

I'm sure I don't need to point out 1949 was a very different year
than 1938, in which the US economy was still deep in recession.

Yes, of course. I would expect therefore that there would have been fewer trains per day in 1938 than in 1949, which would raise my percentages. If you have data showing that the Great Depression led to more trains across Wyoming, I would like to see it. Or if you have better data than Mark provided, please make that public.

I don't understand
the basis of your statement "[other conductor books] wouldn't be the
same, but they are likely to be similar". The tricky word of course
being "similar"...

I think the sentences following the one you quoted spell out precisely what I mean by "similar". I wrote: "For example, I would expect them to show the same dominance of UP and SP cars, and I think it is likely that the Central Western ICC region will have more than its fair share of cars, even with UP and SP removed. The New England and Southern regions may have fewer than expected representation also."

Best wishes,
Larry Ostresh
Laramie, Wyoming