Tim Gilbert wrote
"In the early 1950's, the AAR established SCS-90 which simplified the
return routing so that DL&W would get all CIL empty cars from the NYO&W
in Scranton, and route them home via the NKP. If the empty car was owned
by, say the C&EI, NYO&W could have delivered the empty to the
D&H-PRR-C&EI or ERIE-C&EI, or LV-WAB-C&EI to get it home. (The above are
hypotheses because the only SCS-90 I have seen was the B&M's.)"
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I can give you more of the specifics of SCO-90 and a few examples of how it was applied.
SCO-90 was designed to reduce the mileage of cars following record rights. It essentially modified the car service rule that cars could be delivered to the road fron which it was received loaded excepting that a car belonging to a direct connection of the road it was on could not be delivered to a road that was an indirect connection of the owner.
Under SCO-90, each railroad was given an outlet for each foreign mark for which it did not have a direct connection. I'm not sure of this but I believe that any railroad having a box car belonging to a direct connection had to deliver it to that connection. I'll show you how it worked, using the B&M as an example. Let's look at B&M's disposition of cars with marks of FEC, SAL, N&W, SOU, L&N, SLSF, WAB, UP, GN, MILW and SP.
The B&M outlets would be
NH for SAL, FEC
D&H for SOU, WAB, SP, N&W
NYC for L&N, SLSF, GN, UP, MILW
NH's outlets for those marks could have been
PRR for SAL
B&O for FEC
PRR and B&O would have RF&P as the outlet for FEC and SAL cars
RF&P's outlet for FEC would be ACL.
D&H's outlets would have been
PRR for SOU and N&W
ERIE for WAB and SP
ERIE's outlet for SP would be ATSF
NYC's outlets would be
CB&Q for GN
RI for UP
I don't remember the specific marks, but this example is representative of how the system worked. In SCO-90 for any car with which you didn't have a direct connection, you could look up the railroad that had to accept it to get it closer to home. It designed to fairly distribute the total empty car mileage based on a massive study of actual car movements.
I wonder if there is an accessible surviving copy of SCO-90.
Malcolm Laughlin, Editor 617-489-4383
New England Rail Shipper Directories
19 Holden Road, Belmont, MA 02478
