Approach To Managing a Group of Empty Cars For Local Customers??

From what I have read a local/regional railroad would need to have some inventory of empty cars to deliver to customers. They could be "in-yard" or delivered by a leasing company. Customer fills the car and tells the Local to deliver them to "xxxxx". The local makes the arrangements with the Class1 company for pickup. The "customer's cars" may now go to some number of their customers for delivery of their product. Either the class-1 or a regional would be involved in the deliveries. Rather than trying to bring all of those cars back to the original (Trainz) customer I assume they could be sold to a leasing company with our local getting either cash credit or a contract for some number of future leases.

The reverse scenario also occurs wherein the Trainz local ends up with some cars they do not own. The owner would probably arrange to a leasing company to take them.

Of course the customer may contract to have some number of specific cars available on a specific date. If the local does not have them at the specified time they would have to lease cars to fill the order.

These and many derivations seem possible as the small regional/local railroad has a juggling act to perform. Is this a real-life operation for a local/regional railroad? Reading about rail operations presents a lot of nightmare scenarios for loosing money and customers.

Obviously Trainz can't model some of this. However I would like to model the local's operation as much as possible. Just "slicing and dicing" the local's inventory in the yard is messy. Then sending an engine to pickup cars, to fill the order, from somewhere is a portal operation.

In my case the "local" is based in Portland, Maine. It is fortunate to own the Rigby yard which is quite large. It also owns one slightly smaller yard as well. Its client area is up the Maine coast North to the Canadian border at Lubec. The most notable client is L.L. Bean. You can also see in this scenario leasing is a critical factor for cost control.

Are the assumptions I made valid?

No, in1880 most railroads made a interchange agreement so railroad A car go on railroad B track, A pays B for shipping, after unloading B pays A for "rent", B can then send the car to C and they pay A. This made railroad like to use other RR cars first to get them off there track. One car did not get back to the owner for like 18 years.

Very Interesting

I wonder if leasing is the modern replacement for that strategy. The car is still a floater but thanks to computers its ownership can change many times. Perhaps a company may lease a car they once sold to a a different leasing company years ago. Leasing may present a simpler tax profile than several sales. because of that whole area of thousands of rail cars being leased and "bought/sold" yearly we get to see trains with a wide variety of labels and conditions as they go by a train watcher's vantage point.

Thanks for that insight....

whitepass said:

No, in1880 most railroads made a interchange agreement so railroad A car go on railroad B track, A pays B for shipping, after unloading B pays A for "rent", B can then send the car to C and they pay A. This made railroad like to use other RR cars first to get them off there track. One car did not get back to the owner for like 18 years.

Click to expand...

For my "route in progress", I've recreated the Utica, NY yard from the early 1880's. This yard was used by several railroads for both freight and passenger service, including at the time the NYC, NYO & W, West Shore RR, DL&W, and the Utica & Black River RR. Each railroad company had their own freight houses. For example, the NYC would bring perishables and the U&BR RR would deliver them to towns north of Utica. The DL&W would bring in coal from Pennsylvania and the U&BR RR would deliver the coal to local
factories, businesses and the Utica gas company. What I haven't been able to find out is how the railroad companies interacted , how the commodities were exchanged and where the cars where dropped off from railroad A to be delivered locally by railroad B and then returned . Any info out there on how railroad companies interacted with each other in yards back then would be helpful to me.
Thanks for reading.

JimDep said:

For my "route in progress", I've recreated the Utica, NY yard from the early 1880's. This yard was used by several railroads for both freight and passenger service, including at the time the NYC, NYO & W, West Shore RR, DL&W, and the Utica & Black River RR. Each railroad company had their own freight houses. For example, the NYC would bring perishables and the U&BR RR would deliver them to towns north of Utica. The DL&W would bring in coal from Pennsylvania and the U&BR RR would deliver the coal to local
factories, businesses and the Utica gas company. What I haven't been able to find out is how the railroad companies interacted , how the commodities were exchanged and where the cars where dropped off from railroad A to be delivered locally by railroad B and then returned . Any info out there on how railroad companies interacted with each other in yards back then would be helpful to me.
Thanks for reading.

Click to expand...

This is called "interchange service" and involved the majority of railway employees -- who were office workers, not trainmen. Keeping track of the usage of each car was a monumental operation, esp. since the billed charges were based on miles used. The Pennsylvania RR had probably the largest single boxcar fleet in North America and you would find its cars anywhere, each pulling in revenue for the home road.

Interchange could be as simple as setting cars out on an interchange track any place two roads crossed. It also could be more complex; in one road's yard, cars would be blocked into transfer consists, then run as trains to another road's yard. (Hence "transfer cabooses.") My Dad worked as brakeman on graveyard moves from the Northern Pacific Minneapolis yard to the Milwaukee's Pigs Eye yard in Saint Paul during his senior year in high school. Trains went the other way, too, of course. With the Twin Cities being a hub for five or more major railways there was a lot of transfer runs from yard to yard.

Many yards had designated sub-yards devoted to such transfers. You'd have to study the manuals and employee timetables of the road(s) you're interested in to get a full grasp of it all.

The nice part of this is you can legitimately run anybody's wagons on your own tracks.

"Pooled Power," where everybody uses anybody else's locos, is a much more recent innovation which developed in the last half of the 20th century. Large leasing operations didn't become common until that era either (somebody's going to shoot me down on some of this, but there we are.)

Have fun!

:B~)

This is very interesting. It seems that local and regional agreements followed no rules. Railroads, large and small, each negotiated their own "deals". The Reciprocal Switching video on the web presented that process as absolute and it apparently is not. I could not get a a car/wagon exchange to work with the balky portal operation in the current release of Trainz. Now as the Supreme Rail Tycoon it seems I can cut deals with other "roads" to suit my objectives and not convention.

The commercial side of railroading is not a major element in hobby railroading. Once you have planted all the trees and paved all the roads, with proper structures in place, it is time to do "business" and make money. I subscribe to Trains magazine which covers the commercial part of railroads. It sparked my interest in approaching Trainz as a "tycoon" and not a hobbyist. So THANKS for all the information.

I use portals for car exchanges. But they are not reliable in 111951. So that is on hold pending the next update. The simple use of a siding to exchange cars is reliable but more complex versus a portal representing another railroad.

On my complex Gloucester Terminal Electric route, I interchange freight with the local railroad. The GTE has a substantial yard due to the number of industries it serves which include a quarry, fishing wharves, manufacturing, a brewery, an oil/gas terminal, and various warehouses.

When my industries need a string of freight cars, such as the oil/gas terminal, I will bring down a block of tank cars from the yard and switch them out. Upon returning to the yard, I will put the empties up on the interchange track for the next passing freight.

After sometime a freight will appear on the mainline. I will take control of the freight and switch out any "fresh" tank cars I need from that consist along with other boxcars and hoppers I may have gathered on my switching job. With everything switched out, I'll let the mainline freight continue on its way to its destination.

Thanks John,

I'd love to get a hold of some manuals / timetables from employees who handled freight from that era. I already have the passenger service timetables, but only very basic info on the commodities and where they went, and nothing on how they interchanged between railroad companies. The 1880's in this location was before railroads, such as the DL&W became standardized, from one division to the next.
That's neat that your dad was once a brakeman up there in Minnesota. Glad this was after the pin pulling days, but still dangerous work, especially during the harsh winters in that region. Thanks for sharing.

In the U.S. before 1880 the railroads did not connect to each other, had 10 deferent track gages and interchange was done at a waystation by unloading from train to station then station to other train, this added a lot of time, money, and pilfering.