The other day, I passed a train and it inspired a few questions. I hope that some folks here in Doper-land can help.
The rail line in my town is owned by Union Pacific. Much of the traffic is UP trains pulling coal cars belonging to a single shipper. However, yesterday, I saw a two BNSF locomotives pulling a string of automobile carriers. The auto carriers appeared to be identical in every respect except that the bore the names and logos of many different railroads. I saw UP, Conrail, BNSF, Trail-r-Train, and other logos.
So…
[ol]
[li]Why would BNSF locomotives be heading a train on UP tracks? Would the crew belong to UP or BNSF?[/li][li]Do the railroads keep careful track of where each of their rolling stock is?[/li][li]If a car were to break down, requiring the train to stop, who would be responsible for the repairs? Would UP, BNSF, or whoever receive some sort of compensation for the blocked rail line?[/li][li]How is billing handled for moving these automobiles from their origin to their destination? Does the shipper receive a bill from UP for using two cars, a bill from BNSF for using four cars, a bill from CN for their car, or just one bill for using seven railroad cars? Would the bill come from BNSF, UP, or a combination of the two?[/li][/ol]
Thanks, y’all.
FTR I am not a railroad worker. But I do know that in most of the U.S., the freight operators allow Amtrak to operate passenger trains over their tracks. So I wouldn’t be surprised if other freight carriers can do so as well, presumably in return for some kind of payment or other consideration. According to this post in another thread about abandoned or dormant rights of way, freight cars may or may not belong to the railroad company; businesses that frequently ship and receive carload lots sometimes own their own cars and pay the RR to haul them to wherever.
Obviously the RR has to keep close tabs on where all their rolling stock is! My favorite illustration of this principle is the fact that Amtrak runs about a dozen round trips between L.A. and San Diego every day, over trackage that belongs to, and is also used by, the BNSF. In a few stretches, there is only a single set of rails. AFAIK there hasn’t yet been a head-on collision.
I’d be interested in knowing how they did that in the old days, say 100 years ago–especially in the Northeast and other densely tracked parts of the country.
Due to mergers or purchases, BNSF or a predecessor may have been granted trackage rights over that section of the UP. Sometimes the Interstate Commerce Commission or the Surface Transportation Board required this for anticompetitive reasons. Trackage rights can also be negotiated between the two railroads for simple business reasons. The crew probably belonged to BNSF, but they would have qualified to run over that section of UP track by demonstrating that they knew the UP’s signal system and operating rules.
In case of an emergency reroute, there would usually be a UP crew in a pilot locomotive on the front, guiding the BNSF power over the foreign road.
Yes, in the old days this was handled by mimeographed reports exchanged between railroad clerks; now its handled by computer. Tracing a missing car for a shipper used to be a frustrating bit of detective work, and sometimes took months before a clerical error was rectified or a yardmaster inquired about a car in the corner of a yard.
A bad-order car would be set out at the first opportunity, but I’m not sure how the costs of repair and liabilities for delays would be handled. Ostensibly, the originating road’s mechanical department certified the car as suitable for service before it was delivered to the auto plant for loading.
The originating railroad for the shipment is generally prepaid for the entire service. That railroad might in turn pay per diem car rental (though it’s now calculated hourly) and mileage to the various railroads who owned the cars and freight charges to other railroads used for parts of the journey. The recipient may also need to pay switching charges to yet another railroad that actually pushes the cars into the customer terminal where the cars are transferred to trucks. A waybill that accompanies the auto rack car on every train in which it runs tells what’s on board, where it’s going, what routing (which railroads) will be used along the way, and permits the various railroads involved to keep track of things and make their claims.
So, let me see if I get this.
[ol]
[li]The company that needs to ship some automobiles contacts the railroad that runs by his factory/terminal/whatever and says, “I need to send 100 automobiles to Los Angeles.”[/li][li]The railroad calculates how many freight cars that takes. The railroad also schedules the freight cars onto a train that is passing by.[/li][li]It gathers the freight cars from wherever it finds them. Perhaps a nearby auto manufacturer has a surplus of cars on its spur, so the RR grabs those. It doesn’t matter the name of the RR on the side of the car.[/li][li]The RR delivers the empty cars to the shipper who loads his cargo. The shipper pays the RR for the service of delivering his 100 automobiles to their destination.[/li][li]A train with the appropriate motive power arrives and picks up the loaded cars and adds them to the train.[/li][li]The RR then pays the owners of the cars an hourly rate or mileage rate for using the cars.[/li][li]Everybody leaves happy.[/li][/ol]
That’s about it, but the shipment may move along the track of other railroads on the way to the destination, and so the originating railroad will have to pay them to move the railroad cars, as well as paying some otherwise-uninvolved railroad for use of its auto-rack cars. Generally, the originating railroad will try to send cars back to the home road, so if BNSF is picking up Toyotas in Long Beach to go to Atlanta, it might favor CSX auto racks over, say, those owned by Canadian National. However, the seven Class I (biggest) railroads now extend across so much of the country that this is less and less important. Also, a lot of freight cars are now owned by coöperative pools (which may be in turn consortiums of railroads) or by third-party leasing companies such as TTX.
It’s a shame my husband’s not home right now, because tracking the billing of cars is a large part of his job for the UP.
It looks like the question’s been beautifully answered though. One additional comment - there is a letter code on the side of each car that indicates something about the car’s ownership. For example, my understandins is that if the code ends in the letter ‘X’, the car is not owned by the railroad but is owned by a private company/individual/organization. For example, the code ‘DODX’ on the side of a car indicates a car owned by the Department of Defense that they have contracted with the railroad to move. The military does a LOT of business with the railroads.
Thanks. In my town, the coal cars are three letters and X. I always wondered why it was an X instead of the fourth initial of the company that owns the cars. That makes sense.
Thanks for the information. It seems that the name on the side of the car doesn’t really matter much, at least to the shipper. He/She only has to deal with the originating railroad, rather than the owners of the various cars required to move the cargo.
My dad worked for the railroad during the period when this evolved. Basically from WW2 to about 1981. When he started there were still lots of steam engines in service, and train orders were transmitted by telegraph. By the time he retired scheduling was done by computers. I used to ask him about the sort of things you are wondering.
He worked as a signalman. Basically repairing all the electronics and electrical infrastructure of the railroad. So not directly involved with keeping trains from colliding, but very near to it.
The people who did that were the dispatchers. In the very early days, the primary tools were train orders and good watches. Train orders told train crews when to be where, and where to wait on a siding or spur for an opposite bound train to pass, and not to proceed past a siding if the otherbound train wasn’t there yet. If a train broke down in the middle of a section, the whole system could break down. And trains running into each other was something that happened.
The railroads were early adopters of the telegraph. This allowed new train orders to be sent ahead of a moving train. The station master would set a semaphore arm to tell the train to stop and pick up new orders. Station masters could also report if a train didn’t arrive as expected. In this era, a train would not enter a section of track until the dispatchers determined from the telegraphed information that that section was clear. This was a pretty good system for keeping trains from colliding, but not optimal for moving the most freight.
It was then not long before the railroads adopted remotely controlled signal lights or semaphore arms. This served as a safety backup for train orders. Next came devices that would detect where the trains were, how the switches were set, etc. This would get routed to a Centralized Train Control (CTC) room where lights on a big schematic of the railroad showed all this information. This made for a marked improvement in dispatching efficiency.
And this is how the railroad ran from post WW2 until the early 1970s. The 1960s trains started being equipped with radios…for the first time dispatchers could contact trains while they were rolling.
The railroad saw dispatching as something that could benefit from computerization. Dads railroad made two false starts…finally they sent some experienced dispatches back to school to learn computer programming, and ended up with something that worked. My dad retired shortly after that.
The question has been answered, and very well too, but I’ll add that it is not uncommon for railroads to lease running rights from other railroads. I know, for example, that here in Canada, VIARail (the national passenger carrier) owns no trackage of its own, but leases what it needs to run on from Canadian National (mostly) or Canadian Pacific (rarely). I would imagine Amtrak does the same thing in the US. With advance notice, scheduling on the CN main line takes VIA’s trains into account, so things run smoothly. Again, Amtrak is probably treated similarly.
It is worth pointing out also that CP and the Union Pacific are in a partnership of sorts (if the UP locomotives and cars I see on CP trackage locally are anything to go by); as are the BNSF and CN. BNSF and CN actually tried to amalgamate some years ago, but were stopped by the transportation authorities in both Canada and the US. Regardless, from what I see, railroads may be in competition with each other, but will work together through a variety of mechanisms (leasing rights and so on), if it helps them serve and get paid by their customers.
I worked on data processing for BN (before BNSF). I didn’t work on these systems directly (I did personnel/safety computer systems), but others in the area did. There was a whole lot of effort devoted to this.
As I remember it from way back then, there is a joint system where all the railroads report every night on every single railroad car in their property. This was very important, because it determined who would pay or collect rent for that car for the day. So if BN had a CSX-owned covered 111-ton grain hopper car number xxx on our trackage that night, we owed rent to CSX for use of that car.
Thus there was a financial emphasis on getting ‘foreign’ cars back onto their owners tracks as soon as possible, to minimize the rent on them, and on keeping your cars on others trackage as long as possible, so you collected more rent. (Of course, this was all less important than the basic job of keeping cars filled with freight and moving, and having empty cars available when your customers needed them.)
Lost cars did happen. Sometimes for quite some time. (More often empty cars; filled ones had someone waiting for that load who would start inquiring when it was late.) I believe that the joint system policy on this was that the railroad who last reported having the car continued to pay rent on it every day until it was ‘found’ again. So this created an incentive for all the workers on each railroad to keep track of cars, and ask about that one sitting in a corner of the yard.
This tracking of cars was a big deal. It went on constantly, detailed down to every single car.
We know from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity that time slows down for a moving object. Thus these boxcars are younger than you the observer. Even more interesting, given they have travelled from divergent places, they are different ages from each other. :smack:
As to why they have come together in your specific time and space, nobody can say. Heisenberg would suggest it’s caused by your own uncertainty…as evidenced by this thread. Rene Descartes would suggest it’s your train and you can decide any answer you like.
Incidentally, you didn’t see a cat peering out did you? Mr Schroedinger from down the block is looking for his…
These days, coal hoppers most often run as unit trains, which means the same consist of cars stays together all the time, just running back and forth from a coal mine (often in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming) to a particular power plant. No other cars will be mixed into the train. Unit train cars are easy to distinguish because one end will be painted a contrasting color from the rest of the car. They often are owned by the power company rather than a railroad; the ones that are bound for Wisconsin Power & Light have the reporting marks WISX, while ones bound for Fayette Power Project in Texas use FPPX or LCRX. These cars have rotary couplers, and are pulled into proper position above the coal intake at a big power plant and **turned upside down **to dump out the coal.
I was quite amused when visiting my daughter in Colorado Springs. I had to wait for a railroad crossing and right there in front of me was my hometown FPP train.
Back when I was working for BN, I was told by a long-time employee that something like 15-20% of BN’s business was unit coal trains from Powder River to Detroit Edison.
And the rotary coal cars are replacing the hoppers because they hold more coal in the same length – the hoppers have to have sloping sides & ends so the coal falls out when unloading; the rotating ones can be a regular square container, thus holding more coal. Also, they can be used for other freight, like a gondola car would be, if needed.
