As info for anyone interested in photographing older smaller private (x
marked cars). The lessors will keep cars in their fleets as long as repairs
don't become uneconomical (this type of review/decision is what I do for
about 50% of each day).Well the class ones have in the recent past adopted
"uniform frt rates". This means that the shipper pays the same frt rate
whether he ships a 10,000 gal or a 20,000 gal car(pardon the tank car
reference but its what I'm most familiar w/these days). What this does is
encourage the lessees(shippers) to return smaller cars and operate larger
ones. In the past they paid so many cents or $/hundred wt or gallon to move
commodity and so the incentive was not as great to use larger cars.The larger
cars save the carriers some switching but of course destroy r-o-w faster. So
if your interested in older cars better make some trackside trips as I'm
ordering older smaller cars dismantled on an accelerated basis and I know my
counter part at GATX says he's doing the same. Leo
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