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The paper records and window shades are ,no doubt, in a box or crate in some wharehouse near Chicago much like the Ark of the Covenent (Indiana Jones movie) is in some Army wharehouse along with hundreds and hundreds of other boxes and crates, never to see the light of day. Some things are never opened, looked at, touched for ever. From: "qutlx1@aol.com" <qutlx1@aol.com> To: cbq@yahoogroups.com Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 6:46 PM Subject: [CBQ] Mileage System was REA,etc To add to the discussion by John,Pete & Rupert. The administrative
bureacracy at both the RRs and the private car owners to keep "track" of
mileages on private cars and who owes who what was mind boggling.
My first job after BN was as a mileage auditor at UTLX. There were 4 or 5
of us who took green bar computer printouts who's data hand been keypunched into
the system from paper reports by the RR and compared them to paper reports(that
had been been keypunched into the system) from lessees claiming mileage.
It was our job to compare routes and mileages as reported by the two
entitities and resolve discrepancies. Somewhere there is a picture of a much
younger me surrounded by binders full of print outs preparing an audit for a big
lessee like Standard Oil,Shell,etc. We would actually file paper claims with
carriers for shortages of miles on a movement. And an adjustment clerk at the RR
would respond as to why it was allowed or disallowed. Our audits became the
basis for corrections to payments to lessees for 10s of thousands of $s in
mileage adjustments,both up and down.
I will spare the readers of this post from a discussion of the Sherman
& Elkins Act which governed all this activity and what could and could
not be allowed,claimed,paid,etc,etc,etc.
ut before we could do our work a large group of clerks within UTLX had to
set up the route allowance and another group of clerks at the carriers had to
set up the payment routes.
And before computers there was another seperate bevy of clerks within
UTLX,and other car lessors, who manually recorded mileage reports coming in from
the RRs onto, off all things, a version of a large window shade. They would
literally write the data on the shade as to locations,mileages,dates,etc. Then
when the shade was full they would start over at the top with a scrapper and an
early version of white out recording new data. For a couple years,while I was
Supv of payables at UTLX, I had a clerk in my little army, who had started in
the mileage group and she talked often of the shades and the knives to scrape
off the old data.
Oh and by the way she was Polish, and would spend each lunch hour talking
to her girlfriends in Polish. Unfortunately I never picked it up.
Better yet when I moved on to Dir Fleet Services, my mechanical records
coordinator, who updated all changes to cars, had originally been a mileage
clerk, and he still hand his mileage knife. He also had the hand written logs of
car #s assigned to newly mfg cars and then crossed out and reused as cars were
retired before it was computerized. They are still safely preserved at
UTLX.
A huge amount of jobs were eliminated when the entire industry gradually
moved to "zero rated shipments".
Today none of this exists.
Leo Phillipp
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