Re: [CBQ] CB&Q Mileage Tariff from the 1960's

["William Hirt" <whirt@fastmail.com>]

Here is the story on the NMRA Operations SIG industry list.

This was started by the late Bill Jewett when he was president of the Op SIG. Probably 80-90% of the industry listings are from the railroad issued industrial guides. I know because I contributed  to the Op SIG project. Doug Harding who is on this list also provided a information to the project based on his research. Ted Schnepf sells reproductions of many of these guides now and even the BRHS has offered as part of the archives campaign a Chicago Switching Tariff.

The general rule on these industrial guides is that they only list industries that were at competitive points for subject railroad. I am sure part of the idea was to try and get customers to route their traffic via the railroad that produced the guide.

That is why at points like Mt. Morris where there were no other railroads there is no railroad industrial guide listing customers. This is why there is a great deal of overlap in the Op SIG data set for places like Kansas City and St. Louis because a several guides listed industrial customers at various times. Many guides were very generic about what a customer shipped/received. Some rare exceptions were more specific. A lot of this appears to have depended on the information provide by the local station agent. Also by the mid 1950s it appears that many railroads decided not to issue such listings anymore. I suspect part of that was keep this information from trucking competitors. Also some railroads seem to have discontinued them even sooner with World War II being a dividing point. The exceptions I have seen by the 1960s was the Chicago Switching Tariff, a GN system listing, a MP system listing, a NP system listing, a RI system listing and a Milwaukee Road system listing  (all Midwest or western railroads). The latest comprehensive eastern railroad industry listing I've seen was a 1954 Reading (which is available online now). If there are more, it appears many have been lost to the trash bin of history. One used to be able to watch for them on eBay but they have become few and far between the past 10 years.

I've added some of this information to my own personal list based on my interests based on magazine articles, etc. I just added several industries to the Trenton MO area based on a article in the latest Trains and Railroads Past about the Rock Island there. As far as I know, any additions to the Op SIG industry list has been pretty dormant for a number of years because no one really picked up the ball after Bill passed.

Peter White, who sells a program called Shenware Waybills for creating waybills for model railroads, offers a free program called IndMan that will ingest the Op SIG industry files and convert it to a format his program can use. I've used his software for many years.

Bill Hirt

On 10/20/2020 9:56 AM, Tom Mack via groups.io wrote:

>       
>       On Mon, Oct 19, 2020 at 10:26 AM, Jack Schroeder wrote:
> > I am working on a BRHS web site project to document
> >         the CB&Q's rail network as of the late 1960's. This will
> >         include a station search (1,733 stations) with map location,
> >         station information such as photos, track profile, operating
> >         division and more..., and line segments (260 segments) which
> >         will show a map, list stations in order on each segment, track
> >         profiles for that segment and more, and a station or segment
> >         search using a map feature to get you to the stations.
>       Jack,
>       
>       This sounds awesome! Thanks for working on this!
>       
>       I was going to bring this up separately, but now might be a better
>       time in view of Jack's work. The list of industries along the Q on
>       the BRHS website is very old and inadequate. Don't get me wrong,
>       it's better than nothing, but it apparently came originally from
>       the NMRA OpSig so it is not particularly Q focused. For example,
>       there are no industries listed for Oregon, IL. Kable Printing in
>       Mt. Morris is listed, but Oregon and its industries (e.g.
>       carnation) are not. That includes the huge sand operation at
>       Oregon that is currently operated by Unimin. Photos I have
>       collected from Oregon show many reefers there in the late 1960's,
>       clearly destined for Carnation, so the operation was going strong
>       even in the late 1960's. There were also other industries more in
>       downtown Oregon (like Etnyre) that occasionally got cars.
>       
>

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