Re: [CBQ] Empty GN/NP Box Car Extras

["leakinmywaders via groups.io" <leakinmywaders=yahoo.com@groups.io>]

Bill:  One reason CBQ might collect the empties for WB might be related to that fact a lot of these wood products shipments went east as roller loads-that is they were routed initially consigned to the shipper before a buyer was found for the load.  They sometimes went on circuitous paths over a fairly broad potential market area buyer was found.  As soon as the car was unloaded, the most direct return route available would shorten the down time between paying loads.  For a large area of the nation, a most direct route would collect cars at Chicago, where a handoff to Q for Twin Cities makes sense.  In that sense it would have been shortening the empty time and increasing car availability to wood products shippers that drove the system.  

That’s some speculation on my part, as I don’t have direct info on return routing orders for these cars.  But I do have all those 1969 wheel reports that Allen Reuter posted, plus a bunch of others from NP conductor Warren McGee.  Some info on that here also:

http://www.nprha.org/Pages/Operations-Traffic.aspx

I do have somewhere compiled a virtually complete set of info on NP station codes I used to annotate the database. 

I’ve reviewed some of the more relevant NP president’s files from the 1960s, and my speculation stems in part  from the high level of attention given by executives (at the persistent behest of some heavy hitters like Sen. Warren Magnuson) to getting suitable boxcars returned to the NP to meet the needs of wood products shippers. The NP’s perspective was their newly built high-class cars too often got trapped in circulation “somewhere out east” (often flaunting ASR rules), where acute boxcar shortages persisted because so may roads flirting with bankruptcy had sidelined a large portion of their own fleets instead of spending money they didn’t have on maintenance and new car acquisitions. So the NP and probably others were pulling out all the stops to shorten the time it took for their high-class cars to make it back out west. 

Chris Frissell
Polson, MT

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