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

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

Chris,

It is always to great to see this information! Thank you.

The cars getting hung in the east was a constant topic of railroad's Burlington Bulletins especially when Harry Murphy was president. It was a main topic in about every other Bulletin. So the Burlington also knew they had cars getting hung up in the east. If I recall right, the eastern roads in the 1960s had about a 15% Bad Order rate. And a common complaint in the Burlington's pleadings that the daily per diem rate was so low that it was cheaper for the eastern roads to hold the western road cars than repair their own.

Attached is a teletype consist of CB&Q Train LW68 departing Lincoln NE for Creston IA circa 1965. There is GN boxcar (12583) in the consist with the consignee ROLLER. The broker was obviously hoping for a sale before the car reached the NYC at Ogdensburg NY.  I've also attached the Excel spreadsheet I've put the car information and my best attempt to decode all of the information in the teletype report.

I've read that the ICC prohibited roller cars starting late 1965-1966 to try and mitigate the national boxcar shortage.

Bill Hirt

On 4/11/2021 1:23 PM, leakinmywaders via groups.io wrote:

>       
>       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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CBQ LW68 Lincoln to Creston 1965.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

Train LW68 Lincoln to Creston 1965.xlsx
Description: MS-Excel 2007 spreadsheet