RE Lumber "rollers"
All this conversation about "rollers" brings back memories
of my days as a brakeman on the Lincoln and Wymore Divisions
in the late 1950's.
At that time 1956-58 there was the matter of boxcars of
lumbers being held at various sidings awating disposition.
The siding I have in mind was at BERKS just a few miles East
of Crete, NE The "Siding" and it was a real Timetable
Siding..not just an auxiliary track was almost always full of
boxcars of lumber awaiting dispositon.
I was working the Crete-Wymore local for it seemed
like..many many days..It was a 16 hour job coming back from
Wymrore to Lincoln wi;th most of that time being used for
switching Cete Mills and we were almost always on overtime
when we left Crete after finishing 5-6 hours of the night
switching and OT or not..We were TIRES AND HUNGREY and wanted
to "get home'...
About the time we were getting our train together and head
for Lincoln the Crete Clerk would come out with a message that
we had several cars of Lumber to "dig out"...and I do mean
'DIG OUT" of the siding at Berks..just a couple of miles east
of Crete an on the uphill side of the hill that takes the Main
Line out of the Blue River Valley and into the bluffs up and
down on the way to Lincoln.
Well sometimes there would be 25-30 cars of that 'cursed
lumber" on the siding and gues which cars we
needed..12th....17th....25th etc.. Well that maneuver from
siding to mainline getting those cars dug out gave us an extra
hour or two of OT and...knowing nothing about rates, routing
tarriffs etc we always wondered "what kind of CRAZY routing
was responsible for this kind of nonsense. To make matters
worse many of these cars were "Foreign" thusly the Q was
paying Per Diem for these cars which were sitting on the
siding for extended periods of time.
Just a year or two later after I had gone to work for the
Rock Island I discovered that that road had a similar
situation at Belleville, KS which was "full of lumber" Just
like we had on the Q.
I had always wondered and still do...how "profitable"
that "Bidness" was which caused such an inordinate amount of
literal "storage in transit especially when the cars were
"stored" on a foreign road and accumuaing per diem.
Pete
-----Original Message-----
From: William Hirt <whirt@fastmail.com>
To: CBQ@groups.io
Sent: Mon, Apr 12, 2021 10:39 am
Subject: Re: [CBQ] Empty GN/NP Box Car Extras
Chris,
I recall seeing a picture of a train rollers on
one of the Burlington branch lines. It was the
Cheyenne WY - Sterling CO branch. Normally a train
of a SW-1, 2-3 cars, and a waycar. The photo had
double headed SW-1s pulling 40 boxcars of roller
lumber plus a waycar. The explanation was that
caused an extra day for the lumber to be moved east
and another day to try and sell it.
The C&NW Modeler had an issue about modeling
lumber yards. As part of that issue, there was
discussion of roller lumber cars and some of the odd
routings the cars would take moving east all to
delay arriving at a final destination without being
sold.
For many years one of those Morrison lessors sat
next to a grain elevator in Rushville MO. The top
coat paint had worn enough that the Lackawanna
lettering was showing through on the car.
Bill Hirt
On 4/12/2021
1:03 AM, leakinmywaders via groups.io wrote:
Bill: Interesting stuff, thanks! That’s the first
I’ve heard of a ban on roller loads, and guys working
for the NP in the late 60s have reported being quite
familiar with the practice, so I wonder if that ban
was temporary, and/or ineffective.
Your comments on the spreading of EB traffic among
multiple interchange roads got me thinking about a
sales agent spreading rollers around the country, so
at any given time he’d have a load within a day or 2
of most any buyer that rang him up.
The east-west disparity in boxcars was so bad that the
NP and GN both worked deals with lessor AA Morrison to
buy older boxcars by the hundreds off the NE
railroads’ bad order lines, refurbish them with
double doors, and lease them for lumber service. So
they were cheap rolling stock that saw high
utilization and big net profit for the NP, and
presumably GN.
Chris Frissell
Polson, MT
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