John,
Pete Hedgpeth's story and Jack Schroeder's post about his experience
explains most of it.
The best way to think of it is that the boxcar was a rolling warehouse.
A broker would buy the load from a lumber producer and then attempt to
find a buyer while the car was enroute. A lot of these "rollers" took
circular routes on connected branch lines that would gain an extra day
or two each time this happened to sell the load on it's way to it's
supposed destination point. The Northwestern Modeler I mentioned in
another message said one of the favorite routings for lumber brokers was
on the Fort Dodge, Des Moines and Southern as that could easily add two
days of transit time and more time to sell the load. Once the load was
sold, the waybill would be changed to give the car the most direct
routing to the customer.
In the 1970s, the C&NW used the old major CGW yard at Oelwein IA to
store these lumber cars. A friend of mine who was summer relief engineer
there related the same type story as Pete Hedgpeth did spending an
entire night cherry picking lumber cars out of the yard whose loads had
been finally been sold.
Bill Hirt
On 4/12/2021 11:31 AM, railbass wrote:
What are lumber rollers? I have never heard this term before.
- John Manion
Denver, CO
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