[PRR-talk] Cars never assigned to pools, plus cars stolen from pools

[ricktipton]

Norm - you asked a great question.  Generally speaking, most railroads
"elected" (read, were forced) to participate in assignment pools.

1.  I imagine that you know there were many car types that would never be
"assigned" to pools.  Under Car Service Directive 145 (CSD 145), you could
not assign "plain, unequipped" cars.  AAR Mechanical Codes would include:
XM - unequipped boxcar
GB and GM - unequipped gondola
FM - unequipped flat car
HM or HT - unequipped hopper car

There's some school of thought that any covered hopper (LO) is by definition
specialized equipment.  However, I suspect an LO would have to have at least
a special lining to qualify for "pool assignment" under CSD 145.

2. Under a different car service directive (the number does not come to
mind), hopper cars of the Pocahontas roads were forbidden to be reloaded and
so were thus returned empty to the N&W, C&O, VGN.  But being plain cars,
they could not be assigned to pools -- this was just an adaptation of normal
AAR Car Service Rules to keep opentop car supply at the mines from drying
up.

3. leased cars (most tanks, many reefers) were "privately owned", and moved
per the instructions of their owners/lessees.  I suppose some of them (from
a single-factory shipper)might carry "return to" markings -- but there was
no real need for these markings.  

4. It helps to recognize that most of the "return to" cars met the need for
specialized and/or expensive internal equipment -- particularly for auto
parts transport.  A given auto parts pool would consist of cars from the
various railroads that got part of the revenue outbound from a particular
parts plant (which might ship transmissions, or engines, or carburetors, or
axles, or shock absorbers, or fenders, or other body stampings) to all the
final assembly locations using that plant's output.  And the "inside"
equipment for that pool was often quite specific -- racks for those fenders,
or carts for those transmissions, etc.

5. CSD 145, like many other AAR Car Service Rules, was set up to provide a
reliable supply of cars for loading, and sought to divorce the specialized
(and usually more expensive) equipped cars from, say, the grain rush or
other major traffic disruptions.

6. Of course, as I've written before, every year we (GE Appliance) would
have a few 40-foot DF cars returned with the DF rails caked with rotting
grain.  The CSD 145 -- and even the fact these cars had 8 foot doors (normal
grain traffic required a single 6 foot doorway), did not save us.  In the
real world, our cars would be "stolen" by some desperate grain elevator
(with the collusion of his equally desperate local railroad agent) to move
grain.  This only happened in the fall during the grain rush, but it was our
busiest time of the year as well, and forced us to do more truck shipping
than we liked.  Every year the "car shortage" problem was bucked by grain
operators up to their Congressman, who always "studied" it until it went
away for another year.  The problem got worse as mechanical harvesting moved
faster and faster in an area, and was only resolved when the 100-ton covered
hopper became the norm for grain transport.  You may have noticed that the
railroads then quickly cut up their 40' XM's, "solving" the problem in favor
of jumbo LO's (preferably shipper-provided).

Then again, the above is likely more than you ever wanted to know on the
subject <G>...


Rick Tipton -- Louisville Kentucky
ricktipton at bellsouth.net
Pennsylvania Railroad Technical & Historical Society
Remembering PRR Lines West


-----Original Message-----

________________________________________________________________________
1a. Re: Assigned car lists may be hard to find...
    Posted by: "Norman Bell" nrmnbell at yahoo.com nrmnbell
    Date: Mon Jul 7, 2008 4:08 pm ((PDT))

So were there ever cars from certain railroads you wouldn't put
in "assigned" service?  If so for what reasons. Thanks Norm Bell