Car Hire

[Passaic River Rat]

So let's make pretend I am ridiculously rich and I buy a shortline which owns its own gondolas. I want to buy new ties for my new shortline, but I do not know my @$$ from my elbow about the industry. My question is:

How would I waybill the move? Would I have to pay to move my empty cars from my property to the tie plant, then pay again for the loaded move?

I've been trying to read the OT-10 at the Railinc sight, but that seems to be beyond my reading comprehension skills.
Also, the gons are mine and do NOT have the letter "X" as the last character in the reporting marks. Nor do I offer them up for hire at this time.

[rovetherr]

The simple answer would be to bill them empty in advance of loading. However, to get to the point where the interchanging carrier(s) will accept such a move will take a fair amount of negotiation and coordination with their marketing and car control departments. The negotiations could be easy and fairly straight forward if you already have a good working relationship with them, or a real PITA if you are new to the game, or worse, not in their good graces. The basic premise is to move the cars as non-revenue empties to the tie plant, and then pay the freight to move them home. A 180 from the usual method of moving a revenue load, and then reverse routing the empty car as a non-revenue move.

[BR&P]

Here's your problem - Let's say the tie plant is served by CSX (or any other line you want). They most likely have their own cars sitting around. Since the cars are on their home road, they don't cost CSX any car hire. So ordinarily CSX spots them for loading, then takes them to your shortlline and you start paying CSX car hire.

Now if you want to send YOUR cars to the tie plant, CSX would have to pay car hire to you, and would incur a cost to move your empty cars to the tie plant. And they would continue paying car hire to you until the loads are delivered to you. What's in it for them?

So the move would cost MORE to CSX if they use YOUR cars instead of their own. So they will charge you something to move your empties to the plant Whereas when a CSX car goes back to them from you, you pay nothing to get it back to where it came from., CSX MIGHT get lucky and find another load for that CSX car not far from your line and have very little empty mileage to run up.

And if it's going to cost you more to move the ties in your cars, why subject them to the wear and tear? Keep them for whatever revenue customer it is you have on line that uses them. The hassles of the negotiations, and the probability of a higher freight rate, are probably not going to be worth it.