Flip Trips

What exactly is a "FlipTrip"?

I notice there are some agreements on them, I can only conclude that perhaps its when a crew gets to a terminal, they go right back out on an other run to their home terminal within the same "trip"?

Or am I way off?

That's exactly right, These are mainly on short runs where it takes 5-8 hrs oneway. Here in Denver where coal is king, we do a lot of buildups where you take an mty out and deadhead back or deadhead out and bring a load back. Flip rate applies to both. Now there's one district at my terminal that has a sweet agreement for flip trips where anytime you change directions its a flip rate, for example your called to dogcatch a train that died at a station thats only a few miles outside of switching limits then you get flip rate even though you only went 5 miles to bring it in.

On former Conrail it was called "turning on the wheel". An example, a
short pool crew between Selkirk and Dewitt (Syracuse) could make the
trip in 4 hours or maybe even a little bit less if everything went OK. The
railroad could have an eastbound train waiting for a crew at Dewitt and
put this inbound crew on it for a fast trip home.
I once ran a train from Selkirk to Buffalo and approaching Buffalo we were
asked by the dispatcher if we were interested in deadheading back to
Rochester to bring in an outlawed SETO to Buffalo, we did and we made
it with 10 minutes to spare.
Noel Weaver