by Tracer
Anyone have any stories about railcars that have gone missing? Like delivered to the wrong shortline or siding then loosing track of them?
Railroad Forums
Moderator: Robert Paniagua
DutchRailnut wrote:missing ?? no, but gone on long scenic tour yes !!Or sometimes taking a nice long rest in a quiet, out-of-the-way spot after becoming separated from its waybill. (Actually, it was quite easy for that to happen, since the waybill did not travel directly with the car itself but was part of a stack of waybills which the conductor had with him in the caboose, maybe a mile away. If the train set off 17 head-end cars en route the conductor would place the corresponding 17 waybills, not 16 and not 18, in a box provided for the purpose at that location. You can see plenty of chances for slippage here, although in actual practice the system worked well most of the time.) Gadfly is correct that when a car got separated from its waybill some delay and frustration would result. I believe most railroads had at least one full-time clerk, usually at System headquarters, called a "no-bill clerk" -- in fact, major yards also had a no-bill clerk -- who was responsible for matching up bills without cars and cars without bills. Penn Central, of course, wrote the book on lost cars. The most famous incident was probably that involving the LaSalle & Bureau County, which simply corralled quite a number of PC boxcars that were routed to its line, and before interchanging them back painted over the lettering and marked them LaSalle & Bureau County with the intent of collecting car hire for them from whichever railroad had the cars in its possession on a given day. Of course they were found out eventually, and I never heard whether they had to make restitution or whether there was any other penalty. That incident, of course, was outright skullduggery on someone's part and would not be a part of normal railroad operation. I should also add that all this goes back more than 20 years. The way it's supposed to work today is that everything about a shipment is in the computer. If you have a stray boxcar you just put the number in the computer and you'll have all the information about the car -- its movement history, what's in it, where it's supposed to be going, and everything else pertaining to its movement. I know that many aspects of this were working when I retired; instead of spending time once a month inserting freight-train schedule pages in a loose-leaf binder, if you want to know a present-day train schedule, where from and to, where it works en route, and what traffic it carries, just punch in the train symbol, and whether it was last revised 5 minutes ago or 5 months ago you'll have the current version. I'd like to know, if anyone reading this works with car movement on a regular basis, whether it really does work like this nowadays, and whether nobills are largely a thing of the past.
ExCon90 wrote:I had forgot about the "no-bill" clerk who spent part, or most of his time searching for lost cars! LOL! As the computer system became better (ours was called "TIPS"-Terminal Information Processing System), cars became less likely to become lost. Very handy. You could search about anything about cars, origination, destination, past history.........and that jazz. It got me in trouble AND saved my A-- at the same time.DutchRailnut wrote:missing ?? no, but gone on long scenic tour yes !!Or sometimes taking a nice long rest in a quiet, out-of-the-way spot after becoming separated from its waybill. (Actually, it was quite easy for that to happen, since the waybill did not travel directly with the car itself but was part of a stack of waybills which the conductor had with him in the caboose, maybe a mile away. If the train set off 17 head-end cars en route the conductor would place the corresponding 17 waybills, not 16 and not 18, in a box provided for the purpose at that location. You can see plenty of chances for slippage here, although in actual practice the system worked well most of the time.) Gadfly is correct that when a car got separated from its waybill some delay and frustration would result. I believe most railroads had at least one full-time clerk, usually at System headquarters, called a "no-bill clerk" -- in fact, major yards also had a no-bill clerk -- who was responsible for matching up bills without cars and cars without bills. Penn Central, of course, wrote the book on lost cars. The most famous incident was probably that involving the LaSalle & Bureau County, which simply corralled quite a number of PC boxcars that were routed to its line, and before interchanging them back painted over the lettering and marked them LaSalle & Bureau County with the intent of collecting car hire for them from whichever railroad had the cars in its possession on a given day. Of course they were found out eventually, and I never heard whether they had to make restitution or whether there was any other penalty. That incident, of course, was outright skullduggery on someone's part and would not be a part of normal railroad operation. I should also add that all this goes back more than 20 years. The way it's supposed to work today is that everything about a shipment is in the computer. If you have a stray boxcar you just put the number in the computer and you'll have all the information about the car -- its movement history, what's in it, where it's supposed to be going, and everything else pertaining to its movement. I know that many aspects of this were working when I retired; instead of spending time once a month inserting freight-train schedule pages in a loose-leaf binder, if you want to know a present-day train schedule, where from and to, where it works en route, and what traffic it carries, just punch in the train symbol, and whether it was last revised 5 minutes ago or 5 months ago you'll have the current version. I'd like to know, if anyone reading this works with car movement on a regular basis, whether it really does work like this nowadays, and whether nobills are largely a thing of the past.
Aa3rt wrote:There was a rather infamous incident that occurred on the PennCentral in the early 1970's that involved a mail car traveling from Philadelphia, PA to Birmingham, AL being set out in Perryville, MD due to mechanical problems and then being "forgotten" for over 2 years. I was able to find a portion of a Time Magazine article on line discussing the incident. You need to be a Time subscriber to read the entire article but the first few sentences give you a good idea of what transpired. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 57,00.htmlI was told at the time by someone involved in the investigation that the car was bad-ordered in Washington Union Station during the routine interchange inspection and accordingly rejected by the Southern. The Post Office Dept. was notified to transfer the lading. Some time thereafter, PC was notified by the PO that the lading had been transferred and the car was now empty. The car was of a series designated to be scrapped if necessary repairs exceeded a certain amount, which they did in this case. Accordingly, the car was moved (empty, everybody thought) to Perryville, where it was placed on a siding along with 50 or 100 other identical cars, all whitelined and waiting for scrap prices to go up. At some point during this process it was discovered that -- hey -- this one isn't empty!