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  • Do railroads ever lose railcars??

  • General discussion about railroad operations, related facilities, maps, and other resources.
General discussion about railroad operations, related facilities, maps, and other resources.

Moderator: Robert Paniagua

 #1046509  by DutchRailnut
 
missing ?? no, but gone on long scenic tour yes !!
 #1046712  by Gadfly
 
That wasn't all that uncommon in my day. The Southern TIPS system made it less and likely, but once in a while a car would get set out somewhere and not picked up by a work order. Occasionally, we'd get a note that said, "BE on lookout for a certain boxcar, etc", and we'd shuffle out to the yard tracks to look for it. It was more likely to be found in a cut that was set off at an industry siding, which made it harder to find. Cars could sit there for days, attached to a cut, and the industry would unload ITS set-off and shove it back outside the gate with-OUT saying anything about the "mystery" boxcar. After all, it wasn't THEIR car/load, so they had no obligation to keep up with it! And so, it would sit until somebody happened up on it and checked the car number. Sometimes they would be found in cuts of "MTY-Return Same Route" that just got missed on the bill-outs. It rarely happened in the yard itself because there was always activity and the cars were constantly being moved around. Cars got picked up by work orders and billed MTY, or as loads return route. It was frustrating to "lose" a car, and it could certainly happen. Hope that helps.

GF
 #1046725  by ExCon90
 
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.
Last edited by ExCon90 on Thu May 17, 2012 3:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
 #1046729  by Bigt
 
Yes, it does happen. I was employed in the Plant Protection Dept. at the ALCOA Massena, NY Operations
back in the early - mid Eighties. One night on the midnight shift, just prior to Christmas, we were called
to the Remelt / Ingot / Extrusion mills for a "mysterious find". Upon arrival, inside the loading building,
there were a number of gons and boxcars awaiting LOADING. As the workers opened a 50 foot Railbox
boxcar, to their surprise they found it to be already loaded.....with 50,000 teddy bears! We inspected
what paperwork we could gather from the loading (how we knew what and how many of what we had)
and then contacted the local Conrail officials. At first, they denied that we even had the car. After I
assured them of my past railroad experience, and, that the reporting marks were correct, they decided
they would "do some checking and get back to us". After about an hour, we received a call from a Conrail
official in Albany (Selkirk) who wanted to confirm all of the information. Once that was done, he admitted
that Conrail had indeed "lost" the car and had been searching for it for a little over a month! It had been
labeled as an MTY and was delivered to the Massena Terminal Railroad (ALCOA at that time) when empties
were requested by us. The MTRR picked-up the cars at the Massena Conrail yard, then, brought them to the
plant to the yard there. The car sat in our yard for a couple of days, then, was delivered to the mill
for loading where it sat for another day and a half until it was found not to be empty. As it turned out, the car had
been destined for a toy distribution warehouse somewhere in the New Jersey / Pennsylvania area and was to have
been delivered sometime in the first week of November! How it had ever arrived in Selkirk, then to be sent to Dewitt,
then north to Massena, we never did learn. However, the next morning the MTRR SW1500 was seen switching the
car out and then made a "one car run" to the Conrail yard. I doubt the car and its contents made it to its destination
in time to help for Christmas.
 #1047139  by slchub
 
Before I left the UP for Amtrak, they would sent out a notice that x-number of cars are missing. If any of those cars were found, the person finding the car would get a box of Omaha Steaks. I know of a few guys in Salt Lake who enjoyed a tasty BBQ's as a result of finding a lost car.
 #1047150  by Gadfly
 
ExCon90 wrote:
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.
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.

This only nominally related, but I was called off the 'board one day to work 2nd trick Bill Clerk. This mostly consisted of billing "pigs" (Intermodals) for the "hot shot" afternoon and evening Southbounds. This was a VERY hectic slot, and once the work orders started coming and the piggyback yard delivered their slips, the Bill Clerk was on the computer billing as fast as he can--fingers flying and tractor printers buzzing furiously. BZZZZZZZZT-BZZZZT-BZZZZZZZZZZT-BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! Those of you who have ever worked in a busy yard/freight office know what I'm talking about! :)

One of the features of the TIPS system was, you could NOT bill a car with a mismatched Route/Destination error. IF you did, when you hit "Send", the cursor would fly down the page and highlight each error (including that one) with a red dot beside the mistake. It would not allow the bill to "Send" until you corrected the error---or, at least, this was the way it was *supposed* to work. This did prevent a lot of lost car errors and mis-routes.

So on that particular day, I billed like hell for 4 solid hours--Trainmaster yelling to "GIT THEM BILLS OUT RIGHT NOW, MISTER", printer buzzing and clerks hustling to and fro in the Freight House. There was no apparent incident, I corrected a bunch of typo mistakes as I went, I billed like crazy that evening, and marked up on the extra board for another call.

The following week, I reported at 7 AM to protect a Yard assignment, and the Terminal Agent buttonholed me,
"Come into the office, I need to see you a minute."''

Uh-OH, what have I done NOW?

After pausing for effect and folding his hands across his desk, he said, "Take a look at this (pointing to a 'bill before him) waybill and tell me what's wrong with it."

Naturally, I couldn't because, on the surface it appeared to be just another waybill.

"Well, Uh, Mr, McK----, I really can't with the information in front of me."

So he proceeded to explain. "Well, Mr O----------, you billed that car to Huntington, IL, and it was supposed to go to Huntington, IN! Your Route and Destination didn't agree, and it cost the railroad $1600 to get it BACK!!!!" One lousy letter was going to get me out of service for awhile!

Mr McK----- already had the disciplinary letter typed out, likely giving me 15 days on the ground.

"But, Sir," I protested, "Isn't TIPS suppposed to flag route and destination errors? We depend on it when we are billing, and it usually catches any errors!!!!"

Mr. McK------'s face instantly changed, "UH, YEAH........THAT'S RIGHT! THAT'S WHY I CALLED YOU IN HERE...UH, ER, AH...............I WANTED TO SEE IF YOU , ER UH..HAD ANY SUGGESTIONS ON HOW TO FIX THE COMPUTER SO IT WON'T DO DAT!"

AH HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Saved by the bell! Yeah, right. He wasn't looking for my help to fix a computer glitch, he was going to run me OFF for mis-billing a car. THAT'S what he was up to!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :)

Another story in the saga of missing and mis-routed cars!!!!!!!!!!!

GF
 #1047202  by Desertdweller
 
Geez, I love those Omaha Steaks!

Back when I was working as a clerk, we didn't have anything like a TIPS system. We had a thing on the Milwaukee, but all that would do was search for billing info. that had already been inputted for a particular car (it also worked for TOFC trailers, containers hadn't entered the scene yet).

The main concept here is "Garbage in/Garbage out". There were no electronic readers, the optical scanners wouldn't work if the cars were dirty (wonder what genius thought that up). Everything depended on a clerk sitting somewhere punching an IBM 24 keypunch, trying to read a handwritten handbill.

Did cars get lost? You bet they did. I think I know where a boxcar full of new air conditioners has been sitting for several years.

Despite all the fancy systems, I think the system worked best when there were yard clerks who would actually work in outlying yards, and take daily physical checks of their tracks. A lost car sitting on a lonely siding will never cross a scanner if it is never picked up in a train.

Apparently, nobody has the job of checking cars that sit for a long time. Train conductors, the ersatz clerks by default, are rightly concerned with what is in their train and what they are tasked to pick up. Some of these lost cars are filled with some customer's product that someone else was waiting for and never got. All lost cars not belonging to the railroad they are on, empty or not, are accumulating car hire that someone is getting charged.

Actually, the situation I have most encountered is where a car is delivered empty for loading, and is found to be either full or partially so. It is not hard to trace back the car to the last receiver. But time and again, the previous receiver will insist that the car was empty at the time it was released. These guys will rather lose the value of the full or partial load than admit they made a mistake.

Les
 #1047334  by Gadfly
 
On SR, lost loads, timed freight and lost cars that didn't arrive in time got their demurrage charges annulled. It was charged to an internal account we jokingly called "Railroad Error"! :) We'd talk about railroad error and nobody else knew what the H we were talking about!!! ;)


GF
 #1047401  by Desertdweller
 
GF,

This sort of thing used to really bother me personally. But it all comes down to what that wise Santa Fe clerk told me: "Things are this way because the railroad wants it to be this way."

When I was working in Pierre, SD, I would have moved Heaven and Earth to prevent a situation like that. But how far can a person go if the people you work for don't care?

The lost car full of air conditioners was common knowledge to just about everyone on that particular railroad, including the manager. No one cared.

I worked on a couple other railroads where theft was a big problem. On one of them, someone was sneaking into the railroad yard at night and stealing materials from cars loaded by a local scrap dealer. The railroad hired a couple local guys to hide in a caboose to keep an eye on things.

The problem was, the guys they hired were part of the ring of thieves. Instead of watching out for thieves, they were lookouts to cover for them.

The owner of the scrapyard went to the police department to complain of the continuing thefts. While he was standing there at the desk, the police dispatcher picked up the phone, and warned the thieves (in Spanish) they had better lay off for awhile.

The scrapyard owner was an Anglo, but spoke fluent Spanish. Other than the police dispatcher getting fired, I know of no other repercussions.

Another place I worked was having trouble with thieves stealing copper from our open-air engine facility. Copper windings were being cut out of generators and traction motors that had been removed from locomotives. The railroad was reluctant to spend the money needed for area lighting.

I volunteered to spend an occasional night in the cab of a parked locomotive, with a spotlight and a gun. My plan was to get the drop on the thieves and call the police on my cell phone.

I was told in no uncertain terms that I would do no such thing. The railroad would rather suffer the losses than protect their property.

I've always felt that, inasmuch as my work earned the money that supported my family, a crime against my employer was a crime against my family. And, just as I would defend my own property from those that would steal or destroy it, so would I protect my employer's property.

Apparently, this attitude is now old-fashioned at best, borderline criminal at worst. My only comment was, "Well, if the company is not willing to protect their own property, maybe they deserve to have it stolen."

Someone told me once that they thought I was born 100 years too late. They may be right.

Les
 #1052091  by BR&P
 
Man, lost and wayward cars could fill a whole chapter in the book!

One time a yard crew spotted a car into a local industry. When the customer opened it up to load it, not only was it already loaded, but it was product which that VERY SAME PLANT had shipped out about a month before!

We had a nobill clerk, altho the job was called "Car Tracer". And yes, it was a full-time job. I never bid the job regular but did fill in a few times when the regular guy was out sick or on vacation. It was amazing how mixed up things could get before modern computers.

Probably the strangest one ever was a car which has never been found to this day, at least by the ones who were looking for it. Back in about 1977, a new restaurant was being built with a railroad motif. Hank, a local railfan, bought a surplus flatcar from a large local industry, and arranged to loan it to the restaurant owner for display - probably in return for a few free dinners.

Well that flat car had been used for in-plant service for so long that there were no visible reporting marks on it. It DID have an initial and number assigned to it but you sure couldn't tell by looking at it. So the car moved from the industry to the main CR yard, and from there to an outlying yard. From the outlying yard it SHOULD have gone out on a branchline local to the town with the restaurant. But two things happened.

First, at the outlying yard the car apparently arrived without a waybill. This MAY have been related to an attempt to have the car moved "under the radar" by arrangements with the local brass, I don't recall. But at the outlying yard the crew didn't know what to do with it, so they lined it up to go back to the main yard. And then the blizzard hit.

With snow knee-deep to a giraffe, things were all messed up, and the main yard was plugged. So it was decided to move the whole block of cars from the outlying yard straight to Buffalo to be classified there. Records show the mysterious flat was between two boxcars, whose numbers and initials were known. Both those cars were headed for points west, and Buffalo sent the 3-car "sandwich" on to Elkhart. On paper, the two boxcars showed coupled together. At Elkhart the two boxcars were sent in different directions, while the flat vanished into thin air.

Now that's a long time ago but I THINK the thing which prevented a loss claim from being made was the attempt to have the car moved free. For those younger guys here, in this age of trackside scanners, AEI tags, computerized consists and so on it may seem strange, but in the "old days" some amazing things could be made to happen, without any records, by judicious donations of a box of cigars or a fifth of scotch. This flat car was only one leg of its journey short of an honored resting place, but instead it was whisked off to points unknown, never to be heard from again. Personally I suspect it was stuffed into some steel mill in the greater Chicago area, and eventually was scrapped. We'll never know for sure.

The last part is something which almost happened. A year or two later, in the course of railfanning, either Hank or some of his friends happened on a long string of surplus cars which were shoved down a former EL branch for storage. Included in that string were a couple flat cars. There was some discussion of repainting one of them with nice, bold initial and numbers of the missing car, and then waiting for it to be "discovered" and matched to the missing car. But that was not done, probably because without full waybilling it could not be fully established that the original car had ever existed.

Oh, the stuff that used to go on! :wink:
 #1055860  by Aa3rt
 
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.html
 #1055932  by Gadfly
 
Southern, I think, had a policy that if a car was set out "bad-ordered", it MUST be reported immediately and the car peck sent out to repair it so it could, at least, make it to the rip track for complete repairs. There was a conductor's report, to be filled out on each consist noting any and all bad orders and their disposition. The idea, of course, was to prevent that from happening. THAT was the conductor's duty to do so and accountability for cars "lost" on his tour, or a car unaccounted for in a particular train, MUST have a "last known" location. However, cars DID get lost------occasionally, and with the volume of traffic during boom times, a certain of "lost" cars was to be expected, All in all, we did pretty well, and I didn't spend too much time out there searching out lost cars. When it DID happen, the first item we looked for, along with the intended destination, was bad orders and set outs. Checking to see if the car had accidentally been shoved into an industry.
Pick out the last train the car was thought to be in and call the traffic managers of each customer along the way and ask if they had any cars in a cut that didn't belong there. Sometimes we'd find 'em that way. Then we'd check the "bad-order" report and any rip tracks to see if the car had been sided or moved to a repair track without documentation. Sometimes they'd get set out in the rip track waiting for the carmen to get to it. We'd verify that the car had had a waybill generated, or if it was a "no=bill" car (for which someone would get scolded !). Finally, put out "APB" to conductors to watch all sidings and industry set-offs to see if any numbers matched, or cars that seemed "lonely", sitting off to the side somewhere. Some yards had a "no-bill" clerk whose duties, along with others, was to seek out any lost cars.

With the "TIPS" system, these didn't happen often because EACH and every yard had to receive cars IN, and process them OUT, and a printout/lineup as to how the cars stood in the trains was generated. This was given to the conductor along with all waybills. He was to check the list and see that all waybills matched the list. If he came across a "no-bill", he was to hand-write one and turn it in at the NEXT yard so the clerks could enter it into the computer. They were a lot of safeguards built into the computer system---which eventually got so GOOD at car tracking, most yards turned to ghost towns and all clerical functions were transferred to some central location. I would've never thought that Charlotte (NC) Yard would become such a ghost town! :( I might add that Southern Railway was known for its innovations in dealing with railroad problems and was at the forefront of car tracking and movement! ;)

GF
 #1056020  by ExCon90
 
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.html
I 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!