A few, rather esoteric questions about freight sidings

Having traveled thousand of miles on Amtrak, I've seen countless (almost always abandoned) freight sidings of various configurations along the way.

My purely hypothetical question is this:

How complicated is it to get a siding installed? Let's say I'm opening a small factory and I want to get a single-track siding of a minimal length. Is it terribly expensive in the whole scheme of things? Does it ultimately belong to the owner of the main line, or me? How long does it take from the first call to CSX or whomever before the siding is installed and ready for service?

Occasionally, you can find a line of old, rusted out freight cars that haven't left an unused siding in what appears to be decades. Am I correct in assuming that each of these cars belonged to the facility owner and not the freight company?

Sorry for the kind of oddball nature of these questions, but it's the sort of thing that comes to mind on a long journey by rail.

Arborway wrote:Occasionally, you can find a line of old, rusted out freight cars that haven't left an unused siding in what appears to be decades. Am I correct in assuming that each of these cars belonged to the facility owner and not the freight company.

Not necessarily.
Sometimes facilities do in fact purchase and re-use old freight cars (especially old boxcars and covered hoppers) for storage.
Covered hoppers make great storage silos - companies often keep active ones which the product was shipped in as JIT silos and pay demurrage charges to the owners as they use the product over a long period - (cheaper than building a real fixed storage silo) - so why not buy a used one when it comes on the market to use as their fixed storage silo. And old, retired boxcars as mini-warehouse storage, well, that's pretty obvious. Tank cars too, but not so much (maybe due to cleanliness standards for food oils, or pressure/leak-proof standards for chemicals/oils).
Then sometimes the car owner temporary takes the freight cars out of service (often due to economic downturn, or a lessen need for that type of freight car), and makes a deal with a railroad or a company with unused/underused sidings to store these cars for long periods (months, years even) until they are needed again. A take-off on that are bad-order cars, or cars heavily damanged in derailments say, which are put on the sidings until they can be sold or scrapped.
There can be other reasons, but reuse of the cars as storage, and storing them out of the way until needed again (or scrapped) are two of the biggest. Also during track reconstruction projects often the railroad will get permission (payment may be involved, of course) from nearby facilities to store the MOW equipment for a period of time on their sidings.
I guess a few of the cars are 'forgotten' ("hopper? what hopper?"), or at least during the Penn Central era they would have been

Starting rail service varies depending on where your hypothetical plant will be located. It will probably be cheaper and easier if it's on a short line than if you're on a Class I. And it will make a difference how busy the line you are on is - if you think you can get a siding off the Northeast Corridor to bring in a couple cars now and then, forget it!

There are all sorts of arrangements on sidings - probably most common is that the railroad will own the track to the property line and the customer will own beyond that. In most cases the factory owner will have to hire a contractor to build his portion. Usually the railroad will construct the turnout and track to the property line, especially if they are unionized. On the other hand a shortline may do the work themselves or contract the turnout also.

I'm not trying to be vague but there are many different ways it is done. One thing you will find almost everywhere is the railroad will want some sort of guarantee of traffic. I can't count how often some customer has good intentions of doing "X" cars a year and it never happens. Some lines have a policy of requiring a certain number of cars a year, or else the customer pays a fee to keep the switch in place. Another deal which is sometimes made is for the railroad to charge the entire expense to the customer, but then refund a small amount for each carload the shipper gets or sends. So if the factory owner really does provide a decent amount of traffic, the railroad shares the cost with them. If they don't, the railroad is made whole for the hassle.

More information on this subject:

http://www.readingnorthern.com/updates.shtml

Near the bottom of the page, click on "Industrial development sidetrack specifications".

Thank you all so much for the information, it's something that has really been nagging at me a lot as of late.