@@Hyce777 i cross referenced the AAR website with BTS (bureau of transportation) as well as some educated guesses provided by the knowledge that over 500 railways are operated in the US. Granted this is including all sizes and gauges of cars.
UP also states this same number on their site. 28,000 movers, 1.6million unpowered freight cars, 140,000 miles of track in the US. Plus LIRR, MNCR, Brightline, Amtrak, those are just the 4 that come to mind as a Former New Yorker.
X on the end of a reporting mark means it's not a common carrier so BNSF is a common carrier while FURX is a private company. Basically means that BNSF cant really deny a load while FURX could.
So fun fact Hyce, there's a wartime ad from the Pennsy that actually talks about where a specific boxcar's been over the course of a year. IIRC it actually winds up in Portland or Seattle or something like that at one point.
The exception to this is passenger railroads. Those railroads tend to own their own rolling stock. I'm referring to the modern government-owned passenger railroads.
One rare exception can be found on on one of the commuter lines running from NJ into New York. You will see a mix of NJ Transit and Metro North rolling stock and locomotives. The line is operated by NJ Transit, but the rolling stock is owned by Metro North.
Actually, lots of head-end equipment showed up in other railroads’ passenger trains. There are tons of photos of NYC/PRR/other eastern roads’ baggage and express cars in UP and SP passenger trains, among others. Transcontinental sleepers were common, too-NYC and PRR had their agreement with the Overland trio (C&NW, UP, SP)-and when Pullman was broken up and railroads painted sleepers in their own colors ca. 1949, one-road, unified-paint-scheme passenger trains were pretty much a thing of the past. Gotta get those cars across the country somehow!
Work at a small recycling refinery. We lease about 20 tank cars. Very much true we are responsible for wear and tear damage and damage that is our fault. Usually any part that we have to deal with as part of our loading operations (gaskets, manway bolts and the like). We do, per regulations, pre and post loading inspections, Some defects that we notice we have to call an AAR certified repair crew to fix since we are not certified. Basically any welding or pressure valve work, and oddly enough the reporting marks and lettering on the car. This is all done for every car we touch. Weather we lease it or not. Any major repairs such as running gear and breaks is billed to the leaser and done off site if the railcar can safely travel. The only time my hobby and career choice have ever really crossed paths. Keep up the good work.
I remember reading in Trains or Model Railroader that almost all car carriers are hybrid owned. The car is a flat car which is owned usually by TTX and the superstructure which holds the cars is built and owned by the railroad.
Would make sense why the auto trains I see, the cars all have TTX, GATX etc. on the base near the boogie and the R.R. company toward the top near the front or rear of the car.
@@Hyce777 It's a pretty common setup. The wikipedia article on autoracks even mentions it. The bottom of the car is basically a flatcar, and is almost always TTX-owned, with a TTX reporting number. And then often, you'll have railroad markings and a whole separate reporting number on the carbody. Apparently it's a weird historical artifact of the introduction of the autorack - it was the 1960's, and the railroads were a shambles, and they didn't want to invest in expensive specialized equipment. So the company that became TTX offered them a deal: TTX would build and lease them big flatcars, and the railroads would.... Buy the expensive specialized equipment to put on top of them. Railroad management, man. In fact, this deal was so wildly successful for TTX that it's why the third-party car ownership scheme is so common. These days, new autoracks are usually either entirely-TTX owned or entirely-railroad owned depending on if they're likely to be interchanged or not (because of the particular logistics of the auto industry, usually not), but the older ones are still around in droves.
Ok, as a railroader I'm about to show my foamer card so here goes. The Rocky Mountaineer out of Denver (if I recall correctly) used to use power from UP and got tired of UP basically screwing them over. They also had some bad experiences with lease power for the exact reason you said. The company that owned the lease power wasn't familiar with railroad stuff and couldn't be asked to actually pay to fix the broken stuff. So, the Rocky Mountaineer got in touch with a leasing company we've done some work for before (one where the people running actually know the ins and outs of repairing and maintaining locomotives) and asked to lease some power from them. The company in question had an SD-18 and SD40M-2 (I'm pretty sure) laying around that weren't operational. They didn't have the capacity to do the work that was needed so they sent them to us to do the final needed repairs. They then tested them by running them on a few of our trains to make sure they would function. After all was said and done, we prepped them to be shipped across the country and sent them on a train to (I think) Bellevue, where NS took them further west to (I assume) get picked up by UP and taken to Denver. So, if any of you guys out west see the Rocky Mountaineer being pulled by an HZRX 187 or HZRX 8600, now you know that those two locomotives were made operational again in Brewster Ohio and then shipped all the way across the country because the Rocky Mountaineer was tired of junk lease power and getting screwed over by UP. Also, 11:48 yeah that's definitely a thing. Also, also, 12:26 we actually still have quite a few SD40-2s rolling around in the green and silver FURX scheme.
This is so cool. It feels like when I was a little kid and sat down with my grandpa to hear his stories (he was a section foreman for C&O/Chessie/CSX with 40+ years). It's that same feeling, except now I'm hearing it from someone younger than me! 😂Keep up this series, it's great.
Yeah, I can only imagine the joy of doing any kind of repair to the tank itself. I know we had a *ton* of rules about welding on the locomotive fuel tanks at BNSF. I can only imagine it's the same for tank cars, if not worse.
Fun Fact about TTX: It was originally a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad made to build cars for their trailer trains, In fact the company is literally named Trailer Train Company. The Pennsy is quite famous for its many experiments in inter-modal shipping from early attempts at containerization, to its trailer trains that TTX was made for. Considering how ubiquitous they are now, I'd say TTX was a pretty successful experiment.
@Hyce777 Once the biggest company in the world and the biggest U.S. Railway at the time and their prime era overlapped with the heights of U.S. passanger and freight railroading in terms of mode share. Who else would it be when something important or innovative happened back then? If not them, probably the New York Central, and maybe the Santa Fe, or if you went far enough back in time in the East the Baltimore and Ohio becomes a more likely suspect for such an incident, and for the fat past of railroading in the West that would be either Union Pacific, or the Chicago and North Western depending on how far west we this hypothetical important development that we are thinking of happened.
@@Hyce777 TTX is a whole ball of wax, that is slightly different. TTX is a Railcar pool. A pool of "railroad owned cars". The arrangements on how the Racks and Intermodal cars are handled are slightly modified then a normal "Per Diem" car.
@@Alcochaser actually TTX cars carry an hourly and a mileage rate similar to a normal railroad owned car. I'm looking at a TTZX car right now. It carries a $1.26 hourly rate and a .016 mileage rate.
TTX was not a subsidiary of the PRR. It was formed as Trailer Train in 1955 by PRR, N&W, and Rail-Trailer Corp. Other class 1 railroads later joined. Railbox , which maintains a fleet of boxcars, was added at a subsidiary in 1974. In 1974 they formed Railgon was formed to supply and lease a fleet of gondolas. All 3 were subsequently consolidated as TTX Corp.
BNSF shop crew: The hell are you doing here? NS Locomotive: I don't wanna talk about it.... This video reminds me of a sight from my childhood. I'm originally from Galveston, Texas, and close to the bridge that connected the island to the mainland there was a railyard, and it was full, I mean completely stuffed, with Santa Fe boxcars. In a decade of living in that area, I don't think I ever saw them move. Until recently I didn't know that Galveston still had a rail connection to the mainland, since no rail bridge was visible from the causeway, so little me was always puzzled as to why they were just sitting there. I wonder what happened to them, since that yard is long gone now.
Lots of leased power in the northeast on CSX back in the 2000's era. I rarely seen a train that DIDN'T have some kind of leased power. "Rent a wrecks" I believed the crews called'em.
I like how Hyce is "here's how things work and are basically fine if a bit nuanced" and Well There's Your Problem is like "here's how things work and are completely fucked and constantly kill people"
In my 11 years with the Missouri Pacific and Union Pacific trading power was a nightly occurrence. KCMO being the second largest rail hub in the US, most major railroads have a yard of significant size with some sort of a diesel shop. So every night, the yardmaster or Road foreman of engines would be on the phone either providing power or asking for it. These guys knew each other they were together every day. If you had extra power, you would give it away if they had extra power, they would give it away because it changed who was asking who was receiving from night tonight sometimes nobody had power then trains just sat in the yard Other times had plenty of power and no trading was going on great point.
I work out of a warehouse in Bay Minette, Alabama, and it always makes my day to see foreign power roll by my warehouse. I've seen BNSF, UP, NS, CN, CP, even seen an old switcher with CiT on the side.
European rail freight is a lot more complicated. For example in the Netherlands (where I live) running a freight train is basically a collaboration between 3 companies. 1. Prorail (the owner of the railroad, also responsible for rail traffic control) 2. The owner of the rolling stock 3. The owner of the locomotive
Fun addition on how it is in Finland with our much smaller and more isolated railways. The equivalent of Prorail is Traficom (in charge of communication, roads and waterways as well). For us most rolling stock is owned by the rail operators themselves as VR still have a virtual monopoly on all freight (and still functionally all passenger) although with the slower increase in other rail operators such as Fennirail more cars are leased and pretty much all train operations going over the Russian border has leased cars. (For us the locomotives are owned by the rail operators except with probably some small cases regarding intra industry moving)
@@djcarrotking Might you know offhand a resource explaining where car numbers are located on various kinds of European rolling stock? I've started a small collection of O scale freight and passenger cars (mostly Lima) bearing SNCF, DB, RENFE, SBB+CFF and other liveries, and am puzzling over which markings are the actual car numbers (for collection inventory purposes)
It gets more complicated when cars get forwarded from country to country with a lot of bllsht charges and rules. The EU has not improved it at all, long distance shippers would rather use trucks.
The ones without the Xs on the end are other railroads like GTW = Grand Trunk Western, RBMN = Reading & (Blue Mountain) Northern, and SP = Southern Pacific (R.I.P. 1996) The ones with the X (with the exception of CSX) are non-railroad companies/entities like WFLX = Wells Fargo Leasing, DODX = Department of Defense (aka the Military), and TBOX = the boxcar guys
With CSX their AAR reporting mark is CSXT. The "T" (Transportation?) was added to the reporting mark to prevent confusion with non-railroad car owners.
There used to be a caboose in my area that actually had a DODX report marking. DODX 1483, ex Rio Grande caboose 01483 which was stored in fremont nebraska for a good while. . It's currently in Colorado, undergoing restoration by a private owner.
Part of JD Rockefeller's success, maybe even the greater part, came from his dominance of the tank car industry. He realized right away that he could control the transport of crude oil this way. Since he owned all of the tank cars, oil simply wasn't going to move from point A to point B without him taking a cut. It was a no-lose situation. He didn't have to invest in expensive refineries, railroads or drilling. But he was damn well going to earn money if anyone wanted to move the stuff by rail. And he proceeded to rake in gigantic profits for many decades. UTLX is his legacy.
Edit: GATX >148k Procor ~30k BNSF >85k CSX ~51k NS >54k So yeah well over 50k combined :) All can be found on their wiki pages. Can't give a link because YT will just delete my comment but I'm sure you can google for the name + "wiki" :)
One of my favorite interchange stories is about the old Bangor & Aroostook red white and blue potato cars. They were insulated, but had stoves in them to keep the potatoes above freezing in the winter. These cars would go all over, and usually came back fully iced like a reefer car. It would take hours to clear them out and get them warmed back up for another trip.
The Atlantic and Western, now owned by G&W but for a long time a little ten mile shortline near me, had a car shop and car storage and had over 4,000 box cars in interchange! For a railroad that only serves about five small customers with two or three engines, that's a big fleet!
The ATW railcars are all owned by a leasing company. They just have an agreement to use the ATW marks. The railcars themselves are assigned all over the company and will never see the actual ATW line.
There would also need to be a different mind-set. A locomotive owner will think, 'if it is not moving, it is not earning'. A grain car will have period during the year when there is no grain to be shipped and has to sit in a siding for a month or two
Mostly all railroad cars are belong from factories or mines like a tank car has weird letters and numbers that looks like some sort of a code but no it belongs from a oil factory, and the funny thing is I'm a riding the Austin Steam Train Association trip from Austin to Bertram while I watched this video lol.
Tank cars have a lot of legal requirements with the FRA, Department of Transportation and whatever the Canadian equivalent is called. Most of those markings are tied to that, tank class (primarily among three overarching types: general purpose car, pressure car, or acid car), the permitted lading, and a grid showing the tank's regular inspection schedule. Tanks undergo full qualifications every ten years on the tank thickness, lining, structural welds, safety appliances, wheels, etc. So all the weird markings mean something important.
There used to be ALOT of industry owned wagons. which atleast here in britain was pretty much free advertising whilst you got an order of coal shipped in from a colliery across the country.
@@davidty2006 Looking at photos of UK freight trains from years ago, I can't help but to think all those 2-axle wagons were so small that they were easily outclassed capacity-wise by road-going trucks (lorries). I wonder if that was among the factors responsible for carload freight nearly vanishing from the UK and moving by road instead.
@@RailRide hmm factories found it easier moving their quite low quantity by road moreso by the BR diesel era combined with the de-industrialisation of britain main wagons left were for bigger hauls though there was an attempt to keep some wagonload freight via speedlink.
My first driving job was moving coal to the tipple and loaded onto hoppers for shipment to Denver. The hoppers were 5bay 100ton cars lettered with the “flying” Rio Grande, then you read the “fine print”, the cars were actually owned by (I believe) the First National Bank of Denver. There was some “legalese along with this as well. My dad was the one who pointed this out to me, at first I thought he was joking. The funny thing is absolutely no models of this car has been produced.
With more than 28,000 locomotives, 1.6 million rail cars and freight rail lines spanning across 140,000 miles, America's freight rail system is perfectly positioned to be the most efficient and cost-effective transportation network covering the 3.12 million square miles of the continental U.S.
The AAR standardization and paperwork streamlining for interchange in all of North America is a big contrast with Europe. They do have an EU run entity for "standardization" of interchange practices, but it is disfuncional with every state run railroad charging high costs and labor protectionist type bureaucracy. So if a shipper has something that has to cross more than like two countries, they tend to say fckit and use Eastern European migrant truckers. If European rail was privatized and deregulated North American style, the problem would be fixed immediately with a lot of trucks off the roads.
Video thumbnail immediately caught my attention as you can see GATX (General American Transportation Corp) on a lot of European tank cars. These videos are always interesting to see how things are run on the other continent.
CN and CP (nowCPKC) often just have a two letter code on their cars, I understand that X is used where the owner is not a railway. CP also owns the SOO line, marked SOO.
Private 3rd party owned cars have the last letter X ex: UTLX / GATX and when you have CSX, a class 1, not a third party, had to have the classification: CSXT
Same in box logistics, I live near a seaport and regularly see trucks with standard containers. Often branded by the major box ship operators, like Hapag Lloyd or Maersk Sealand, but sometimes I see containers marked by other companies, most often Swire, which just lease out boxes, or DHL which is a more general logistics company. When a container is leased it can travel any modal form from any origin to any destination on globe, and can be interchanged intermodal. The same container can be transported on truck, ship, and rail, from factory to its destination.
I see you alluded to what I've heard called foreign power. I recently saw a train come through my city with two BNSF engines leading it, but I live in CN territory. One reason I heard for this happening is that train might have originated in BNSF territory but had to pass through CN territory, but it was just easier to keep the BNSF engines on. In this scenario, CN will have their own engines run through BNSF territory, or already have done so.
Speaking of foreign power and horsepower hour agreements, I used to work on the Southwestern Railroad, a small class 3 shortline in Carlsbad, New Mexico, that interchanged with the BNSF in Clovis, New Mexico. We would get in unit fracksand trains, empty oil trains, a TON of hopper cars (mostly BN and BNSF, sometimes Cnadian hoppers) for potash unit trains, and hi-cub BNSF boxcars for salt. In the foreign power category it was mostly BNSF locomotives (when I worked there it was a seperate subdivision operated by SWRR), but there was one or two times we had an NS loco, ALOT of Ferro Mex power, one CSX standard cab Dash-8, and an incredibly far from home Canadian Pacific cowl unit EMD. Yes, a Canadian locomotive in the deserts of south eastern New Mexico. A fish out of water to say the least.
I know our shop here in Utah has two brothers that work together restoring old locomotives and equipment for museums. Their reporting mark is KLIX. They do amazing work and restored a beautiful western pacific loco for the Ogden UT museum
another thing to add to that HP hours thing, when I was working near the Great Western tracks in Windsor, CO, I saw at least 1 Norfolk Southern loco helping shunt cars around the oval (it's a giant oval looking thing on Google Earth). Great Western, from what I could tell, has about 5 locos. one blue, one green, one orange, I think a red one and another color I can't think of. simple paint job with their logo on the side.
In Australia, there is a major lease company known as RailFirst (previously known as CFCLA - Chicago Freight Car Lease Australia), where they lease all types of rail cars (flat beds, ore hoppers, container, agriculture, etc) as well as locomotives. These can be both second hand or new (new locomotives and rail cars are being built as of current, to replace aging rollingstock)
I worked for one company where we leased old covered hoppers from the railroad rather than one of the leasers. They were in captive service between Baltimore and West Virginia. So beat up that no one else would have wanted to use them.
Autoracks seem to have the most variety of RR names on their cars. Run through Locos are common on commodities that travel across the Country. When they come back through then they can bring that Loco back to where it came from.
I'm developing an RPG set in space. And I've been loving all your stories about bizzard interactions between unions, different associations, different lines of ownership, etc. Basically I want trade in space to be every bit as strange as trade on Earth.
Back before the Staggers Act substantially economically deregulated the railroads, the railroads' ability to raise capital for stuff like railcars was limited. This led to car shortages and shipper complaints to the Interstate Commerce Commission (the railroads economic regulator at the time). In an attempt to deal with the shortages, the ICC increased the rates the railroads had to pay to car owners when a car wasn't on its home railroad. This was called incentive per diem. The result was investors buying short line railroads and then buying as many cars as could physically fit on the railroad. They then managed their fleets of cars to keep them on the class 1 railroads as much as possible. This solved the car shortage but increased the class 1 railroads cash bleed. Incentive per diem was repealed shortly after Staggers came into effect.
The staggers act was passed in 1980. The "Incentive Per DIem" boxcars came around later. However, when IPD was cancelled all that really did was cancel the bumped up rate. The IPD boxcars still carried a high rental rate which was later grandfathered in. So for example if you bought a IPD boxcar as an investment in the early 80s you had a few years of incentive per diem and the tax credit. When the incentive rate went away you still owned the car and it still could earn decent revenue.
They didn't even have to buy the railroad, just bought cars and registered them to the shortline and shared revenue. Doctors and lawyers were financing box car fleets. Some of them lost big when the rules were changed, "grandfather" time not being enough to cover it or shippers finding cheaper options for cars. Also a lot of cars with no use ended up sent back to "home rails" that had no space for them.
@@MilwaukeeF40C grandfathered time was actually not bad and if the cars stayed in service they could produce decent revenue. Definitely enough revenue to make the investment worth it. But you had to be willing to weather the storm. It was a long storm however as boxcar traffic declined dramatically as trucks became larger and carried more weight. However to this day you still see thousands of those cars in service.
I don’t have a video of it, but one time, while a Train was Passing through at the Station where I take my Railroad Training Class, there was a CSX locomotive (and I think a NS locomotive) behind a UP locomotive in Stockton, California.
Fun fact, the Field Manual of the AAR Interchange Rules has colors on the cover that always matches the latest Super Bowl winner prior to the release of the book's annual updates.
When i was younger the Seabord Coast line rail road had a train called the coast to coast express this train started in california on the southern pacific railroad and ran through Abbeville SC. It would have engens from southern pacific, frisco and the seaboard.
9:51 It goes the other way too down here in Atlanta, with BNSF power absolutely EVERYWHERE on NS. Like full BNSF power on an intermodal, going thru Duluth or Norcross.
On the last part of Danny Harmon's latest video, he chased down an empty hopper train going to Florida's Bone Valley. The motive power - a BNSF GE unit all by its lonesome.
Talking about shared power hours. There is also trough route trains. When I lived in FL you would see this. A flour mill near Tampa would get a grain train in from CSX. I have seen it where the inter train. Locomotives and all the rolling stock say BNSF on it. Its a lot easier for CSX just to stick their crew on that train when the whole thing is going to the same place.
Not only have I seen Norfolk Southern power in Edmonds, I've seen one of their heritage units going south through Edmonds! Don't recall which railroad, it was the light green one...
Funnily enough, the only BNSF locomotive in my collection was acquired specifically to re-create the practice of horsepower-hours amongst my many NS locos. Being in O gauge, this was a rather pricey simulation :)
I think you might have seriously underestimated the number or railcars out there. I see a lot of GATX on CN's line. Wikipedia says as of Dec 31 2020, they had 148939 rail cars. They are in Europe and Asia as well as North America, so that number won't apply to North America exclusively. A couple other examples would be Wells Fargo Rail has 135000 cars and Procor has 30000 cars.
I swear that NS 4500-whatever engine has been kicking around the NW forever. I'm pretty sure it's the same one I saw heading south through Portland in 2017 on a UP manifest
I was under the impression the X suffix at the tail of the reporting marks represented it was a private/contract carrier vs. a common carrier, eg UTLX, GATX, TTX, etc. CSX was kind of a self-made exception because they were using it as a placeholder when renaming the Chessie System after they acquired Seaboard and it just stuck because it was the 80s, man.
For rolling stock not owned by the railroads, The best example I can think of for this are the three bay hoppers marked OMAX , the report marking for the Omaha Power Public District
Hey Hyce! I work on a class one (the blue one) and I've come to realize something and would like to share. Not sure if you already know this but going back to the Autoracks, big leasing companys own the bottom of the car (the "flat" car) and the railroads actually own the rack part of it. I still havent figured out why yet but its something to keep you thinking! Thats why you can see railroads on a autorack and the car is labeled as a TTGX or something of the sort. Fun!
Someone else also commented this; and it's just utterly bizarre to me. Lol. Maybe each railroad has different ramp setups requiring different types? I have no idea. Very neat fact.
. If the train isn't moving too fast I try to look at those end panels and you can get a TTX bottom and the track has a UP herald but on paper they are still CNW. SP. MP. DRGW. WP the latter two being the rarest. The recent Mindbender are the new auto racks apparently owned by GATX with no lettering or reference to TTX and have WRWK Warwick reporting marks but the big metal plate has the new CPKC emblem
I remember seeing Conrail locos lashed into Southern RR trains. I found out that some Southern trains would run into Conrail territory to deliver a train directly to a yard and avoid an interchange. But that generated a HP-hours credit for Southern. So occasionally Conrail would provide a loco to Southern to "run off hours".
A very nice episode Mark about something I never thought too much about. Makes perfect sense of course. So enjoyed the nuanced details you included which added a perfect layer of understanding to car ownership. As always, Professor, many thanks for yet another excellent Railroad 101 learning moment video and cheers to you!
X usually symbolizes a private company or privately only car or locomotive. For example my local power plant owns their own coal cars and end in x. Leasing companies are typically private.
As for the thumbnail: _GATX Corporation is a railcar lessor that owns fleets in North America, Europe, and Asia. In addition, jointly with Rolls-Royce Limited, it owns one of the largest aircraft spare engine lease portfolios. It is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. As of December 31, 2020, the company owned 148,939 rail cars, including 83,959 tank cars, 64,980 freight cars, and 645 locomotives. Other major car types owned include covered hoppers, open-top hopper cars, and gondolas. It primarily serves the petroleum industry (29% of 2020 revenues), chemical industry (22% of 2020 revenues), food industry (11% of 2020 revenues), mining industry (10% of 2020 revenues), and transportation industry (20% of 2020 revenues).[1]_
don't know if this has anything to do with it but X is a fairly common substitution in short-hand words, like, the company I work for uses Trx for "transmissions" Tix for "tickets", in this case it might be a substitution for "cross" as in "Cross-country", or maybe simply alluding to the universal association of the X of a "crossing" sign to railroads... kind of like the way trucking company logos almost always incorporate a graphic representation of a road receding off into the distance
I do a lot of railfanning. A reporting mark ending in X indicates that the owner is not a railroad. Not all reporting marks have 4 letters, notably UP for Union Pacific. Some manufacturers own their own freight cars, and one that I will note is The Andersons, which is an agricultural products company that frequently uses the mark AEX but has others. TTX owns almost all the auto rack bases even if the cover shows the name of a railroad. Some short lines have large lease fleets, and so you tend to see their reporting marks all over the place.
You see that with the commercial shipping industry. You see the standard commercial container with the livery of the major shippers like Maersk mixed together on all sorts of container ships operated by these companies. These intermodal containers are handed off from one carrier to another as they move to their destination. They are mostly owned by or leased to the companies that use these shippers services.
Fun lore fact for my o gauge railroad, there are two ES&DT locomotives and their only standard gauge crane on permanent loan to the AP&CC. Side note, how was the trip overseas?
I've seen quite a few GATX cars, mostly liquid containers where the name is quite prominent on the tank. And I'm not even American, lol. I always thought it made sense that the railways may not necessarily own their carriages since they're the infra owners (owning the tracks) and transporters (owning and operating the locomotives) but also are merely given an order to ship a company's goods which also own containers. I think road logistics work similar where (some) shipping companies merely own the vehicles and the drivers and merely transport others' cargo including the containers.
The electric utility serving the San Antonio TX area owns a fleet of coal hopper cars used to transport WY coal. To prevent inadvertent door operation in route, the cars are solid bottom. They dump by inversion mechanism at the coal yard.
When I was a kid in the 80s railroads hauled lots more boxcars than they do now- they had all sorts of neat writing on them and pictures. Then intermodal took the place of most of the boxcars. When I worked as a conductor in the 2000s I noticed everything was a utilitarian color/ grey, black, white, reddish brown, yellow, etc. gone were the fancy road names and slogans and all I saw were reporting marks and numbers. The cool designs of days gone by were no more…😢
The most one thing I’ve noticed. On certain cars you see a stencilling saying something to the effect: this car runs under an international running agreement/ license…. This must pertain to what you are talking about.
I thought an X at the end of a reporting mark designated that it was owned "privately" and not by a railroad. Like the UTLX or TTX or TILX cars you mentioned, but I've also seen leased locomotives near me (Lubbock & Western Railway, operated by Watco; from Lubbock west to Whiteface and south to Seagraves, and from Plainview west to Dimmitt) labeled as WAMX or GATX. I don't know if LBWR has any of their own locomotives or leases them all, but they do have a couple that are painted red and black with Texas Tech logos on it. WAMX 3536 (GP35L) and WAMX 4207 (GP40-2M) for anyone that wants to look them up.
Hearing the explanation for sharing horsepower-hours was great, earlier today I saw a Ferromex loco pushing at the rear of a BNSF consist in Denver earlier today so that explanation was really timely lol
When I was working as a railway clerk the daily fee that a railroad would pay the owner of a car not owned by that railroad was seven dollars. I was at work the night the Penn Central went down. We (the B&O) held thousands of cars routed for the PC in Baltimore Terminal and the priority was to offer the cars for interchange so the B&O could charge a penalty for cars offered for interchange, not accepted.
That all changed ages ago. Railcars not privately owned are now paid for on an hourly basis with the rate dependent on the age of the car and its value. In today's market you can also negotiate with the railroads what you think your car is worth on an hourly basis
@@andywomack3414 You're right Andy. And interestingly enough the actual term "per diem" goes back to your day when cars were "Per Day". I bet the term 'midnight interchange' means something to you. I came around a bit later and by then "Per DIem" was an hourly rate so there was no monetary reason for a midnight interchange. (I'm sure you know the "old heads" clung on to the concept for years and computer systems would measure cars in yard at midnight). There is now a term called "offering" in which your computer transmits a list of cars to your connection and tells them you want to give them cars they say they cannot accept. And of course the new system is probably as mis-used as what you saw!
@@cdavid8139 I don't know if the position of railway clerk exists anymore. I doubt the clerk jobs that remain involve walking track or standing out in the rain verifying inbound and outbound trains
@@cdavid8139 When I first started the computer was a main-frame occupying a large room downtown. We sent train consists buy feeding punched cards into a machine that translated the data to a punched tape which was feed into what looked like a 1920's era teletype machine which also typed out a list to be stored with the tape and cards. The consist would then be delivered via teletype to whatever yard received the train. Not familiar with the term "midnight interchange" although there may have been a midnight deadline for offering those cars to the PC as it went bankrupt. After midnight, lose a day's per diem. I've forgotten more than I remember, but that was a memorable night. Strangely celebratory on the B&O, as the PC was a spectacular merger failure, and rail mergers are not popular with railroaders on the ground. B&O was in the process of being taken over by the C&O, and there was resentment over that.
Did you ever get to "foreclose" on one of the bank's engines (I guess it would be more of a mechanic's lean) for failure to pay in a timely manner? That would be so funny.
Been there. Done that. Used to own a bunch of old GP7u locomotives and had to go after a couple of leasors for non payment. There are some legal assistance (or there was at the time) that gave the equipment owners a bit more power to reposses than other heavy equipment. It all worked out but it was entertaining
Something else not touched on about the locomotives: run-through power. Danny Harmon (Distant Signal) did a good video on it some time ago. It doesn't really make sense for say UP to get a train from CPKC that doesn't need to be broken up because it's not at its final destination only to swap the locomotives to their own. They would just put their own crew in the CPKC lead and carry on and then owe CPKC (or whoever's locomotives they actually were) those horsepower hours.
If something is seriously wrong with the car, a lot of times they will ship it to the repair facility. When this happens itll have a sign saying home shop for repair.
It's always fun to see "mismatched" freight cars and locomotives running on different railroads. Also it's pretty interesting to see what abbreviations get made up to mark on the cars. Where I am in CSX/NS land here in NJ, because of all the ports, especially the port of Newark, we tend to get quite a bit of foreign power and cars. I've met railfans who have seen nearly every railroad's locomotives here in NJ at one time or another. Just today, someone posted a video that they saw both KCS and CN on two different trains here in NJ. I haven't tried to railfan freight trains, my main focus has been NJ Transit, but I might try to sometime.
I remember looking at the statistics in Railway Age during the big recession and it was about 35% this is also when scrapping is outnumbering new cars deliveries 2 to 1. You always know when things are slow and passing sidings are filled along with the lightly used Branch lines
Railcar accounting rules/practices are a mind-numbing maze. They often resulted in empty cars being returned to the owning railroad rather than re-loaded near where they were emptied. Pennsy (yes, them again) started the company that became TTX to develop TOFC equipment. With ICC approval of car pooling other railroads then bought into it. Pooling of car ownership with RailBox - "Next load, any road" - and RailGon was a way to reduce utilization inefficiency and provide much needed equipment for cash-strapped railroads pre deregulation. I think TTX absorbed the RailBox and RailGon fleets at some point. TTX's website says they own "175,000 efficient and low cost railcars."
all depends on car type. You can set up your cars as general purpose and it can be loaded from any point to any point. Makes sense during equipment shortages.but if you have a car your company invested in to haul a specific product you can assign them to a home point so that when empty the must return home
Just found this out myself traveling to the midwest in may this year having a man tell me at the golden spike tower in north platt nebraska. It blew my mind.😁
I used to do both freight agent work as well as shop car management. Your description of the AAR billing is fairly correct, but I can add that the AAR has a billing matrix as well as an annual field manual that describes all the common repairs and the costs that you are allowed to charge for repairs. It's fairly complicated. Any repairs not covered are usually those for specialized equipment provided by the car owner for the product that the cars are designed for. Things like the piping on pressure differential cars comes to mind. We did repairs to a great many of those as a contract shop for the car owners. Repairs that cannot be completed by the contract shops are sent to the major shops according to the car owner desires. For the record, there are MILLIONS of freight cars in North America!! I would estimate that 75% of them are NOT owned by the railroads themselves. Most are owned by leasing companies, regardless of what name is showing on them. The X on the end of the names is a generic identifier for non-rail company owned cars. It doesn't mean that cars without the X are not still owned by leasing companies. It simply means that they are non-rail owned cars that the revenue goes to the owner. With leased cars, the revenue goes to the carrier, and they pay a lease fee.
Customers pay rental fees too: One of my first jobs was to scan the RFID on rail cars as they entered and left a steel mill with a PLC. A simple SQL report (by others) of the stored times proved how long the cars were on-premise and saved the steel mill big $$
Demurrage. Keeps customers from sitting on the cars and using them as storage. Generally only applies to railroad owned cars, however a private car owner can make their cars subject to it also.
![[SFS] This is a boxcar that ruined our week.](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/F-Jb1L8ShrY/mqdefault.jpg)
![[SFS] This is a boxcar that ruined our week.](/img/tr.png)
There are roughly 1.6 million rail cars in the united staes
Holy crap. I knew it was a lot but not that many. What's the source on that?
@@Hyce777 i cross referenced the AAR website with BTS (bureau of transportation) as well as some educated guesses provided by the knowledge that over 500 railways are operated in the US. Granted this is including all sizes and gauges of cars.
That includes about 250,000 grain cars.
Now imagine how many times you've seen the same rail car throughout your life. I think about that with semi trailers on the highway. 🤔
UP also states this same number on their site. 28,000 movers, 1.6million unpowered freight cars, 140,000 miles of track in the US.
Plus LIRR, MNCR, Brightline, Amtrak, those are just the 4 that come to mind as a Former New Yorker.
So what you are saying is I could buy a custom rail car and put logos on it. Genius advertising.
When do we get a real CRAP car
I mean, this isn't legal advice, but it'd be cheaper to buy a few spray cans... Lol!
@@kANGaming if I saw a Kan branded car I would be delighted
@@Hyce777 ESnDT branded tank cars comming soon to your local CSX yard ? xD
#DEW IT
X on the end of a reporting mark means it's not a common carrier so BNSF is a common carrier while FURX is a private company. Basically means that BNSF cant really deny a load while FURX could.
Oh interesting! That's a detail that I've never heard, but makes sense. Cheers!
@@Hyce777 That's also why CSX's reporting mark is CSXT and not CSX.
Huh. Never thought about common carrier protections and regulations on the railroad, especially in re private cars. Interesting.
@@Hyce777 interestingly most container reporting marks end in a "U" or a "Z" like JB Hunt is JBHU for a container
@@dafrog55Huh. I always wondered why all FedEx trailers are FDXZ or whatever. Cool to learn, thank you!
So fun fact Hyce, there's a wartime ad from the Pennsy that actually talks about where a specific boxcar's been over the course of a year. IIRC it actually winds up in Portland or Seattle or something like that at one point.
That's cool!
Makes me want to buy air tracker and put it on a car or ten.
The exception to this is passenger railroads. Those railroads tend to own their own rolling stock. I'm referring to the modern government-owned passenger railroads.
For most, yeah. There's always odd exceptions too. Haha.
One rare exception can be found on on one of the commuter lines running from NJ into New York. You will see a mix of NJ Transit and Metro North rolling stock and locomotives. The line is operated by NJ Transit, but the rolling stock is owned by Metro North.
Actually, lots of head-end equipment showed up in other railroads’ passenger trains. There are tons of photos of NYC/PRR/other eastern roads’ baggage and express cars in UP and SP passenger trains, among others. Transcontinental sleepers were common, too-NYC and PRR had their agreement with the Overland trio (C&NW, UP, SP)-and when Pullman was broken up and railroads painted sleepers in their own colors ca. 1949, one-road, unified-paint-scheme passenger trains were pretty much a thing of the past. Gotta get those cars across the country somehow!
I was actually being told about private rail car chartering. Blew.my mind.
in britain alot of passenger stock is on lease though normally wears operator livery.
Work at a small recycling refinery. We lease about 20 tank cars. Very much true we are responsible for wear and tear damage and damage that is our fault. Usually any part that we have to deal with as part of our loading operations (gaskets, manway bolts and the like). We do, per regulations, pre and post loading inspections, Some defects that we notice we have to call an AAR certified repair crew to fix since we are not certified. Basically any welding or pressure valve work, and oddly enough the reporting marks and lettering on the car. This is all done for every car we touch. Weather we lease it or not. Any major repairs such as running gear and breaks is billed to the leaser and done off site if the railcar can safely travel. The only time my hobby and career choice have ever really crossed paths. Keep up the good work.
Thank you for some great additional context! :)
I remember reading in Trains or Model Railroader that almost all car carriers are hybrid owned. The car is a flat car which is owned usually by TTX and the superstructure which holds the cars is built and owned by the railroad.
Weird. Would love to hear the source on that.
The rack is called an "Appurtenance" and actually carries its own rental rate separate from the flatcar.
Would make sense why the auto trains I see, the cars all have TTX, GATX etc. on the base near the boogie and the R.R. company toward the top near the front or rear of the car.
@@Hyce777 re-read buddy, his source was either "Trains" magazine or "Model Railroader" magazine :)
@@Hyce777 It's a pretty common setup. The wikipedia article on autoracks even mentions it. The bottom of the car is basically a flatcar, and is almost always TTX-owned, with a TTX reporting number. And then often, you'll have railroad markings and a whole separate reporting number on the carbody. Apparently it's a weird historical artifact of the introduction of the autorack - it was the 1960's, and the railroads were a shambles, and they didn't want to invest in expensive specialized equipment. So the company that became TTX offered them a deal: TTX would build and lease them big flatcars, and the railroads would.... Buy the expensive specialized equipment to put on top of them. Railroad management, man.
In fact, this deal was so wildly successful for TTX that it's why the third-party car ownership scheme is so common. These days, new autoracks are usually either entirely-TTX owned or entirely-railroad owned depending on if they're likely to be interchanged or not (because of the particular logistics of the auto industry, usually not), but the older ones are still around in droves.
Ok, as a railroader I'm about to show my foamer card so here goes. The Rocky Mountaineer out of Denver (if I recall correctly) used to use power from UP and got tired of UP basically screwing them over. They also had some bad experiences with lease power for the exact reason you said. The company that owned the lease power wasn't familiar with railroad stuff and couldn't be asked to actually pay to fix the broken stuff. So, the Rocky Mountaineer got in touch with a leasing company we've done some work for before (one where the people running actually know the ins and outs of repairing and maintaining locomotives) and asked to lease some power from them. The company in question had an SD-18 and SD40M-2 (I'm pretty sure) laying around that weren't operational. They didn't have the capacity to do the work that was needed so they sent them to us to do the final needed repairs. They then tested them by running them on a few of our trains to make sure they would function. After all was said and done, we prepped them to be shipped across the country and sent them on a train to (I think) Bellevue, where NS took them further west to (I assume) get picked up by UP and taken to Denver.
So, if any of you guys out west see the Rocky Mountaineer being pulled by an HZRX 187 or HZRX 8600, now you know that those two locomotives were made operational again in Brewster Ohio and then shipped all the way across the country because the Rocky Mountaineer was tired of junk lease power and getting screwed over by UP.
Also, 11:48 yeah that's definitely a thing.
Also, also, 12:26 we actually still have quite a few SD40-2s rolling around in the green and silver FURX scheme.
glad to see that "Treat it like a Rental" applies to more than cars.
And mules, as in "Sidney Crosby beat him like a rented mule, and the Penguins retake the lead!"
This is so cool. It feels like when I was a little kid and sat down with my grandpa to hear his stories (he was a section foreman for C&O/Chessie/CSX with 40+ years). It's that same feeling, except now I'm hearing it from someone younger than me! 😂Keep up this series, it's great.
I was just thinking ‘I’d love a new Hyce talky video’ and here one is!
Saturday's and sunday's at 12 pm est. :)
used to work at a shop repairing tank cars, super dangerous work but good times. got a lot of stories out of it lmao.
That's freaking cool!
Yeah, I can only imagine the joy of doing any kind of repair to the tank itself. I know we had a *ton* of rules about welding on the locomotive fuel tanks at BNSF. I can only imagine it's the same for tank cars, if not worse.
@@Hyce777 we had 4 books that were about 5 inches thick just on welding regulations, it was pretty crazy
Fun Fact about TTX: It was originally a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad made to build cars for their trailer trains, In fact the company is literally named Trailer Train Company. The Pennsy is quite famous for its many experiments in inter-modal shipping from early attempts at containerization, to its trailer trains that TTX was made for. Considering how ubiquitous they are now, I'd say TTX was a pretty successful experiment.
It's always the Pennsy, lmao.
@Hyce777 Once the biggest company in the world and the biggest U.S. Railway at the time and their prime era overlapped with the heights of U.S. passanger and freight railroading in terms of mode share. Who else would it be when something important or innovative happened back then? If not them, probably the New York Central, and maybe the Santa Fe, or if you went far enough back in time in the East the Baltimore and Ohio becomes a more likely suspect for such an incident, and for the fat past of railroading in the West that would be either Union Pacific, or the Chicago and North Western depending on how far west we this hypothetical important development that we are thinking of happened.
@@Hyce777 TTX is a whole ball of wax, that is slightly different. TTX is a Railcar pool. A pool of "railroad owned cars". The arrangements on how the Racks and Intermodal cars are handled are slightly modified then a normal "Per Diem" car.
@@Alcochaser actually TTX cars carry an hourly and a mileage rate similar to a normal railroad owned car. I'm looking at a TTZX car right now. It carries a $1.26 hourly rate and a .016 mileage rate.
TTX was not a subsidiary of the PRR. It was formed as Trailer Train in 1955 by PRR, N&W, and Rail-Trailer Corp. Other class 1 railroads later joined. Railbox , which maintains a fleet of boxcars, was added at a subsidiary in 1974. In 1974 they formed Railgon was formed to supply and lease a fleet of gondolas. All 3 were subsequently consolidated as TTX Corp.
BNSF shop crew: The hell are you doing here?
NS Locomotive: I don't wanna talk about it....
This video reminds me of a sight from my childhood. I'm originally from Galveston, Texas, and close to the bridge that connected the island to the mainland there was a railyard, and it was full, I mean completely stuffed, with Santa Fe boxcars. In a decade of living in that area, I don't think I ever saw them move. Until recently I didn't know that Galveston still had a rail connection to the mainland, since no rail bridge was visible from the causeway, so little me was always puzzled as to why they were just sitting there. I wonder what happened to them, since that yard is long gone now.
Lots of leased power in the northeast on CSX back in the 2000's era. I rarely seen a train that DIDN'T have some kind of leased power. "Rent a wrecks" I believed the crews called'em.
New Drinking Game: Take a shot any time Hyce says 'nuance' 'nuances' and/or 'nuanced' This applies to any of his previous videos as well
Nuisance
Interestingly with the autoracks, I think most of the flat cars are owned by TTX but the tracks on top of them are owned by the railroads.
That's wacky! Neat.
@@Hyce777that's why they're ttxd yet the car car container section has say a bnsf logo
@@Hyce777 If you look closely, you'll see the rack has it's own number distinct from the actual car number.
I like how Hyce is "here's how things work and are basically fine if a bit nuanced" and Well There's Your Problem is like "here's how things work and are completely fucked and constantly kill people"
In my 11 years with the Missouri Pacific and Union Pacific trading power was a nightly occurrence. KCMO being the second largest rail hub in the US, most major railroads have a yard of significant size with some sort of a diesel shop. So every night, the yardmaster or Road foreman of engines would be on the phone either providing power or asking for it. These guys knew each other they were together every day. If you had extra power, you would give it away if they had extra power, they would give it away because it changed who was asking who was receiving from night tonight sometimes nobody had power then trains just sat in the yard Other times had plenty of power and no trading was going on great point.
I work out of a warehouse in Bay Minette, Alabama, and it always makes my day to see foreign power roll by my warehouse. I've seen BNSF, UP, NS, CN, CP, even seen an old switcher with CiT on the side.
European rail freight is a lot more complicated. For example in the Netherlands (where I live) running a freight train is basically a collaboration between 3 companies.
1. Prorail (the owner of the railroad, also responsible for rail traffic control)
2. The owner of the rolling stock
3. The owner of the locomotive
Fun addition on how it is in Finland with our much smaller and more isolated railways. The equivalent of Prorail is Traficom (in charge of communication, roads and waterways as well). For us most rolling stock is owned by the rail operators themselves as VR still have a virtual monopoly on all freight (and still functionally all passenger) although with the slower increase in other rail operators such as Fennirail more cars are leased and pretty much all train operations going over the Russian border has leased cars.
(For us the locomotives are owned by the rail operators except with probably some small cases regarding intra industry moving)
Yeah theres alot of leasing companies.
Where the stock had the livery of the operator but is owned by someone else...
@@djcarrotking Might you know offhand a resource explaining where car numbers are located on various kinds of European rolling stock? I've started a small collection of O scale freight and passenger cars (mostly Lima) bearing SNCF, DB, RENFE, SBB+CFF and other liveries, and am puzzling over which markings are the actual car numbers (for collection inventory purposes)
It gets more complicated when cars get forwarded from country to country with a lot of bllsht charges and rules. The EU has not improved it at all, long distance shippers would rather use trucks.
@@RailRide Those numbers are called UIC codes. It consists of 12 numbers.
The ones without the Xs on the end are other railroads like GTW = Grand Trunk Western, RBMN = Reading & (Blue Mountain) Northern, and SP = Southern Pacific (R.I.P. 1996)
The ones with the X (with the exception of CSX) are non-railroad companies/entities like WFLX = Wells Fargo Leasing, DODX = Department of Defense (aka the Military), and TBOX = the boxcar guys
CSX is actually CSXT. X denotes non common carrier. Meaning private companies can deny loads to other private companies.
With CSX their AAR reporting mark is CSXT. The "T" (Transportation?) was added to the reporting mark to prevent confusion with non-railroad car owners.
@@wvrails never saw those too often aside from their engines
There used to be a caboose in my area that actually had a DODX report marking. DODX 1483, ex Rio Grande caboose 01483 which was stored in fremont nebraska for a good while.
. It's currently in Colorado, undergoing restoration by a private owner.
Part of JD Rockefeller's success, maybe even the greater part, came from his dominance of the tank car industry. He realized right away that he could control the transport of crude oil this way. Since he owned all of the tank cars, oil simply wasn't going to move from point A to point B without him taking a cut. It was a no-lose situation. He didn't have to invest in expensive refineries, railroads or drilling. But he was damn well going to earn money if anyone wanted to move the stuff by rail. And he proceeded to rake in gigantic profits for many decades. UTLX is his legacy.
Edit:
GATX >148k
Procor ~30k
BNSF >85k
CSX ~51k
NS >54k
So yeah well over 50k combined :) All can be found on their wiki pages. Can't give a link because YT will just delete my comment but I'm sure you can google for the name + "wiki" :)
That's neat! I knew BNSF keeps a pretty extensive grain hopper fleet but didn't think they had that many. Cool!
One of my favorite interchange stories is about the old Bangor & Aroostook red white and blue potato cars. They were insulated, but had stoves in them to keep the potatoes above freezing in the winter. These cars would go all over, and usually came back fully iced like a reefer car. It would take hours to clear them out and get them warmed back up for another trip.
The Atlantic and Western, now owned by G&W but for a long time a little ten mile shortline near me, had a car shop and car storage and had over 4,000 box cars in interchange! For a railroad that only serves about five small customers with two or three engines, that's a big fleet!
The ATW railcars are all owned by a leasing company. They just have an agreement to use the ATW marks. The railcars themselves are assigned all over the company and will never see the actual ATW line.
Sounds like IPD boxcars
@@cdavid8139 I'm going back to the 60s and 70s with the interchange fleet, I have no idea what their reporting mark gets up to in modern times.
There would also need to be a different mind-set. A locomotive owner will think, 'if it is not moving, it is not earning'. A grain car will have period during the year when there is no grain to be shipped and has to sit in a siding for a month or two
Happy that you mentioned Railroader! It does a good job of portraying how different load types and car ownership works.
TTX is a pooled ownership by railway companies.
Mostly all railroad cars are belong from factories or mines like a tank car has weird letters and numbers that looks like some sort of a code but no it belongs from a oil factory,
and the funny thing is I'm a riding the Austin Steam Train Association trip from Austin to Bertram while I watched this video lol.
Tank cars have a lot of legal requirements with the FRA, Department of Transportation and whatever the Canadian equivalent is called. Most of those markings are tied to that, tank class (primarily among three overarching types: general purpose car, pressure car, or acid car), the permitted lading, and a grid showing the tank's regular inspection schedule. Tanks undergo full qualifications every ten years on the tank thickness, lining, structural welds, safety appliances, wheels, etc.
So all the weird markings mean something important.
There used to be ALOT of industry owned wagons. which atleast here in britain was pretty much free advertising whilst you got an order of coal shipped in from a colliery across the country.
@@davidty2006 Looking at photos of UK freight trains from years ago, I can't help but to think all those 2-axle wagons were so small that they were easily outclassed capacity-wise by road-going trucks (lorries). I wonder if that was among the factors responsible for carload freight nearly vanishing from the UK and moving by road instead.
@@RailRide hmm factories found it easier moving their quite low quantity by road moreso by the BR diesel era combined with the de-industrialisation of britain main wagons left were for bigger hauls though there was an attempt to keep some wagonload freight via speedlink.
I wouldn't say " mostly", not even half. Some major shippers own their own cars, but they are in the minority.
My first driving job was moving coal to the tipple and loaded onto hoppers for shipment to Denver. The hoppers were 5bay 100ton cars lettered with the “flying” Rio Grande, then you read the “fine print”, the cars were actually owned by (I believe) the First National Bank of Denver. There was some “legalese along with this as well. My dad was the one who pointed this out to me, at first I thought he was joking. The funny thing is absolutely no models of this car has been produced.
Because of you mostly I have become kind of a train nerd at least compared to all of my friends
Ya love to hear it. :D
With more than 28,000 locomotives, 1.6 million rail cars and freight rail lines spanning across 140,000 miles, America's freight rail system is perfectly positioned to be the most efficient and cost-effective transportation network covering the 3.12 million square miles of the continental U.S.
The AAR standardization and paperwork streamlining for interchange in all of North America is a big contrast with Europe. They do have an EU run entity for "standardization" of interchange practices, but it is disfuncional with every state run railroad charging high costs and labor protectionist type bureaucracy. So if a shipper has something that has to cross more than like two countries, they tend to say fckit and use Eastern European migrant truckers. If European rail was privatized and deregulated North American style, the problem would be fixed immediately with a lot of trucks off the roads.
Some would argue what we have in the US is still not enough. Rail wise that is.
Video thumbnail immediately caught my attention as you can see GATX (General American Transportation Corp) on a lot of European tank cars. These videos are always interesting to see how things are run on the other continent.
As for tank cars things are getting even more interesting, if they are becoming incontinent :P.
CN and CP (nowCPKC) often just have a two letter code on their cars, I understand that X is used where the owner is not a railway. CP also owns the SOO line, marked SOO.
Private 3rd party owned cars have the last letter X ex: UTLX / GATX and when you have CSX, a class 1, not a third party, had to have the classification: CSXT
UPRR
@@ItsReallyJackBlack that’s a class one…
@@YourLocalRailfan no t
@@ItsReallyJackBlack because it doesn’t end in the letter X
Same in box logistics, I live near a seaport and regularly see trucks with standard containers. Often branded by the major box ship operators, like Hapag Lloyd or Maersk Sealand, but sometimes I see containers marked by other companies, most often Swire, which just lease out boxes, or DHL which is a more general logistics company. When a container is leased it can travel any modal form from any origin to any destination on globe, and can be interchanged intermodal. The same container can be transported on truck, ship, and rail, from factory to its destination.
I see you alluded to what I've heard called foreign power. I recently saw a train come through my city with two BNSF engines leading it, but I live in CN territory. One reason I heard for this happening is that train might have originated in BNSF territory but had to pass through CN territory, but it was just easier to keep the BNSF engines on. In this scenario, CN will have their own engines run through BNSF territory, or already have done so.
Speaking of foreign power and horsepower hour agreements, I used to work on the Southwestern Railroad, a small class 3 shortline in Carlsbad, New Mexico, that interchanged with the BNSF in Clovis, New Mexico. We would get in unit fracksand trains, empty oil trains, a TON of hopper cars (mostly BN and BNSF, sometimes Cnadian hoppers) for potash unit trains, and hi-cub BNSF boxcars for salt. In the foreign power category it was mostly BNSF locomotives (when I worked there it was a seperate subdivision operated by SWRR), but there was one or two times we had an NS loco, ALOT of Ferro Mex power, one CSX standard cab Dash-8, and an incredibly far from home Canadian Pacific cowl unit EMD. Yes, a Canadian locomotive in the deserts of south eastern New Mexico. A fish out of water to say the least.
I know our shop here in Utah has two brothers that work together restoring old locomotives and equipment for museums. Their reporting mark is KLIX. They do amazing work and restored a beautiful western pacific loco for the Ogden UT museum
another thing to add to that HP hours thing, when I was working near the Great Western tracks in Windsor, CO, I saw at least 1 Norfolk Southern loco helping shunt cars around the oval (it's a giant oval looking thing on Google Earth). Great Western, from what I could tell, has about 5 locos. one blue, one green, one orange, I think a red one and another color I can't think of. simple paint job with their logo on the side.
I work for a class 3 shortline and while we bring in cars we dont own, we do own around 1700 cars ourselves.
In Australia, there is a major lease company known as RailFirst (previously known as CFCLA - Chicago Freight Car Lease Australia), where they lease all types of rail cars (flat beds, ore hoppers, container, agriculture, etc) as well as locomotives. These can be both second hand or new (new locomotives and rail cars are being built as of current, to replace aging rollingstock)
I even saw a Norfolk and Southern locomotive in the yards in Lethbridge, Alberta here in Canada. They really seem to get around.
I worked for one company where we leased old covered hoppers from the railroad rather than one of the leasers. They were in captive service between Baltimore and West Virginia. So beat up that no one else would have wanted to use them.
Autoracks seem to have the most variety of RR names on their cars. Run through Locos are common on commodities that travel across the Country. When they come back through then they can bring that Loco back to where it came from.
I'm developing an RPG set in space. And I've been loving all your stories about bizzard interactions between unions, different associations, different lines of ownership, etc. Basically I want trade in space to be every bit as strange as trade on Earth.
50,000 Rail Cars isn't even close. 100,000 wouldn't even be approaching the total.
2 million wagons?
@@raymondleggs5508
Not quite that many. :)
Back before the Staggers Act substantially economically deregulated the railroads, the railroads' ability to raise capital for stuff like railcars was limited. This led to car shortages and shipper complaints to the Interstate Commerce Commission (the railroads economic regulator at the time). In an attempt to deal with the shortages, the ICC increased the rates the railroads had to pay to car owners when a car wasn't on its home railroad. This was called incentive per diem. The result was investors buying short line railroads and then buying as many cars as could physically fit on the railroad. They then managed their fleets of cars to keep them on the class 1 railroads as much as possible. This solved the car shortage but increased the class 1 railroads cash bleed. Incentive per diem was repealed shortly after Staggers came into effect.
The staggers act was passed in 1980. The "Incentive Per DIem" boxcars came around later. However, when IPD was cancelled all that really did was cancel the bumped up rate. The IPD boxcars still carried a high rental rate which was later grandfathered in. So for example if you bought a IPD boxcar as an investment in the early 80s you had a few years of incentive per diem and the tax credit. When the incentive rate went away you still owned the car and it still could earn decent revenue.
They didn't even have to buy the railroad, just bought cars and registered them to the shortline and shared revenue. Doctors and lawyers were financing box car fleets. Some of them lost big when the rules were changed, "grandfather" time not being enough to cover it or shippers finding cheaper options for cars. Also a lot of cars with no use ended up sent back to "home rails" that had no space for them.
@@MilwaukeeF40C grandfathered time was actually not bad and if the cars stayed in service they could produce decent revenue. Definitely enough revenue to make the investment worth it. But you had to be willing to weather the storm. It was a long storm however as boxcar traffic declined dramatically as trucks became larger and carried more weight. However to this day you still see thousands of those cars in service.
I don’t have a video of it, but one time, while a Train was Passing through at the Station where I take my Railroad Training Class, there was a CSX locomotive (and I think a NS locomotive) behind a UP locomotive in Stockton, California.
There’s a cat litter plant that receives shipments of clay in hoppers with reporting marks CATX. They even have a small paw print painted on them.
Fun fact, the Field Manual of the AAR Interchange Rules has colors on the cover that always matches the latest Super Bowl winner prior to the release of the book's annual updates.
Actually they print two batches of copies and always have to shred the one with the loser colors.
When i was younger the Seabord Coast line rail road had a train called the coast to coast express this train started in california on the southern pacific railroad and ran through Abbeville SC. It would have engens from southern pacific, frisco and the seaboard.
9:51
It goes the other way too down here in Atlanta, with BNSF power absolutely EVERYWHERE on NS.
Like full BNSF power on an intermodal, going thru Duluth or Norcross.
On the last part of Danny Harmon's latest video, he chased down an empty hopper train going to Florida's Bone Valley. The motive power - a BNSF GE unit all by its lonesome.
Talking about shared power hours. There is also trough route trains. When I lived in FL you would see this. A flour mill near Tampa would get a grain train in from CSX. I have seen it where the inter train. Locomotives and all the rolling stock say BNSF on it. Its a lot easier for CSX just to stick their crew on that train when the whole thing is going to the same place.
What's fun about early railroading is that every railroad had their own gauge.
Not only have I seen Norfolk Southern power in Edmonds, I've seen one of their heritage units going south through Edmonds! Don't recall which railroad, it was the light green one...
That would be 8099, the Southern Heritage Unit. It’s an ES44AC.
Funnily enough, the only BNSF locomotive in my collection was acquired specifically to re-create the practice of horsepower-hours amongst my many NS locos. Being in O gauge, this was a rather pricey simulation :)
Take a shot every time this man says “nuance”
That is a dangerous game
I think you might have seriously underestimated the number or railcars out there.
I see a lot of GATX on CN's line. Wikipedia says as of Dec 31 2020, they had 148939 rail cars. They are in Europe and Asia as well as North America, so that number won't apply to North America exclusively. A couple other examples would be Wells Fargo Rail has 135000 cars and Procor has 30000 cars.
I love - and I mean LOVE - when I get to see foreign power. As a railfan it's a real treat.
I swear that NS 4500-whatever engine has been kicking around the NW forever. I'm pretty sure it's the same one I saw heading south through Portland in 2017 on a UP manifest
I was under the impression the X suffix at the tail of the reporting marks represented it was a private/contract carrier vs. a common carrier, eg UTLX, GATX, TTX, etc. CSX was kind of a self-made exception because they were using it as a placeholder when renaming the Chessie System after they acquired Seaboard and it just stuck because it was the 80s, man.
For rolling stock not owned by the railroads, The best example I can think of for this are the three bay hoppers marked OMAX , the report marking for the Omaha Power Public District
Hey Hyce! I work on a class one (the blue one) and I've come to realize something and would like to share. Not sure if you already know this but going back to the Autoracks, big leasing companys own the bottom of the car (the "flat" car) and the railroads actually own the rack part of it. I still havent figured out why yet but its something to keep you thinking! Thats why you can see railroads on a autorack and the car is labeled as a TTGX or something of the sort. Fun!
Someone else also commented this; and it's just utterly bizarre to me. Lol. Maybe each railroad has different ramp setups requiring different types? I have no idea. Very neat fact.
. If the train isn't moving too fast I try to look at those end panels and you can get a TTX bottom and the track has a UP herald but on paper they are still CNW. SP. MP. DRGW. WP the latter two being the rarest. The recent Mindbender are the new auto racks apparently owned by GATX with no lettering or reference to TTX and have WRWK Warwick reporting marks but the big metal plate has the new CPKC emblem
2:52 Scanner Channels for railroading are called AAR Channels
I remember seeing Conrail locos lashed into Southern RR trains. I found out that some Southern trains would run into Conrail territory to deliver a train directly to a yard and avoid an interchange. But that generated a HP-hours credit for Southern. So occasionally Conrail would provide a loco to Southern to "run off hours".
A very nice episode Mark about something I never thought too much about. Makes perfect sense of course. So enjoyed the nuanced details you included which added a perfect layer of understanding to car ownership. As always, Professor, many thanks for yet another excellent Railroad 101 learning moment video and cheers to you!
X usually symbolizes a private company or privately only car or locomotive. For example my local power plant owns their own coal cars and end in x. Leasing companies are typically private.
As for the thumbnail:
_GATX Corporation is a railcar lessor that owns fleets in North America, Europe, and Asia. In addition, jointly with Rolls-Royce Limited, it owns one of the largest aircraft spare engine lease portfolios. It is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. As of December 31, 2020, the company owned 148,939 rail cars, including 83,959 tank cars, 64,980 freight cars, and 645 locomotives. Other major car types owned include covered hoppers, open-top hopper cars, and gondolas. It primarily serves the petroleum industry (29% of 2020 revenues), chemical industry (22% of 2020 revenues), food industry (11% of 2020 revenues), mining industry (10% of 2020 revenues), and transportation industry (20% of 2020 revenues).[1]_
don't know if this has anything to do with it but X is a fairly common substitution in short-hand words, like, the company I work for uses Trx for "transmissions" Tix for "tickets", in this case it might be a substitution for "cross" as in "Cross-country", or maybe simply alluding to the universal association of the X of a "crossing" sign to railroads... kind of like the way trucking company logos almost always incorporate a graphic representation of a road receding off into the distance
I do a lot of railfanning. A reporting mark ending in X indicates that the owner is not a railroad. Not all reporting marks have 4 letters, notably UP for Union Pacific. Some manufacturers own their own freight cars, and one that I will note is The Andersons, which is an agricultural products company that frequently uses the mark AEX but has others. TTX owns almost all the auto rack bases even if the cover shows the name of a railroad. Some short lines have large lease fleets, and so you tend to see their reporting marks all over the place.
You see that with the commercial shipping industry. You see the standard commercial container with the livery of the major shippers like Maersk mixed together on all sorts of container ships operated by these companies. These intermodal containers are handed off from one carrier to another as they move to their destination. They are mostly owned by or leased to the companies that use these shippers services.
Fun lore fact for my o gauge railroad, there are two ES&DT locomotives and their only standard gauge crane on permanent loan to the AP&CC. Side note, how was the trip overseas?
I've seen quite a few GATX cars, mostly liquid containers where the name is quite prominent on the tank. And I'm not even American, lol.
I always thought it made sense that the railways may not necessarily own their carriages since they're the infra owners (owning the tracks) and transporters (owning and operating the locomotives) but also are merely given an order to ship a company's goods which also own containers. I think road logistics work similar where (some) shipping companies merely own the vehicles and the drivers and merely transport others' cargo including the containers.
You definitely look exactly like the kind of fella who's into trains.
The electric utility serving the San Antonio TX area owns a fleet of coal hopper cars used to transport WY coal. To prevent inadvertent door operation in route, the cars are solid bottom. They dump by inversion mechanism at the coal yard.
When I was a kid in the 80s railroads hauled lots more boxcars than they do now- they had all sorts of neat writing on them and pictures. Then intermodal took the place of most of the boxcars. When I worked as a conductor in the 2000s I noticed everything was a utilitarian color/ grey, black, white, reddish brown, yellow, etc. gone were the fancy road names and slogans and all I saw were reporting marks and numbers. The cool designs of days gone by were no more…😢
The crew when their shitty locomotive breaks down in the middle of nowhere for the upteenth time: Eff you RX!!
That makes a lot of sense from many perspectives.
I've actually seen cars that don't belong to anyone anymore on occasion on the short line here. A couple were Penn Central boxcars
The most one thing I’ve noticed. On certain cars you see a stencilling saying something to the effect: this car runs under an international running agreement/ license…. This must pertain to what you are talking about.
I thought an X at the end of a reporting mark designated that it was owned "privately" and not by a railroad. Like the UTLX or TTX or TILX cars you mentioned, but I've also seen leased locomotives near me (Lubbock & Western Railway, operated by Watco; from Lubbock west to Whiteface and south to Seagraves, and from Plainview west to Dimmitt) labeled as WAMX or GATX.
I don't know if LBWR has any of their own locomotives or leases them all, but they do have a couple that are painted red and black with Texas Tech logos on it. WAMX 3536 (GP35L) and WAMX 4207 (GP40-2M) for anyone that wants to look them up.
Huh, never heard the origin story for Gramps tankers before, but it's a good one.
must of made life easier for train crews to figure out which trains they needed to put them on.
Hearing the explanation for sharing horsepower-hours was great, earlier today I saw a Ferromex loco pushing at the rear of a BNSF consist in Denver earlier today so that explanation was really timely lol
When I was working as a railway clerk the daily fee that a railroad would pay the owner of a car not owned by that railroad was seven dollars.
I was at work the night the Penn Central went down. We (the B&O) held thousands of cars routed for the PC in Baltimore Terminal and the priority was to offer the cars for interchange so the B&O could charge a penalty for cars offered for interchange, not accepted.
That all changed ages ago. Railcars not privately owned are now paid for on an hourly basis with the rate dependent on the age of the car and its value. In today's market you can also negotiate with the railroads what you think your car is worth on an hourly basis
@@cdavid8139 Not surprising, much can change in 50 years.
@@andywomack3414 You're right Andy. And interestingly enough the actual term "per diem" goes back to your day when cars were "Per Day". I bet the term 'midnight interchange' means something to you. I came around a bit later and by then "Per DIem" was an hourly rate so there was no monetary reason for a midnight interchange. (I'm sure you know the "old heads" clung on to the concept for years and computer systems would measure cars in yard at midnight). There is now a term called "offering" in which your computer transmits a list of cars to your connection and tells them you want to give them cars they say they cannot accept. And of course the new system is probably as mis-used as what you saw!
@@cdavid8139 I don't know if the position of railway clerk exists anymore. I doubt the clerk jobs that remain involve walking track or standing out in the rain verifying inbound and outbound trains
@@cdavid8139 When I first started the computer was a main-frame occupying a large room downtown. We sent train consists buy feeding punched cards into a machine that translated the data to a punched tape which was feed into what looked like a 1920's era teletype machine which also typed out a list to be stored with the tape and cards. The consist would then be delivered via teletype to whatever yard received the train. Not familiar with the term "midnight interchange" although there may have been a midnight deadline for offering those cars to the PC as it went bankrupt. After midnight, lose a day's per diem. I've forgotten more than I remember, but that was a memorable night. Strangely celebratory on the B&O, as the PC was a spectacular merger failure, and rail mergers are not popular with railroaders on the ground. B&O was in the process of being taken over by the C&O, and there was resentment over that.
Did you ever get to "foreclose" on one of the bank's engines (I guess it would be more of a mechanic's lean) for failure to pay in a timely manner? That would be so funny.
Been there. Done that. Used to own a bunch of old GP7u locomotives and had to go after a couple of leasors for non payment. There are some legal assistance (or there was at the time) that gave the equipment owners a bit more power to reposses than other heavy equipment. It all worked out but it was entertaining
It's also fun that UTLX is owned by Berkshire Hathaway that own BNSF too.
Something else not touched on about the locomotives: run-through power. Danny Harmon (Distant Signal) did a good video on it some time ago.
It doesn't really make sense for say UP to get a train from CPKC that doesn't need to be broken up because it's not at its final destination only to swap the locomotives to their own. They would just put their own crew in the CPKC lead and carry on and then owe CPKC (or whoever's locomotives they actually were) those horsepower hours.
News flash, many truck trailers, are lease/rentals or if specials owned by the user who doesn't own any tractors.
If something is seriously wrong with the car, a lot of times they will ship it to the repair facility. When this happens itll have a sign saying home shop for repair.
It's always fun to see "mismatched" freight cars and locomotives running on different railroads. Also it's pretty interesting to see what abbreviations get made up to mark on the cars. Where I am in CSX/NS land here in NJ, because of all the ports, especially the port of Newark, we tend to get quite a bit of foreign power and cars. I've met railfans who have seen nearly every railroad's locomotives here in NJ at one time or another. Just today, someone posted a video that they saw both KCS and CN on two different trains here in NJ. I haven't tried to railfan freight trains, my main focus has been NJ Transit, but I might try to sometime.
CN and KCS just merged, didn't they? Might be a little less special to see those two liveries on one train than it once was.
@@phillyphakename1255 it was two separate trains. One was NS and KCS and the other was two CN.
There are a lot of railcars in storage too, I would not be surprised if the total in North America was 6 figures.
I remember looking at the statistics in Railway Age during the big recession and it was about 35% this is also when scrapping is outnumbering new cars deliveries 2 to 1. You always know when things are slow and passing sidings are filled along with the lightly used Branch lines
I installed a playground for GATX over in Hearn TXs it looked like a train
Railcar accounting rules/practices are a mind-numbing maze. They often resulted in empty cars being returned to the owning railroad rather than re-loaded near where they were emptied. Pennsy (yes, them again) started the company that became TTX to develop TOFC equipment. With ICC approval of car pooling other railroads then bought into it. Pooling of car ownership with RailBox - "Next load, any road" - and RailGon was a way to reduce utilization inefficiency and provide much needed equipment for cash-strapped railroads pre deregulation. I think TTX absorbed the RailBox and RailGon fleets at some point. TTX's website says they own "175,000 efficient and low cost railcars."
In essence, TTX is the only operating remnant of the Pennsy.
all depends on car type. You can set up your cars as general purpose and it can be loaded from any point to any point. Makes sense during equipment shortages.but if you have a car your company invested in to haul a specific product you can assign them to a home point so that when empty the must return home
Just found this out myself traveling to the midwest in may this year having a man tell me at the golden spike tower in north platt nebraska. It blew my mind.😁
I used to do both freight agent work as well as shop car management. Your description of the AAR billing is fairly correct, but I can add that the AAR has a billing matrix as well as an annual field manual that describes all the common repairs and the costs that you are allowed to charge for repairs. It's fairly complicated. Any repairs not covered are usually those for specialized equipment provided by the car owner for the product that the cars are designed for. Things like the piping on pressure differential cars comes to mind. We did repairs to a great many of those as a contract shop for the car owners. Repairs that cannot be completed by the contract shops are sent to the major shops according to the car owner desires.
For the record, there are MILLIONS of freight cars in North America!! I would estimate that 75% of them are NOT owned by the railroads themselves. Most are owned by leasing companies, regardless of what name is showing on them.
The X on the end of the names is a generic identifier for non-rail company owned cars. It doesn't mean that cars without the X are not still owned by leasing companies. It simply means that they are non-rail owned cars that the revenue goes to the owner. With leased cars, the revenue goes to the carrier, and they pay a lease fee.
Customers pay rental fees too: One of my first jobs was to scan the RFID on rail cars as they entered and left a steel mill with a PLC.
A simple SQL report (by others) of the stored times proved how long the cars were on-premise and saved the steel mill big $$
Demurrage. Keeps customers from sitting on the cars and using them as storage. Generally only applies to railroad owned cars, however a private car owner can make their cars subject to it also.
@@660Oliver Definitely Railroad-owned.
These were all coal cars.
While on the Rocky Mountaineer in Canada, I saw a UP loco attached to a CP train.
Yeah i imagined it's similar to trucking, the customers own the shipping containers, the trucker or agency owns the truck