Freight House Operations: LCL and Freight Houses

 LCL is a huge source of revenue, car loading, and tonnage for railroads of the steam era. By the end of WWII numbers dropped fast, mainly due to trucks and roads. But to be honest LCL continued to be a big part of railroading. Today all that UPS traffic is LCL.

There has been a lot of discussion of late about how to implement LCL  on a model railroad. My feeling is I do not want to perform a function by simply standing and counting off the seconds, pretending to off load LCL packages. What I did on AIR1 was to print up Waybills that simulated packages of LCL. 

The peddler car was placed in the consist of a local, the car card for the peddler car had multiple bills in it, and as the local got to each depot, the train crew would check their LCL bills to check for a set out. You did not set out the car, you set out the BILL.  I extended this procedure for REA packages, US Mail, passengers, and now I plan to add this function for loaded milk cans, but more on all that later. I actually sit down with a McMaster-Carr catalog and write up the LCL bills. By using the MC Catalog I can easily include sizes, weights and values. For those of you that need it, throw away Grainger’s number, go to McMaster-Carr.

LCL was much larger than a few bills in a peddler car however. All those named freight trains (Alpha Jet, Blue Streak Merchandise, Orange Blossom Special) were all LCL trains. According to a Kalmbach book a town of 5000 received at least 5 car loads of LCL daily. Sears, Montgomery Ward, Spiegel were all huge LCL operations.

Larger freight house operations might have their facilities divided into Inbound, Outbound, and Transfer Freight houses. 

The inbound house would normally be larger than the outbound house since most communities are net consumers, but if your town has some businesses that ship  a lot of LCL this might not be true. A transfer house would be the largest. Railroads built these houses at major junctions, and they drew in a lot of cars from the region.

On the AIR2 I plan to model three freight houses:

Inbound with 24 car spots

Outbound with 12 car spots

Transfer with 48 car spots

The Transfer and Outbound houses get switched on a schedule. Tracks are organized so when you pull them they are blocked for easy switching when the appropriate train arrives. The inbound house receives cars all the time, when the arrive they are spotted for unloading.

Now Al Daumann and I worked out a system of Waybills that allowed the operator of the Freight house job to load cars as he saw fit. Each waybill was equal to a fraction of a car load. Dave Ramos does this as does Ralph Heiss. Ralph lists numbers on his Waybills for different items. The idea is that the person “Loading” the LCL boxcar can fill the car up to 100 units. It might be TWENTY barrels of flour and EIGHTY crates of plumbing fittings : 20 + 80 = 100

On Al’s BR&W layout he has LCL bills listing loads that are equal to 1/4 car load. While Ralph can load as many bills as add up to 100, Al limits his LCL cars to a maximum of 4 bills. I actually went away from this idea, as I thought that based on the size of my freight house operation, and unlike Dave and Ralph where their Freight House operation is nearly their ENTIRE operation, my freight house job would be busy enough just spotting and pulling cars and making connections with through LCL Trains.

Additionally I plan to model several connecting railroad’s freight houses and have some sort of transfer between these foreign roads and the AIR freight house. You can add the freight houses at Pettigrew and Chatsworth* and I will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-9 medium to large freight houses. Additionally I plan to model several warehouses which will contribute car loads to the LCL traffic, and at least one industry, Old Dominion Furniture, that will operate a trap car**.

LCL traffic on the Atlantic Inland will be the second busiest, after coal, in terms of car loadings.

Of the scheduled freights on my time-table, a number are solid or primarily LCL trains.:

BSM-1 & 2  Blue Streak- Newport News to St. Louis (Connecting to Washington DC and Norfolk at Richmond, VA.)

AJ-1 & 2  Alpha Jet -Northeast & Baltimore to Chicago

CSD-1 & 2 Central States Dispatch - Southwest & Southeast to Northeast

WM-1 & WM-2  St. Louis to Western Maryland (Connecting at Chatsworth, WV)

SR-70 & RS-71  St. Louis-Richmond/Richmond-St.Louis

While all are 2nd Class freights the Blue Streak and Alpha Jet are HOT (Some Passenger trains go in the hole for the BSM)

I’m interested in how many of you simulate LCL traffic on your layout and I’d like to hear about your procedures.

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*Chatsworth is the eastern-most city on the modeled portion of the AIR2 layout. They will have a medium sized freight house receiving 5 or more car loads per session, and shipping an as yet undetermined amount.

**A trap car is an LCL boxcar in captive service between two points, in my case, between old dominion furniture and the outbound freight house. Old Dominion will ship furniture around the country but usually in Less than Car Load Lots (LCL)