Freight Agent

For a long time I have been considering creating a job called “Freight Agent”. I have been thinking of combining the Freight Agent job with the Transfer job. Let him do both. But let me diagram what it is I think a Freight Agent does before I start combining the job with another.

The Freight Agent would walk the entire layout, he is simulating what the prototype agent does when he visits every customer on his portion of the railroad. The Agent learns,  from speaking to customers, when cars will be ready for pick-up; when off-spot cars need to be spotted at loading doors or docks; he learns about MTY car requests; or inter-plant switch moves (Somewhere I was told that nearly 70% of all switch moves a railroad makes are inter-plant moves); and he tracks cars to let customers know when a load will arrive or reach its destination. He develops an intimate knowledge of the working of his railroad and the customers in his area of responsibility.

What he can then do with this knowledge is make sure the customer gets what he wants as quickly and problem free as possible (Well maybe not anymore in these days of poor customer service). If a clean 40’ boxcar is MTY and ready for pick-up from one customer, and another customer wants a clean 40’ boxcar, the agent can, assuming he follows AAR car service rules (wink-wink), write a temporary waybill re-directing the car (impounding or confiscating the car) from the releasing customer to the customer requesting the car. This saves the railroad money because the railroad does not have to bring a MTY boxcar, potentially from hundreds of miles away, to the customer, and as we all know “m-o-n-e-y spells Mother”. He saves the first customer money because the MTY is pulled sooner, costing less in possible demurrage charges. The receiving customer is happy because he gets a car sooner.

My question now is, how can I simulate this function? I thought of printing a list of MTY car requests for the freight agent, and giving the agent a stack of temporary waybills he can fill in and place in the card pocket.

A local switching these industries would leave their yard with only the work in their train. They only know about the set-outs they have in their train. Now an veteran train crew will have a good idea of what lies ahead, but they really will not know their whole days work until they arrive at the job site and read the paperwork the Freight agent prepared for them. Adding the Freight Agent job to a model railroad opens up this other half of the process. 

Ahead of the local, hopefully, the agent would be doing all this work, and would write up messages and or switch lists for the local. The agent would ideally leave these switch lists, messages, and waybills in the local bill box for the local, when it arrives (Often local switcher’s work night time hours, and freight agents are more 9 to 5 types, he works when business customers are open and can talk to him, either in person or on the phone. The agent will leave all the paperwork in a locked bill box for the switch crew, or he just may stuff the paperwork into a hole in the chain-link fence!).

On a model railroad a freight agent will need a detailed knowledge of the workings of the layout, and to be honest, I simply do not think that enough operators are willing to make the effort to learn that much about the workings of a layout.

It’s this reason that I am rapidly loosing interest in the job of Freight Agent. I just think that while the potential of the job is very good, and might have very high play-value, AND the job certainly is prototypically correct, Finding a crewman to do it reasonably well will be difficult at best.

If during staging I must prepare all these MTY car request lists, as well as provide instructions for all the potential moves, and the nuances of the job, well,  I might as well just bill the cars with regular waybills during staging, and “selectively compress” all the clerking, writing, and printing, as well as the Freight Agenting right out of the picture. To be honest it will make staging a lot simpler, which I am ALL ABOUT these days.

On AIR 1 I was pretty interested in installing several Boulder Creek Engineering track scales* on the layout, because weighing cars, especially coal hoppers, is a common, everyday, prototypically event. Every car on a railroad, and I mean EVERY CAR, gets weighed. 

Then I operated at several layouts with working scales, and talked extensively with other operators who had been involved with working scales. Weighing cars with working scales had a fairly, INITIAL, broad appeal, but on layouts with a great deal of cars to weigh, like a certain West Virginia Coal Hauler, with 500 coal hoppers to weigh, the novelty of working scales wore off. It became a nuisance job. 

Now before I get sued by Boulder Creek Engineering, I’m going to buy several of their scales. I plan several locations where weighing cars will take place on AIR2, and where weighing will add to the play-value: both main yards , the coal prep plant, and a scrap yard, to name a few. I plan to install a scale track at the B-Yard at Pettigrew, to simulate weighing, but large scale weighing of coal hoppers will probably not take place. It was a good idea, that turned out to have real practical drawbacks that made it more of a nuisance, as opposed to adding more play-value.

Same with the Freight Agent Job, I think…

Stay tuned.

*I recently learned that the Boulder Creek scales are no longer available. Apparently, and according to their website they stopped production of all their products and sold out of EVERYTHING on 4/6/2023.