Freight House Operations: Unforeseen Traffic

 LCL traffic originating, terminating and traveling between FH’s is a major component of my operations on the Atlantic Inland (AIR). I recently mocked up LCL traffic and determined that my plan for interchanging cars between foreign roads,  via transfers that originate in small off-layout staging yards,  will create more traffic volume than my Inbound and Outbound FH’s can handle.

Based on what I learned about LCL operations from the Kalmbach book by Jeff Wilson*, I designed an Inbound FH that had room for twelve cars. The Outbound House had only a six car capacity. The logic behind this design decision was that Littlerock, WV would be, like most other communities in the USA, a net consumer of LCL packages. I had no basic plans to model a large enough industry, which shipped a lot of LCL shipments, on the layout.

What I found out was that each of these planned foreign railroad transfer runs would contain at least one car billed to the Inbound FH, and that I would send one car to each interchange point from the Outbound FH. This would DOUBLE the traffic from the Outbound House, assuming I can restrain myself to staging only ONE car per interchange per session. It would also be at least a 50% increase of capacity at the Inbound House.

Back to the drawing board.



—————

*The Kalmbach Book on LCL operations is, to me anyway, a very good resource. One very informative tidbit of statistical information from the book is that in a community of 5000, the Depot Freight House of that town could expect at least five inbound boxcars of LCL PER DAY. Outbound loads might only amount to 1 or 2 cars, since most communities receive more LCL packages than they ship, since LCL shipping was mostly a business function, either business to business or business to retail customer (Sears, Wards, Spiegel catalogs, etc…)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wingedfoot Paper Part 2: Pulpwood

 On AIR1 a large, centrally located industry, was Wingedfoot Paper. As Jon Cure is fond of saying, a paper mill is the perfect Model Railroad industry. The major raw material is wood pulp. In 1952  pulpwood, cut and stacked like cord wood, was shipped to mills in a variety of cars. Nearly any car you can name was used, or modified in such a way as to become, a pulpwood hauler. Generally pulpwood was not valuable enough to travel far. The collection of pulpwood racks I have,  needs a great deal of repainting and re-lettering.  I just don’t think it’s likely to see Atlantic Coast Line cars hauling pulpwood into central WV! I have been toying with the idea of repainting cars from distant foreign roads and just adding a simplified lettering, using the premise that they are not for interchange. We’ll see. [4/19/22 this afternoon I went through the box of pulpwood cars. I think with only a few exceptions I’m going to have to repaint these flats and letter them for the AIR....
Read more

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 l...
Read more

Freight House Operations: LCL from Foreign Road Freight Houses

 On AIR 1 while WM , N&W, CRR, and VGN trains had trackage rights over some or all of the layout, there were no freight houses for these foreign roads. Often in towns served by two or more competing lines one will find a freight house for each of these roads. In Winchester, VA the freight houses for the PRR and the B&O still stand today. On AIR 2 I do not plan model the extensive trackage rights as on the first layout. I plan to have these foreign roads to come on to the layout via either a short run of their track, visibly modeled, terminating at an interchange point, or simply a transfer from an off layout staging yard. In short fairly limited presence. However at each of these interchange points there should be some foreign road structures in their colors to give strong visual clues that these tracks do indeed belong to someone else. In a few cases, WM and N&W  for sure, some of these foreign road structures will be a freight house. Again, relying on the Kalmbac...
Read more