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 Kalmbach book ob LCL  by Jeff Wilson, we learn that even relatively small towns receive a large number of LCL freight cars. He states, for example, that a community of 5000 could expect to receive at least five LCL boxcars per day.

Additionally these freight houses are an exchange point between one road and another, so a boxcar or two would travel between the AIR freight house and the WM or N&W freight house (FH) each day. To extrapolate further, the AIR outbound house might have one car for the WM FH , as well as another car from the AIR Transfer FH to the WM FH.  Add to this a car from the N&W FH to the AIR Inbound FH & Transfer FH as well as to the WM FH, and so on…

It adds up to a LOT of cars moving across the layout. I’ll need a string diagram!

Now on AIR2 LCL is not the primary game of the layout. It’s a big part, but not the primary part. On layouts where LCL is the Primary game, each boxcar of LCL might have multiple waybills in its card pocket.

At each freight house these bills might need to be removed and resorted before forwarding the car

For example at the WM FH a car arrives, heading to the AIR with the following bills in its card pocket:

AIR, AIR, N&W, WEST, WEST

The bills are removed and the car is reloaded as follows:

AIR, AIR, WEST, WEST

The remaining N&W bill waits at the WM FH until there is a LCL car ready for shipment to the N&W.

The N&W bound car arrives at the WM FH with the following bills:

N&W, N&W, AIR, AIR, WEST

That car is unloaded and then reloaded for shipment to the N&W FH as follows:

N&W, N&W, N&W

The remaining bills for forwarding to points WEST and the AIR are  held at the WM FH until another AIR car is loaded, and so on…

The more connections that are made at one freight house, the more complicated this process becomes. At this point try to imagine this process being replicated at the AIR’s 48 spot transfer house!

At this point in my design and planning stage I think that simply the movement of the cars is enough, however I am continually seduced by the LCL bill reconciliation process. Stay tuned.

I used, and to some extent, will use multiple waybills to represent LCL packages. Do you? Do you even simulate railroad LCL business at all?

If you do would you consider trying to use multiple bills to simulate LCL packages?

If you do model complex LCL operations, how do you do it?

I’m really interested!


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