Waybill colors: White, Pink, Yellow

 We were talking about waybills today and colors came up. These “colors” we discussed are the color of the PAPER the waybill is printed on.

General waybills, your run of the mill, every day waybill for BOTH car load lots and less than car load shipments  are printed on white paper.

Expedited shipments, know as “Preferred Movement Bills” or simply “Preferred Bill”, of nearly any type are printed on pink paper. It can be Auto Parts or Apples. LCL or perishable meat. If a customer paid for Preferred movement, that waybill was printed on pink paper.

Empty movement paperwork was printed on yellow paper. I’m not sure this was a waybill, but rather a form directing that a car be moved, by return routing, to its originating road: Route home empty.

The use of the white waybill is fairly self explanatory for our purposes. Whenever you want to route a car from A to B across your layout you probably would use a waybill printed on white paper. If you wanted to simulate a LCL bill of lading, you would print that on white paper. In these cases you might head the former with the word “Waybill” and head the latter with the words “LCL bill of lading”.

When you wish to imply urgency to a car move you might choose to use a “Preferred Movement Bill” printed on pink paper. On AIR2, for example, I have several trains that carry Preferred LCL only (#65-#66 for example). Yardmasters would simple look at the waybill printed on pink paper and for all practical purposes read no further, “all the ‘Pink Bills’ going WEST go in train 65”. There are, of course subtle differences the YM needs to be aware of, like a Preferred Bill going to Chicago as opposed to a Preferred Bill going to St. Louis. Generally speaking, the pink waybill paper draws the YM’s attention.

This brings us to yellow bills, the so called “Empty Movement Bill”. 

Nine times out of Ten, when I am simulating a MTY car move I simple insert a white bill into the card pocket that routes the car in question to the appropriate staging yard. But let’s say you want to add the “car confiscation” wrinkle to your op session. 

In the past, on AIR1, I had little success with this, and abandoned it. The idea is that a Southern Pacific 40’ boxcar has been unloaded and is being returned, MTY, to the SP. This car, with the yellow bill in its card pocket, travels through Little Rock yard. 

Meanwhile during staging I have given the Little Rock YM a stack of MTY car requests. One of these reads something like “Old Dominion Furniture needs a 40’ boxcar for a load going to Los Angeles, CA.”.

Now according to AAR car service rules, this is a perfect match. An SP boxcar confiscated for a load going to Los Angeles. The Little Rock YM places the “MTY car request” bill into the card pocket of the SP boxcar, it is eventually routed to and spotted at Old Dominion Furniture, where upon it gets re-billed (During the following staging period) for movement West.

These “MTY Car Request” bills are used for boxcars, gondolas, and flat cars, generally. Reefers, tank cars, stock cars, and covered hoppers,  as well as any specialty cars are exempted from these car service regulations (except during WWII).

As you can see however, this “MTY Car Request” game can become quite extensive. It depends on how you want to play this game. You might also post a “Car Department Bulletin” instructing your YM’s to route all suitable MTY 40’ boxcars to the freight house, which needs clean MTY 40’ boxcars. After the freight house gets its fill of 40’ boxcars it can release excess MTY cars to be returned to their respective home roads, and the game continues.

What happened on AIR1 was YM’s simply ignored the “MTY Car Requests”, routed the MTY cars off-layout, and left the stacks of MTY car request bills untouched. So I gave up.