Freight House Routing

 The LCL business was, and still is huge business for the railroads*1. The “brick and mortar” portion of the LCL business is the Freight House. Every railroad operated some sort of LCL operation, or nearly every line. Cars from one freight house to another were regularly scheduled. “The Chicago car runs daily”. These cars ran on time whether loaded to the gills or with one package*2.

When I consider setting up my various freight houses I have dwelled long and hard about establishing a schedule of destinations. High volume destinations like large cities (think Chicago, New York, Richmond, St. Louis) might get multiple cars assigned. Smaller cities and towns might get only one car, or split a car between two or more destinations.

This seems cumbersome.

Additionally on the Atlantic Inland our tracks do not go physically to Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, and Chicago. We go to Zanesville, OH., where we connect end to end with the W&LE. The Wheeling along with the NKP will forward our LCL cars to their destinations.

Because of this do I label these cars CHICAGO or ZANESVILLE? After all I am only sending these cars to Zanesville to connect with the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railway.

Should the shipping doors of my Freight House be labeled with a combination of City AND Railroad names? Do we gather cars for the W&LE Car, as opposed to Chicago? Or are the Chicago Cars labeled “To Chicago VIA the W&LE”?

The next big question is do I establish a series of waybills simulating LCL packages or do I simply forward “Cars”? Let’s save that for next time.


*1 While railfanning in Lombard, Illinois, last weekend, I  saw a double stack train made up entirely of UPS, FedEx, and other package delivery companies containers. I actually never even KNEW that FedEx owned and operated containers. While watching this train roll by, it was HUGE, I mentioned that this was a LCL train. My fellow railfans all looked at me and realized I was right.

*2 LCL was lucrative. The cost to ship a package LCL was many times the car load rate. For example a car-load rate for a commodity might be a few cents a pound, while it might cost ten dollars to ship a one pound package via a railroads LCL service. Because of this LCL cars rarely traveled full. It took only a few packages to break-even on transportation costs. Make no mistake, the costs incurred by “handling” coupled with L&D claims easily made up for this. LCL was labor intensive, and packaging methods in those days often insured that the item being shipped was broken almost from the minute it was turned over to the freight agent.


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