Industries with their own rollingstock

[Gary S]

So where does the industry keep the empties?

And when a customer of the industry orders a load, I guess as long as the industries own cars are available, they would use those for shipping the load?

What if all the industry's cars were in use? Where would the needed empties come from?

Would the indutry's cars typically be in captive service?

[Russ Bellinis]

I'm not sure how many industries have their own rolling stock. Certainly steel mills do, but most of their rolling stock is specialized and never leaves the plant. I worked for Sea Land Service when they got their first double stacks. They were 5 unit sets and had "Sea Land" stenciled on each car in the set. I suspect Sea Land may have leased them or they may have had a deal with S.P., at any rate, the sets were used strictly in the weekly "Land Bridge" operation. Sea Land's ships were too big to fit through the Panama Canal, so all freight from Asia or the West Coast that was destined for the Gulf Coast, East Coast or Europe was off loaded in Long Beach, Ca, trucked to the S.P.'s old Main Street yard in downtown Los Angeles, and loaded on a container train to Houston. In that case the cars went from Los Angeles to Houston and back with loads from either the East Coast or Europe destined for the West Coast or Asia. The sets ran both ways loaded, except for empties that might be needed to relocate an adequate supply of containers on which ever coast needed them. The only other industry that I know of that owns their own rolling stock is Tropicana, and their reefers only stop long enough in Bradenton, Fla. to be either repaired if needed or reloaded and sent out again. If I remember correctly, Tropicana ships 5 100 car juice trains to NYC and 3 to Cincinatti or Chicago each week. In addition they send 4-6 cars on U.P. trains to City of Industry in So Cal probably 4-6 times a week. I don't know if they have other warehouses on the West Coast or other parts of the country where they send a few cars at a time. I don't think storing extra cars is an issue for most privet carriers owning or leasing rolling stock. If they are big enough to own or lease their own rolling stock, they keep it moving. The other industry that comes to mind that lease or owns rolling stock are grain companies, and they frequently use their covered hoppers for extra storage sometimes having loads of grain moving from place to place on the railroad and redirecting the loads two or three times in transit before having the cars unloaded at a grain elevator.

[Brakie]

So where does the industry keep the empties?

And when a customer of the industry orders a load, I guess as long as the industries own cars are available, they would use those for shipping the load?

What if all the industry's cars were in use? Where would the needed empties come from?

Would the industry's cars typically be in captive service?

Those cars are usually held in the closest outlaying yard in some small city or town near the industry.

Privately owned cars is used in captive service.However,that doesn't always mean unit train size shipments as some(say grain) may go to a milling company or perhaps end up as bagged feed for live stock...

[Puddlejumper]

Our local power utilities have fleets of hoppers. They were/are maintained by Conrail/CSX, and are pretty much always moving. There are I think 2 or 3 80 car trains of private hoppers, with the railroad supplying hoppers as needed to make additional 80 car trains depending on demand. When demand is low, the railroad cars are parked or utilized elsewhere and the private owner cars are kept moving.

[doctorwayne]

I think that it would also depend on the cars' intended service: some privately-owned or leased cars are in dedicated service and carry only one product. An example that springs to mind is carbon black covered hoppers - the carbon black would contaminate any other cargo and, I suspect, any other cargo would probably contaminate the car for carbon black service, too.

Many of these cars (and even railroad-owned cars) can be assigned to a particular service or even a particular industry. Boxcars, flatcars, and gondolas are often fitted with loading devices or racks designed for a single commodity: notations such as "Ford truck frame lading only" or "When empty, return to ...." can be seen stencilled on these cars.
The free-lanced (although based on a CPR prototype) car shown below is an early attempt at a covered hopper. While it can still be used as a regular boxcar (there are floor plates which can be installed over the unloading hoppers to allow loading of packaged goods), its "specialised" features keep it in dedicated service.

   

With more modern covered hoppers now in service, this car often carries bagged flux, but can be pressed into bulk service when necessary.

Wayne

[Gary S]

Again, thanks for all the answer.

DocWayne, that is a nice model. Great job.

Nw, my question was indeed referring to GERN Industries Texas Division on my layout. GERN owns their own covered hoppers and tank cars down here. (Or would they most likely be leased?)

So as for operations and my GERN facility, can anyone give me some scenarios of how to use my GERN cars? My layout will be a point-to-point with interchange yards at each end with all loads either coming from or going to the interchanges.

[doctorwayne]

Gary, GERN gives you plenty of latitude as to what's shipped or received and which type of cars are used.

Inbound loads, either in GERN cars or, more likely, regular road cars, could include chemicals and additives used in processing, packaging materials (bags, boxes, cans, and drums), processing and packaging machinery, and just about anything else that you feel is necessary for the plant to function.

Outbound loads would be primarily whatever GERN products in which your plant specialises. These could be shipped in GERN cars (owned or leased - your choice) or whatever suitable road cars are available, generally covered hoppers, tank cars, and boxcars. If you have a product which requires an other type of car, by all means, use it. Another occasional outbound load could be machinery for repair or rebuilding, or as scrap. Other outbound cars would be empty road cars that had previously brought in a load, but are not suitable for re-loading, either due to the car type or the direction in which they're required to be routed.

Wayne

[steinjr]

So as for operations and my GERN facility, can anyone give me some scenarios of how to use my GERN cars? My layout will be a point-to-point with interchange yards at each end with all loads either coming from or going to the interchanges.

There really isn't much of a functional difference on your layout between a company owned car and any other car. Like any other RR car - your company owned cars enter your layout from staging (or from an interchange track), and are then either taken directly to the industry for loading/unloading (often via a yard, if you have a yard on your layout), or - if you want to model the car being a returning empty for which you don't have a load lined up yet, taken to a storage track somewhere not too far from the industry, where the car can be held until there is a need for it to be taken to the industry to be loaded.

Such storage may happen in your local yard (if you have the spare space for it without totally messing up your yard's ability to do it's normal work), or on a siding somewhere, or at an extra spur at or near the industry.

Don't forget that it is totally up to you if you want to model holding an empty until there is a load for it. Hopefully, you are not planning to store dozens or hundreds of cars for indeterminate lengths of time - it might be fairly realistic when modeling a downturn of the economy to have a lot of idle cars around for months (before the oldest cars start getting sent off to be cut up for scrap), but it would kinda be boring for a model railroad layout to have it filled up with stored cars for which there is no demand :-)

Most cars should probably be modeled as being gainfully employed, not kept waiting in a taxi line for random carload sales, but moving on a fairly steady schedule between supplier (staging) and your plant, or between your plant and regular customer/distributor (staging) - say two or four or ten or whatever makes sense for your layout and your plant delivered to your industry daily (per operating session).

You can deliver all cars at once (and at the same time pull all outbound cars from the industry), or you can deliver half of the inbound cars on the morning turn (and pull any outbound cars then too), and deliver the second half of the cars on the afternoon turn, or whatever makes sense when it comes to your staging capacity, industy track capacity and the number of trains you are planning to run.

Smile,
Stein

[Gary S]

Stein, thank you for the detailed response. It all makes sense. Although my layout is a long way from being operational, the more I know, the better the operational design will be.

DocWayne: What kind of resolution do you use for your photos? Yours are so crsip and clean, mine leave alot to be desired....

[doctorwayne]

DocWayne: What kind of resolution do you use for your photos? Yours are so crsip and clean, mine leave alot to be desired....

Beats me. My camera is a fairly basic "point and shoot" type - while it has a few options, I don't recall seeing anything regarding resolution. For close-ups, I sometimes place one of the lenses of my Optivisor over the camera's lense - it works fairly well, although depth-of-field is pretty-well non-existent.

Wayne

[2-8-2]

DocWayne: What kind of resolution do you use for your photos? Yours are so crsip and clean, mine leave alot to be desired....

One of the most important settings (even on point-and-shoot cameras) when taking MRR pics is to use the macro mode setting. This is universal on all cameras, represented by the little flower symbol:



Macro mode allows for close focus of small objects and provides great detail. Without going into a bunch of photography jargon, every camera has its own fudge factor with close-up focus. Try to use the zoom feature instead of actually placing the camera lens close to the object.

[Gary S]

Thanks for the photography tips. I changed the resolution on my camera and it was already on macro. I'll check out the zoom. BTW, this camera is so old that you actually put a 3.5" floppy into it!

Back to the operations: My layout will be large enough to have a yard for storage of the shortline rollingstock, so I guess the GERN cars can be stored there too. But, as was mentioned, the GERN cars will most likely be in constant usage because flux and its derivatives are in such demand.

[Ralph]

This is a fun discussion. I don't have any GERN rolling stock yet but I can imagine some covered hoppers being picked up at my GERN "Cement Flux" plant and taken to off layout staging to be put in a train that sets out at Hudson Cement. Gary, I might model your models when it comes to the GERN covered hoppers shown in your other thread!

Ralph

[Gary S]

That would be great if you had some like mine. Now, check this out...

I have decals for a KP&W boxcar that i haven't gotten around to building yet. Maybe I will do one soon. Hey, how about a photo of a KP&W boxcar?

[doctorwayne]

I always thought that the numbers shown as "dimensions" were simply the physical size of the picture. For the shot about which you asked, that number is 2304x1728. The picture would have been taken at the "two-lip" setting, but I don't recall if the Optivisor was used - I doubt that that would have changed the resolution, anyway. The camera does have an option to change the picture size, and is set at the maximum, which is 4 megapixels.

Wayne