Car Distribution

The title of this post is that of a railroad job, the person responsible for maintaining the inventory of active cars on the railroad, foreign and domestic, and fulfilling requests for empty cars. I have written two prior posts on this topic, beginning with a general description (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/12/whats-car-distributor.html ) and following up with additional information (that post is at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/06/more-about-car-distributors.html ).

Yard offices in the steam era did all kinds of paperwork, including distributing empty cars. The photo below is of the Santa Fe yard office at Amarillo, Texas in November, 1942 (John Vachon photo, FSA-OWI Collection, Library of Congress negative LC-USW3-011438-D). The gentleman in the light Stetson is the yardmaster.

This photo depicts a modest amount of staff; doubtless not everyone is shown. But in a truly large and busy yard, such as Southern Pacific’s Taylor Yard at Los Angeles, the numbers were bigger. In a previous post about this topic (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/05/clerks-waybills-and-all-that-waybills.html ), I showed several photos of the staff at this office; one of them is below. These men are identified in the post cited.

Amongst all these people and their manifold duties is a Car Distributor. It can be an important concept to understand for layout operation to achieve realistic movement of empty cars.

And the core operations point, referring to car distribution, is “where do empty cars come from?” The prototype answer is that there is a “reservoir” yard, to which every town agent addresses requests for empties, and from which every town receives them. This is often easy to research if you have access to an organization chart or, better, a list of railroad officials. Car distributors were only in charge of reservoir yards. 

That doesn’t mean that empty cars never came from anywhere else. But the common model railroad move, of a car made empty in a town, then being used at another industry for loading, was a rare occurrence on the prototype, as several experienced railroaders have commented. The timing, and having the exact car type (and grade) that was needed, being available, was pretty unusual. 

So how was this administered? On the Southern Pacific, empty car movement was the responsibility of the Transportation section of the Operating Department. Car distribution was under the supervision of the general superintendent of transportation. Under him, Freight Car Service was the specific duty of its superintendent. These officers were located in San Francisco. 

On Southern Pacific’s Pacific Lines, the railroad west of El Paso, there were ten operating divisions. There was, in general, one Car Distributor for each division, with two exceptions. The very long Salt Lake Division had a Car Distributor at each end, Sparks, Nevada, and Ogden, Utah. And the immense Western Division shared Oakland Pier and Stockton. 

They were as follows: San Francisco (Coast Div.), Oakland Pier and Stockton (Western Div.), Sacramento (Sacramento Div.), Ogden and Sparks, (Salt Lake Div.), Dunsmuir (Shasta Div.), Portland (Portland Div.), Bakersfield (San Joaquin Div.), Los Angeles (LA Div.), Tucson (Tucson Div.), and El Paso (Rio Grande Div.). 

A good summary of the topic of SP car distribution comes from an article in the SP employee magazine, Southern Pacific Bulletin, in the issue for September 1951: 

“The car service department at San Francisco supervises the tide movement and allocation of empty freight equipment over the ten divisions of the Pacific Lines with an ever watchful eye on economic factors, consisting of maintaining minimum per diem expenses, empty freight car miles, and the flow of empty freight cars through the several gateways of Pacific Lines from the north, south and east.” 

I remember from my interviews with Malcolm (“Mac”) Gaddis, who had worked at San Luis Obispo or SLO in the early 1950s, that I asked him where empty cars came from. He answered, “Usually Los Angeles,” and when I asked how that worked, he said that most days, the afternoon train from Los Angeles, the “San Francisco Manifest,” would have a string of empties in it for SLO. That train normally left LA at 5 AM and was scheduled into SLO at 2:40 PM, though usually late.

(I learned a great deal from Mac. You can read major excerpts from my interviews with him across several posts; use “Gaddis” as the search term in the search box at the right. of this post.)

On my layout, empty cars nearly always come from Los Angeles, though occasionally from somewhere else on the division. It would be unlikely (though not impossible) for a car to arrive from another division, given the size and activity of Los Angeles.

Tony Thompson