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Tuesday, December 15, 2020

What’s a Car Distributor?

 The title of this blog my confuse some — if so, read on — but even those who know what the job was about, may not recognize the ramifications in model railroad operations. I have written in a general way about this in previous blogs. For example, I wrote a fairly general description about what most railroads called their Car Service organization (that post can be found at the following link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-car-service-organization.html ), including a link to an article about car service on the Bangor & Aroostook (BAR).  

A previous post that quoted some railroaders, notably Dave Sprau describing experiences as a relief agent at the NP depot in Snoqualmie, Washington, about how he as an agent would relate to a Car Distributor, was the one here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2014/04/waybills-part-32-waybill-preparation.html

And on this and other bases, I think we understand that shippers called their local agents to request cars, and agents called a Car Distributor nearest them to obtain that car. But then what happened? That’s what I want to turn to next. But first, it’s first essential to remember that armies of clerks did this kind of work on railroads, before the advent of business computers. 

Above is a an example of yard office clerks in a moderate-size Southern Pacific yard at Gerber, California. The photo appeared in the SP employee magazine, The Bulletin, in April 1952. These people relied heavily on the telephone for their work.

The Southern Pacific, like many railroads, located this activity in the Transportation part of the Operating Department. Its name was Freight Car Service, with subordinate individuals called “car service agents” or clerks. The BAR, as shown in the link in the first paragraph above, had a Chief Car Distributor, and under him, several Car Distributors. Another pattern was to have a Car Distributor and car service clerks under him. (I use the male pronoun here because in the transition era, the immense majority of these people were men.)

So how did it work in an office like the one above? how did the Car Distributor and his staff of clerks do their work? On nearly all railroads, the local agent’s “first thing in the morning” duties included listing the number and disposition of all freight cars spotted in his territory. From these reports, the Car Distributor’s staff would know approximately how many cars will be made empty on-line today.

The Car Distributor’s office also receives, every morning, junction reports of all inbound empty cars being interchanged to their railroad, and a status report from the yard as to how many and what kind of empties are stored in the yard.

Against those stocks of empty cars, they have requests coming from shippers, via local agents, which were all submitted prior to 2 PM  (or some comparable time) the previous afternoon. Now the job is to match up the available empties to the requests. Any requests for car types or sufficient numbers of cars not available will have to be sent to a yard in the adjoining division, though of course part of the job is to anticipate needs, and hold a certain number of empties for expected use.

Recently on the Steam Era Freight Cars email list, an interesting comment was made by Todd Sullivan, who worked a year in the early 1960s as a clerk for the NPT (Northern Pacific Terminal Co.) in Portland, Oregon, a terminal switching railroad owned jointly by NP, UP and SP. He did a variety of jobs, but here is his comment (used with permission) about working in the Car Distributor job.

“In my clerking experience, which included working Car Distributor (essentially the car inventory & supply manager) for two weeks, I found that each industry's traffic manager had a pretty good working knowledge of the cars his company needed on a regular basis. When I received calls requesting empties for loading, the requests were usually very specific, down to the individual car or series number. 

“Also, the Car Distributor had a pretty good knowledge of both (a) car types ordinarily found on the property (we were a terminal switching outfit) and (b) how to decipher the contents of the ORER. As a side note, after working as a clerk in the yard for about 6 months, if you gave me a valid initial and number combination for one of our area railroads, I could give a physical description of the car and what it was normally used for.”

I know from experience in model railroad layout operating sessions, that many modelers seem to imagine empty cars falling out of the sky at just the right moment, or perhaps being available because a four-cycle car card regularly directed them to be available. On the prototype, however, a great deal of record keeping and paperwork, and of course knowledge of the territory and the wisdom of experience, was in fact essential to getting Car Distribution right. 

It seems to me that any layout with a serious yard operation could probably duplicate at least some of the reality of prototype Car Distribution. Even my own layout, representing a branch line, may be able to capture some of the ways Car Service actually worked, and I will be exploring them.

Tony Thompson

8 comments:

  1. I seem to have heard that Alameda had a hard time getting cars for Del Monte and other produce shippers.

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  2. Your comments remind me of the time that my folks and I were driving from San Diego to Long Island NY for my wedding in August 1965. Dad worked for the SP and had been trying to find out what happened to 4 boxcars that were no where to be found. We stopped in southern Indiana for lunch at a diner where a small marshalling yard was behind the building. So Dad and I wondered back to have a look: there were the four boxcars that he had spent weeks searching for. He could not get to a phone fast enough to call San Francisco with the news. Great incentive for the SP starting the TOPS project.

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    1. Thanks, Lou, a vivid story that illustrates how it used to be.

      Incidentally, I had a comment from Paul Koehler, long-time SP employee, about the Car Distributor operation at LA's Taylor Yard. The Distributor, who worked under the Terminal Superintendent, had 20 clerks under him, and the work was carried out 24/7. I can well believe it.
      Tony Thompson

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  3. Tony - thanks for taking this on! I've been asking the same question for years and the response usually is "model railroaders want to run trains, not be clerks!" But in my mind, figuring out how to simulate empty car routing is going to be fun! One approach I've heard of is employed by Gary Jordan up here in Mukilteo, WA, who uses cards that represent the loads themselves. Then he can move them from one car card to another while the ore moves from On30 to On3 to O standard gage on his Gilpin Tram railroad. Maybe we could have something like that, where you (in the role of a car distributor) clip a load card onto a waybill to make it "in play."

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    1. Hi, Burr. I like the idea of specifying the load separately, but it seems to me that a normal waybill can do the same job. Of course if a load of ore is dumped into a bin, and reloaded into another (standard gauge) car, on the prototype there would be a new waybill, whereas a "load card" can just say "carload of ore" or equivalent.

      My own layout doesn't really have any opportunities for this kind of thing, but I will give it some more thought.
      Tony Thompson

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  4. Interesting discussion! I think the major issue most people will have with going away from a "fall from the sky" (better known as "spot on arrival" on the prototype) scheme is that our model yards don't typically have excess capacity to store empty cars for eventual use. And even if there aren't firm car orders for equipment there's a reality which would dictate cars pending ordering in being sent to as close to expected point of need as possible to free up yard capacity - in other words excess cars would be left "off-spot" at industries or at other unused sidings as close as possible to the industry outside of yards if trackage is available (especially as capacity at main terminals tightens). And as a prototype yardmaster I often had to straighten out car distributors because they many times didn't take into consideration the switching involved (why do you want me to spend an hour digging out 5 specific cars out of that group of 30 identical cars when the first five on the south end are perfectly appropriate?) In some cases the cars to be spotted in were essentially left up to the switch crew for ease of handling (i.e. Weyerhaeuser needs 5 empty flats today - spot what's ever most convenient and report it to the car distribution clerk at the end of your shift). I suspect the "rules" of car distribution were highly variable depending on the situation rather than a universal process that we can reliably depend on being accurate on our layouts, unless we have specific information from the people who actual did the jobs at the locations we're trying to model!

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  5. Thanks, Dean, very interesting to hear from someone who did that job. Actually, most model yards are clogged with cars that are "sitting around" but I take your point. You would have to dedicate space for empties.

    I like your comment about "straightening out" car distributors. No doubt some of this has to do with Car Service Rules -- how much trouble is it going to be to follow the Rules, as opposed to just spotting the most convenient empty? Around 1950, an AAR study showed that about two-thirds of supplied empties did follow the Rules, so in most cases that effort was made, but fully a third of cases did not.
    Tony Thompson

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  6. I should clarify that my time as yardmaster was in the 90's so I don't really have much to add before that time. But I imagine the pressures of keeping yards fluid was the same - if the time I spend digging out the exact car the distributor wants me to use results in a missed switch to a customer that's not a good trade-off. I should also clarify that I used the term "rules" more to describe procedures in the yards rather than following AAR rules. No doubt there was plenty of give and take between the clerical and operating departments to fill orders efficiently rather than everyone just blindly following the recommendations of the car distributors (see my above comments about "straightening them out...). I'm sure many car distributors learned (often the hard way...) to not only select appropriate cars within AAR rules but also pick the one's that were most convenient for the operating department.

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