Waybills, Part 109: still more stamps

In the preceding post, no. 108 in the series, I showed my creation of a Canadian weight agreement stamp. Just like American ones, this identifies a weight agreement between a shipper and a Weighing and Inspection Bureau or WIB. These agreements allowed a shipper to simply count units loaded and multiply by the unit weight, so the car did not need to be delayed to be passed over a scale. (That post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/04/waybills-part-108-more-stamps.html .) 

Recently a friend, Bill Jolitz, provided me with nice, clear images of WIB stamps that I had not seen before. By this I mean individual agreement numbers in the stamp center, not the WIB itself. They were from the Eastern WIB and the Western WIB. As I showed previously, we know the territories of the six U.S. tariff organizations that hosted WIBs (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/05/waybillls-part-85-more-on-weight.html ).

But the maps shown in the post just cited only emphasize two of the WIB territories, Eastern and Southeastern. The Western WIB region, shown below in green, encompassed a large piece of the United States, the entire states of North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas, along with the northern third of Illinois and the eastern third of Colorado. Note that in this case, the name “Western” does not mean Far West; the Far West shown below was under the Transcontinental Freight Bureau.

Below I show the WWIB stamp image that Bill provided. I like that it’s a very clear and distinct image of the stamp in question. It’s also formatted differently than the WWIB stamp showed in that previous blog post (link in the second paragraph, above). I do like to have variations in what I put on model waybills.

But this format, with the legend in the center, “shippers weight under weight agreement” and the agreement number, does appear to be pretty standard. You can compare a number of such stamp images in one of my previous posts (see that at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/02/waybills-part-79-weight-stamps.html ).  

Bill also provided me a stamp image from the Eastern WIB. As I showed in my post about maps (the with the link in the second paragraph, above), the Eastern territory was not large, but encompassed a really intense industrial area of the United States in the transition era. Here is that territory, repeated from that map post:

And here is the stamp image Bill sent. Again, this seems to have been a standard stamp format, widely though not universally seen.

As attentive readers of this blog will know, I already had images of stamps from these two WIBs, for the WWIB and the EWIB, but slightly different in format and with different weight agreement numbers. This makes further variation among my model-usage waybills. For example, here is a waybill for an inbound load to an industry on my layout, using the new stamp:

Adding the weight agreement stamp to a waybill is very prototypical (for appropriate cargoes), and something I enjoy including on the waybills used on my layout.

Tony Thompson