I have written before about the routing part of a waybill. But most of it was about reasonable routing, not actually the prototype procedure. The latter is the topic today. For the prior posts, I recommend this one (at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/05/waybills-24-routing.html ) along with a later follow-up on the same subject, which is at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/02/waybills-part-37-routing-of-loads.html .
On the prototype, the ICC approved routes, and rates for those routes. Immense numbers of official listings resulted. Here is one example of a routing book, which was issued for the Nickel Plate. This is an 8.5 x.11-inch book, and more impressively, it’s 1-3/4 inches thick, 1008 pages.
The cover repays some attention, prominently identifying itself as Eastbound Routing Guide No. 1 (there would also have been Westbound Routing Guide books). It became effective on September 15, 1945. As you can note below, this only applies originating movements from the six states of the NKP (omitting Michigan), to destinations in 10 eastern states plus the District of Columbia. Other eastbound guides would be needed for New England and the Southeast.
The book begins with a list of participating destination railroads, and gives their abbreviations, in the destination states. This only occupies three pages.
Second, a list of destination stations is given, occupying pages 7 to 71, completing Section 1 of the book (entitled “Stations from and to which routes apply”). Shown below is a randomly chosen page, page 19, showing destination stations in Maryland and giving each one a number.
Next, these station numbers were grouped with routes by number, which is Section 2 of the book, pages 75 to 1000. For each railroad on which the final consignee is located, routes beyond various interchanges from NKP to final railroad are given. These are listed in groups by final-interchange railroad. In the example below, page 111, part of a larger list of approved routes via Baltimore & Ohio is shown. As an example (you can click to enlarge), route 32 is to hand the car off at Fort Wayne, Indiana, and move via PRR to DuBois, PA, where it is handed off to the B&O, which will deliver to final destination.
Finally with all these route numbers defined for each final railroad, we can show approved routes by number, from specific groups of NKP stations. The originating NKP stations are listed by station number. There is no need to tabulate those for NKP employees, as those numbers are in every employee timetable. Each group of NKP station numbers has a corresponding list of ICC-approved route numbers to groups of destination stations on the final railroad of delivery. This of course appears impenetrable by itself (see example page 99 below). But as shown in the previous example page, each interchanged railroad listing contains the explanation of route numbers, followed by further interchange railroad(s) and junction(s).
So how would a clerk use this book? Say you're at Frankfort, Indiana on the NKP (station 2206) and you have a shipper wanting to move a load to Frederick, Maryland, on the B&O (station 1385). The shipper in the great majority of cases chooses routing, as is their right, and they may have specified interchanging from the NKP to the B&O at Fostoria, Ohio (south of Toledo). The clerk can find on the page 111, shown above, that this is route 33. Then on page 99, above, route 33 is shown as approved between these station numbers.
My friend Jerry Stewart, at one time a Chief Clerk in Chicago, told me that even an experienced route clerk would need plenty of patience and time, and still might not find an unapproved route anywhere east of the Mississippi. Still, routing was checked in the way just described. What about roundabout routes, deliberately chosen to lengthen the delivery time for price purposes? Routes could be strung together, but each segment still had to be an approved route.
I am omitting a second large issue, rates. Each route had an associated rate. But I’m not going there today (for a little more on it, see this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/02/waybills-part-118-more-information.html ). Arbitrarily chosen routes could well result in higher rates.
Does this affect how we create model waybills? By no means. Aside from the inconvenience and lack of importance of doing so, you would need a really big set of routing guides. You saw above the size of this single NKP book, and I mentioned that there were probably five or six more, just for the NKP. Imagine now a set of books for all the Class One railroads. Jerry said a complete set would fill a couple of 20-foot shelves. But I find it interesting to see how this work was done in the pre-computer age.
Tony Thompson
No comments:
Post a Comment