distbatching freight cars


lmackattack

lmackattack

old school
before computers came into play How did a railroad know what car and where to send it.

did a customer call up and order a box car,flat bed gon etc... and then spec the lenght of the car?

how did the railroad know where their car is as? did they keep good track of its movement.


always wondered

Trent
 
Well, that question could take a small book to answer. ;) It really depends on the load. For specialized loads like chemicals, grain, and propane, only certain types of cars can be used and some customers have a pool of those cars they lease, either from a railroad or from a car leasing company. For general freight like appliances and cardboard, the shipper just tells the railroad the weight and cubic feet of the load and the railroad provides the appropriate car.

Railroads tried an early version of the bar code system called the Automatic Car Locater. There was a plate with multicolored reflective stripes that had the car info encoded in the code. Trackside scanners read each car as it went by and the data about the location of the car was updated in the computer. You can still see the occasional car that has one of these plates. Unfortunately, the designers of this system didn't realize how dirty freight cars got and that the ACL plate would get just as dirty, so the reader either couln't scan the plate at all or returned false information. I think that system lasted about seven or eight years before the railroads threw in the towel.

Now, most cars are tracked the old fashioned way, by humans copying car numbers while they are in yards and entering them into the computer. There are some cars carrying high value loads that have GPS transmitters so the car can be tracked real time but that technology is still too expensive to use on regular freight cars. I expect that the cost of GPS technology will come down enough over the next decade that all car movements willl by tracked by GPS.
 
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