and i think it had at least one car from every railroad operating in North America!
I saw:
Union Pacific
BNSF
Burlington Northern
ATSF
FerroMex
Norfolk Southern
Kansas City Southern
Conrail
CSX
Canadian Pacific
Canadian National
GTX leasing
and I'm probably forgetting some! Some of the cars were loaded, some looked empty. It was headed west on the BNSF tracks through Lincoln.
Well, cars -- which are loaded at one location and genererally are routed around until they reach their destination, even on a foreign road -- are a different animal from power, which tends to stay closer to home, and return faster when it leaves.
Can you imagine the complex computer system needed
to know where each car is on the North American rail
network and, in addition, figure out how to handle the
financial end of the system...who pays who for what.
One can imagine that any specific car never returns to
it's owning railroad. How does that company get a
return on it's investment?
Can you imagine the complex computer system needed
to know where each car is on the North American rail
network and, in addition, figure out how to handle the
financial end of the system...who pays who for what.
Each railroad has it's own computer system, but the AAR specifies certain formats and messaging between the railroads (or between the railroads and the AAR and then the AAR and the railroads). EDI 418 are train consist protocols and EDI 351 are train movement protocols. It's all standardized and complicated coded so it is both complex yet pretty simple ( actually primitive since the protocols are decades old).
Here's a little secret, you probably at most saw cars from only a couple railroads because the majority of those cars weren't "railroad" cars. They were probably mostly TTX cars with railroad owned racks on them. The railroad doesn't own the car, the railroad owns the rack and TTX owns and controls the cars.
I always wondered about this. Living in the DFW - TX area I see auto racks on passing trains all the time, in all the denomination of road names. Interesting!
A good friend is an executive with a major logistics company based on the East Coast which specializes in rail shipments.
He explained to me one evening that the system has been virtually unchanged since the 1950's and was based on the way cattle ranchers kept track of their personal livestock via "branding".
While the system IS complex, it is also beautifully simple. Needless to say, computers have lightened the load.
I get to see a sweet autorack train about once every 2 days.....The amtrak autotrain loads about 20 miles from my house and we get to watch that heading out......
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