# Railroad freight car sharing



## LocoChris (Jun 26, 2021)

In modern times on any railroad you'll see the majority of the freight cars on their trains are from other railroads (like a CSX car on a Union Pacific train for example), or a leasing company. My question is, how long ago did this start happening? I'm going to be building a UP turbine train from the 50's or 60's so wondering if it would be accurate to include PRR boxcars, for one example.


----------



## traction fan (Oct 5, 2014)

LocoChris said:


> In modern times on any railroad you'll see the majority of the freight cars on their trains are from other railroads (like a CSX car on a Union Pacific train for example), or a leasing company. My question is, how long ago did this start happening? I'm going to be building a UP turbine train from the 50's or 60's so wondering if it would be accurate to include PRR boxcars, for one example.


It goes back a long time. Probably about the time railroads started really connecting to each other. Early railroads were usually short affairs, linking two or three nearby towns. As more railroad track was laid between the post civil war era, and the turn of the 20th century, more and more railroads merged into larger companies. Freight cars were, & still are, "forwarded" from one railroad company's track to another, in order to get from "distant point A" to "faraway point B." Since no one railroad company's track spans the whole width of the US. Today we have four "super railroads" and a bunch of regional lines. There may be less forwarding of cars, since each of the major railroads covers so much territory. However, train lengths, including the sheer number of cars, have increased, so maybe not. In any case, car forwarding has been around since about 1900, and its still done today, so your turbine might quite reasonably pull cars from other railroads, during your 50s-60s era.

Traction Fan 🙂


----------



## MichaelE (Mar 7, 2018)

I remember seeing plenty of other road names pulled by Illinois Central and L&N in the late 60s and 70s.


----------



## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

I worked for IBM in the late 60's, and one of my major clients was the Reading Railroad. They had plenty of non-reading cars on their system every day. AAMOF, there was a rush to get them off the system before midnight, that was the _*Witching Hour*_, they'd get charged for another day's rent if they were on past that time. I was the IBM software representative working with their software guys building the system to track cars.


----------



## cv_acr (Oct 28, 2011)

Since gauge was standardized after the US Civil War.


----------



## OilValleyRy (Oct 3, 2021)

I remember seeing a 1950s PRR service advertisement that showed where one of their X31 (or x32) cars went in one months time. It was all over, from NYC, to Denver, to LA, to Seattle, among a dozen other places. All in 30 days.


----------



## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

Sounds common to me…..


----------

