I was wondering if anyone could help me understand how railroads large and small track their equipment once it leaves their home rails. For a simple example, lets say your shortline just bought a shiny new hopper car and you need a load of coal for your locomotives. So you call up NS and get them to pick it up to go down to West Virginia to get filled. Now let's say that NS is short of hoppers and a customer down the line has some stone to ship out to Califormia. How do you ensure that your car heads for WV for the coal and not filled with stone and shipped west with your coal appearing a week later in some beat up old hopper they had at the coal mine? I assume there is a rental-type fee railroads charge each other for the use of their equipment whether active or as it sits on a siding. That's one thing, but how do you get you hopper back before it gets worn out, assuming using cars in this manner is common practice.As I am clearly not in the railroad business, I was just wondering how it worked, especially for the little guy.Thanks.

Let's begin with the painfully obvious: Every piece of in-transit railroad equipment on its own wheels has both a number and the reporting marks of the railroad or company to which it belongs. In addition, most every major railroad requires any equipment in transit to have permanently affixed a Automatic Equipment Identification, or AEI, tag, which is a passive radio tag that reports to a trackside scanner the data regarding the car's identity.Computers in the railroads' networks will specify, upon entry upon the shipment's acceptance (the agent at the local yard, the trainload coming out of the mine, etc.), the car's planned routing and handover point. In reality, in most cases, the cars are still handled from yard to yard by the moral equivalent of "today's low-priority mixed freight from Cumberland to Baltimore" or "the next hot-shot train to Chicago" or "the trainload of stuff to hand over to the Belt Line", and switched to the appropriate train at the various yards at which the trains terminate. The decision of which train to attach the car is usually made by each successive yard, although on a modern railroad the options are somewhat few and predictable.The fly in the ointment is that everything can be subject to changes for a variety of reasons. A crew member might see that passenger car with odd couplers that's supposed to be at the end of his train, decide that he can't hang the EOT unit there and the car might give them trouble, and just conveniently "forgets" to attach it to his train. The yard might have way too much freight sitting around and not enough locomotives or crews to send out the train the car's supposed to be on, so it gets tacked onto a "dog's breakfast" of odds and ends that get shipped off to another yard, just to get it out of the first yard's way--and Yard B now wonders why they have a car that's gone 200 miles out of its way.Railroads have vastly improved over the days when switch lists were always scribbled with pencil and ACI barcodes would get dirty. But preposterous mis-routings can and do still occur. The wildest I have ever personally heard of was a car that was supposedly being shipped from suburban Chicago to Montreal turning up instead in Elko, Nevada. Wrong direction, wrong railroad.

This is a bit off-topic for rypn, but pick up an old copy of the Official Railway Equipment Register - they turn up at train shows from time to time - and in the back you will find the "Car Hire Rules" and "Car Service Rules". These rules govern how freight cars are to be handled and how car owners are to be compensated. There is also a separate Car Repair Manual that specifies how repairs are to be made and who pays for what.A railroad can specify how a car is to be handled when empty - free for any available load, returned to owner, or returned to a specific loading point (pool assignment). In the old days this information - especially pool assignments - was often stenciled on the car sides. These days it is computer code.The AEI tags and scanner system work well and car tracking is pretty simple - and accurate - these days. Equipment can still get misrouted, but overall the system is much more efficient than it was in the paper-and-pencil era.Alan Maples

Still, I recall back before the WC was taken over by the CN where the Wisconsin Central "lost" a locomotive for possibly several months. I'm sure it was eventually found, but I did not hear the story of how, when or where. I do recall it was being posted on many of the railfan boards hoping someone would spot the thing and report it to WC.Mark D.

Locomotives, passenger cars and other oddities that require special handling tend to be more prone to misrouting, although if the equipment is equipped with the proper scanner tag the odds are pretty good that it won't get "lost".If locomotives in transit are coupled to the road power, they will usually be detached with the road locos when the train arrives at a yard and head for the shop track. This is where trouble usually starts, since they will often bypass the yard scanner system, and the shop track folks don't normally have access to shipping info. My advice for such moves, based on personal experience, is not only make sure you have the proper AEI tags (programed for the correct reporting marks you are shipping under) but also stencil the destination and route on the side of the engine/car.Unlike the GPS tracking systems used by the big trucking companies, the AEI tag system used by the railroads is relatively primative. It doesn't tell you where your equipment is, it tells you where it was. If it gets parked before passing another scanner, then some creative detective work is called for by your railroad's customer service rep.Alan Maples

My own handy tip for the day - if you're attaching your own AEI tags for some reason - make darn sure they don't get put on upside down. Apparently they are direction sensitive. A railroad vendor/manufacturer I worked with verified the tags with a hand scanner, but never verified them ON the equipment when it left the plant. Several million worth of hardware was lost in the system with AEI tags for several months due to the final assembly not realizing there was an 'UP'. Said vendor now has a verification scanner by the outbound lead and verifies tags on the final outbound waybill.The AEI tag is also only as good as the routing waybill. You can know 'who' a car is, but if the load/empty cycle gets screwed up, your load can keep coming back to you as an empty. During the dark early days of the CR demerger, these 'ping pong' cars drove everybody in the railroad business stark raving nuts because the system was started with a test tape instead of the real data - resulting in many, many, cars being identified as loads/empties opposite of reality and getting rerouted back to load point.

Everything you've said is true. It is going to get a bit more complicated. As I understand it, the railroad's computer system known as UMLER is going to get a total makeover early next year, and the data in the computer will actually supercede what is stenciled on the car. Things like air brake work, reflective stripes, overall size and capacity of the car, tare weight, etc., will have to be entered into the computer and that is gospel. If the computer doesn't say it's "in date" or list the measurements,or whatever, then it's off to the repair track and a repair or measurement or whatever is automatically authorized, which the car owner gets billed for. Passenger cars, traveling on the general railway system and locomotives will be included in the big data base, tentatively known as EMIS. Locomotives are included because so many units now travel off-line. The host railroad will be able to check with EMIS and see when periodic work is due, etc Should be most interesting... Don't know how the computer will differentiate between period air brake requirements between the freight (Section 232) and passenger (Section 238) parts of the Code of Federal Regulations The Rail Passenger Car Alliance (RPCA) has been somewhat involved in the UMLER redo, I am not sure whether APTA, TRAIN, ARM or AARPCO has been nearly as involved.g.f.paynebaltimore