(erielack) O&W revenue equipment

["Janet & Randy Brown" <jananran_@_mymailstation.com>]

Todd wrote . . . 
***So the O&W paid off-line roads fees for utilizing their equipment to serve O&W customers . . . expensive for the customers, I bet ***

ALL railroads did -- and still do -- pay daily rental fees ( per diem )for off lines cars on their rails.  By the same rules, they did -- and still do -- earn per diem for their cars on foreign rails.  For most railroads, it mostly sorta balanced out, and the customer never knew the difference -- the rate was the same no matter whose car was used.

For a poor road like the O&W, however, it was a burden which became a downward spiral -- they paid and never received.

In fact [ here comes list content ] it was the refusal of the PC to pay perdiem after bankruptcy while still demanding payment from EL that helped drive EL down and into Conrail.  And all the other roads, too.

L&HR, with very little on-line traffic, used to try as hard as they could to get cars from one end of their road to the other the same day:  thus, no perdiem.  O&W didn't have that opportunity -- neither, for that matter, did EL.

That drove the own-a-boxcar-for-the-perdiem craze of the '70's -- you could buy a boxcar for "X", lease it to a shortline for "Y", they get the perdiem and you get the lease payment and everybody wins.  Except -- everybody NEVER wins.  "If it sounds too good to be true, it is."  Thereby, miles of Middletown & Unionville and Green Mountain and Cooperstown & Charlotte Valley and all the others' boxcars on sidings and even mainlines.  Some railroads "owned" more cars that they could ever fit on their own rails.

Randy Brown ELHS#16

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