ken@ihuxq.UUCP (ken perlow) (02/23/84)
Some freight cars, almost always tank cars but almost never
box cars, have four letters of the alphabet prominently
stencilled on them. The 4th letter is always "X". The 4
characters appear to be highly correlated with the company
that owns the car, that is, cars from the same road usually
bear the same "name", but it never seems to be any kind of
acronym that a human would think of. Does anyone know what
these call signs(?) are, or how they came to be?
advTHANXance
--
*** ***
JE MAINTIENDRAI ***** *****
****** ****** 23 Feb 84 [4 Ventose An CXCII]
ken perlow ***** *****
(312)979-7261 ** ** ** **
..ihnp4!ihuxq!ken *** ***rib@pyuxdd.UUCP (RI Block) (02/24/84)
Herein I expose my limited knowledge on the subject, but here goes: Once upon a time, all the cars that ran on US Railroads were owned by said railroads with the exception of express cars. Express cars are freight cars with passenger running gear (steam hoses, double brake hoses, etc) which were hooked in to the head of passenger consists and hauled under contract for express companies (Mercury Express, American Express, ... the last one I don't know if it was an original company or not was the Railway Express Agency -> "REA Express" Freight cars of other railroads were used under an interchange agreement where the user paid a daily rental and attempted to send the car back to its home sort of like "net.mail.headers" either through an interchange point or a reconstruction of how it came. With the decline of finantial health of RR's, private owners began to provide cars either because the design was non-standard, or there were not enough RR owned cars available. I believe that the private owner was compensated at a higher daily rate that paid to interchange (RR-owned cars). Anyhow, non-railroad owned cars have a marking that always ends in "X".
darrelj@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Darrel VanBuer) (02/25/84)
***X denotes railway cars owned by a holding company rather than by a
railroad. For historical reasons, the railroads have not wanted to own tank
cars (no doubt in part because you can't load any cargo in any car).
--
Darrel J. Van Buer, PhD
System Development Corp.
2500 Colorado Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(213)820-4111 x5449
...{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,sdccsu3,trw-unix}!sdcrdcf!darrelj
VANBUER@USC-ECL.ARPA