Introduction:
This waybill is for a carload of rough lumber, loaded from a mill in Rock Island Ill. and delivered to Algoma Plywood. It is from the group of cars delivered to the Ahnapee & Western on August 27, 1962 and the scan was provided by Andy Laurent from the A&W Waybill Collection (click to enlarge):
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Relationship to Other Waybills in the A&W Collection:
There are two related waybills in the A&W collection (numbers 117 and 231 in the tabulation made by Andy and published on Mark Mathu's GBW page at http://www.greenbayroute.com/1962ahwwaybills.htm). Like this shipment, the commodities were rough soft maple, the shipper was Swords Veneer & Lumber Co., the consignee was Algoma Plywood, and the car was routed on the MILW through Green Bay. So these shipments appear to form a traffic lane; a connection among a commodity, a shipper, and a consignee that is repeated reasonably frequently. These shipments were all roughly 3 weeks apart in the summer of 1962, and they were all on Rock Island flat cars.
Format:
The waybill is in the standard-sized 81/2" by 11" format, with a centerfold crease. The data fields are in the newer style layout and there are three lines for the "STOP This Car At" information which is a newer-style feature. The form is undated, but our estimate is that it was designed and printed post-1959 or so.
The Milwaukee Road was the originating line-haul carrier. The header is a simple, clean, bold typeface without a logo, right-justified across the top. The footer contains the carrier name and interline code number in a much smaller typeface centered across the bottom.
Typefaces, Preprinting, Stamps, and Handwriting:
The typing is all in capital letters and the appearance is light and uneven. It looks as if the clerk's typewriter could have used a new ribbon when this bill was prepared. This light uneven typeface might be an interesting variation to try and model (but its not really typical and probably shouldn't be overdone). The typeface is a fairly ordinary serif, with old-style numbers and closed-top 4s.
There is no preprinting on the waybill.
The use of stamps is quite typical for the waybills that have terminated on the A&W. There are the destination agent's stamp in the lower right, the round interline yard stamps, and a square interchange stamps on the lower left (include a bleed-through image of a stamp that was applied to the back of the bill. The square "Manifested" stamp in the upper left with its handwritten notation are features that we have seen before on A&W waybills but whose function remains unclear. Note the weight ticket attached to the waybill in place of a Shipper's Load and Count stamp.
Aside from several handwritten miscellaneous notations, most noteworthy is the handwritten correction to the consignee. It doesn't appear that this car was a roller or that it was reconsigned; the information in the destination and route fields are not consistent with that notion. It appears more probable that the agent made a mistake while preparing the waybill and corrected it by hand after it was pulled from the typewriter. [Boehm-Madisen Lumber Co. was (and is) a hardwood products distributor/wholesaler near Pewaukee, Wis., one of the western Milwaukee suburbs. They might have been a regular consignee for the RI.]
Waybill Number and Dates:
The waybill number is 52283 and does not appear to have been part of a special series.
The waybill was prepared on August 16 and the car was weighed in Rock Island the same day. On August 17 the shipment was across (west) of the Mississippi River at Nahant Yard on the west end of Davenport. The shipment arrived on the Milwaukee Road in Green Bay and was interchanged to the KGB on August 23. The shipment was stamped received by the A&W destination agent on August 27th.
The Car:
The car was RI 90254, a flat car. The car was one of 772 All Steel Flat Cars listed in RI 90000 to 90798 (Jan. 1958 ORER). The dimensional data are:
IL 53' 6"
IW 10' 4"
OL 54' 6"
EW 10' 5"
EH 3' 10"
CAPY 100,000 lbs.
These cars were rebuilt in 1937 through 1941 in RI's Blue Island shops. USRA-like 43' flat cars (similar to the prototype for Red Caboose model http://cnwmodeling.blogspot.com/2013/02/kit-profile-red-caboose-2200.html) were cut in half and a new 10' long section was welded and riveted in the center as the car halves were spliced together. The spotting features are the 2 heavy rivet plates per side at the locations of the splices, the 15 stake pockets per side, and the wide deck with the stake pocket cutouts (http://www.sunshinekits.com/sunimages/sun45b.pdf). In addition to the Sunshine kit, a couple of folks have attempted to model these cars by cutting and splicing parts from 2 Red Caboose cars. This sounds challenging to me because the floor is integrally cast onto the Red Caboose sideframes and would have to be milled off. It might be easier just to start with sheet styrene. Archer rivets would be a big help with the reinforcing plates over the splice.
The Shipper:
The shipper was Swords Veneer and Lumber in Rock Island, Ill. The best historic aerial photography of Rock Island dates from 1945 and the Sword property was undeveloped at the time. I was able to locate the property from a scan I had of the 1957 Rock Island City Directory and that agreed with the Sanborn map published in 1957:
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Note that the shipper is served by the Rock Island (not the MILW). In 1957 the name appears to have been Swords-Morton Veneer & Lumber Co. Also note that the facility housed two other businesses; Malco Inc. (window and door manufacturers), and Valley Construction Company (warehouse). This multiple corporate use of a single facility is not uncommon and can make for interesting variations in model waybills. In addition to lumber and veneer, this siding could ship building woodwork and millwork and conceivably receive materials for building construction.
The Consignee:
The consignee was Algoma Plywood in Algoma, Wisc. That facility was covered in detail in this post (http://cnwmodeling.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-prototype-waybill-24.html).
The Route:
The line haul route was:
NAHANT (DAVENPORT) - MILW - GREEN BAY - KGB - CASCO JUNCTION - AW - ALGOMA
I calculated the line haul as:
MILW 325 (90%)
KGB 23 (6%)
AW 14 (4%)
Total: 362 miles
The Commodity:
The commodity was 62,800 lbs (31.4 tons) of rough lumber. This shipment was in ICC Commodity Class 411, Lumber, Shingles, and Lath. The revenue generated for the shipment was $367.38.
Lumber, shingles, and lath was a major commodity flow in the 1950s. In 1957 there were 6149 carloads in the national 1% sample:
Box - 5216
Gon - 149
Hopper - 1
Flat - 783
Total 6149 carloads
Shipments of lumber, shingles, and lath from Illinois were not a major flow:
Some (11) of the 24 carloads went to Illinois or adjacent states, but although the state to state flows were modest in number the shipments definitely had a national character. Lumber from Illinois went to the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as well as the gulf coast. Our shipment from Illinois to Wisconsin was a bit shorter, a bit heavier, and generated significantly more revenue than the single corresponding load in the 1% sample.
Special Instructions:
There were no special instructions on the waybill.
Freight Car Distribution:
The car was loaded on the RI lines with a RI car. This is the use of a home road car to an off-road destination, which we designate as a Type 1B shipment. The RI did not participate in the line haul. At the start of the shipment the car was in its home district, as it was at the end of the shipment, for a net change of 0.
Discussion:
Note that the car was loaded at an industrial spur served by the Rock Island. I found it interesting that a RI car was provided for the shipment, but that the RI did not participate in the line haul. All three of the rough lumber shipments from Swords to Algoma Plywood in the AW collection share this characteristic.
This suggests that the Quad Cities area (or at least parts of it) were in a terminal switching district. All of the movements inside the district (in this case prior to the line haul) were accounted for separately - whether by reciprocal switching arrangements, absorption of switching costs, or a fixed allocation of the revenue.
This is one of those real-world complications that makes modeling waybills challenging (and interesting). In the database structure, the shipper "Swords-Morton Veneer & Lumber Co." is associated with the carrier "RI" because the facility is physically located on the RI lines. So a natural thing for an algorithm to do would be to look for routes that start out on the RI and terminate on the AW and we might come up with routes like this:
RI - CNW - KGB - AW
RI - MILW - KGB - AW
RI - CBQ - GBW - KGB - AW
In order to have an accurate model of the process we have to give the route-selection algorithm the information and capability to recognize that a carload originating inside a terminal switching district can originate its route on any of the major line-haul carriers associated with the switching district. In this case, those carriers associated with the Quad City switching district are RI, MILW, and CBQ. So in addition to the RI routes listed above, the algorithm should be able to generate routes like:
MILW - KGB - AW (the actual route for our waybill)
and
CBQ - GBW - KGB - AW (Winona was a major interchange between the CBQ and GBW as we have seen in several other waybills).
This makes the MILW - KGB - AW route feel like a much more natural selection since it has the fewest number of interchanges.
So far, we have been able to identify two major principles for generating model waybills that are associated with the notion of the originating line-haul carrier:
1) You don't need to find header and footer examples for all of the little carriers that existed during your era. If you are going to try to accurately model this "visual scenery", you only need headers and footers for the major carriers that appear as the originating line-haul carrier. This is a tremendous savings in terms of the time associated with cataloging, researching, and generating all the bill blanks.
2) Knowing the major terminal districts is important. From the point of view of modeling waybills, it isn't necessarily to know the particular arrangements that were used to implement the terminal district switching (although this might be important to know from the point of view of model operations). But taking into account that the originating line-haul carrier can be ANY of the major carriers associated with the switching district can help generate more reasonable routes for the shipment.
In reviewing and this post, Andy observed that the details of how a switching terminal district works are a fairly detailed and potentially confusing aspect for operators. For example, on Andy's layout depicting operations in eastern Green Bay, he might not want his operators puzzling over the waybill and wondering "Why isn't the GBW the first carrier listed on the route?" and having to figure out "Oh, this car must be for the CNW/MILW job". I see his point and quite agree with it. I've been on operations-oriented layouts in positions where it was hard to figure out how to get across the railroad, whether it was OK to occupy the main, how does this throttle work again, etc.; with the clock ticking and 10 other operators all humming along smoothly. I don't know that I would want to be fiddling with the details of interpreting a waybill notation in the context of a switching terminal district in that type of a situation.
On the other hand, I envision operating on my Milwaukee harbor layout to be a bit less hectic. Its basically pulling cars off the ferry, pushing some on the ferry, making a few switching moves at a handful of Jones Island industries, blocking the cars for National Yard, and leaving for staging. Since my whole operating concept is built around modeling the flow of commodities, the details on the waybill are of interest to me and I want to have them featured.
My idea is that if these details diminish in any way your enjoyment enjoyment of your layout they should be "compressed" right out of the picture. But I think its at least useful to know that they existed and how they might be modeled so each individual can make their own informed decision about that compression.
Andy Laurent and Charles Hostetler
This waybill is for a carload of rough lumber, loaded from a mill in Rock Island Ill. and delivered to Algoma Plywood. It is from the group of cars delivered to the Ahnapee & Western on August 27, 1962 and the scan was provided by Andy Laurent from the A&W Waybill Collection (click to enlarge):
Relationship to Other Waybills in the A&W Collection:
There are two related waybills in the A&W collection (numbers 117 and 231 in the tabulation made by Andy and published on Mark Mathu's GBW page at http://www.greenbayroute.com/1962ahwwaybills.htm). Like this shipment, the commodities were rough soft maple, the shipper was Swords Veneer & Lumber Co., the consignee was Algoma Plywood, and the car was routed on the MILW through Green Bay. So these shipments appear to form a traffic lane; a connection among a commodity, a shipper, and a consignee that is repeated reasonably frequently. These shipments were all roughly 3 weeks apart in the summer of 1962, and they were all on Rock Island flat cars.
Format:
The waybill is in the standard-sized 81/2" by 11" format, with a centerfold crease. The data fields are in the newer style layout and there are three lines for the "STOP This Car At" information which is a newer-style feature. The form is undated, but our estimate is that it was designed and printed post-1959 or so.
The Milwaukee Road was the originating line-haul carrier. The header is a simple, clean, bold typeface without a logo, right-justified across the top. The footer contains the carrier name and interline code number in a much smaller typeface centered across the bottom.
Typefaces, Preprinting, Stamps, and Handwriting:
The typing is all in capital letters and the appearance is light and uneven. It looks as if the clerk's typewriter could have used a new ribbon when this bill was prepared. This light uneven typeface might be an interesting variation to try and model (but its not really typical and probably shouldn't be overdone). The typeface is a fairly ordinary serif, with old-style numbers and closed-top 4s.
There is no preprinting on the waybill.
The use of stamps is quite typical for the waybills that have terminated on the A&W. There are the destination agent's stamp in the lower right, the round interline yard stamps, and a square interchange stamps on the lower left (include a bleed-through image of a stamp that was applied to the back of the bill. The square "Manifested" stamp in the upper left with its handwritten notation are features that we have seen before on A&W waybills but whose function remains unclear. Note the weight ticket attached to the waybill in place of a Shipper's Load and Count stamp.
Aside from several handwritten miscellaneous notations, most noteworthy is the handwritten correction to the consignee. It doesn't appear that this car was a roller or that it was reconsigned; the information in the destination and route fields are not consistent with that notion. It appears more probable that the agent made a mistake while preparing the waybill and corrected it by hand after it was pulled from the typewriter. [Boehm-Madisen Lumber Co. was (and is) a hardwood products distributor/wholesaler near Pewaukee, Wis., one of the western Milwaukee suburbs. They might have been a regular consignee for the RI.]
Waybill Number and Dates:
The waybill number is 52283 and does not appear to have been part of a special series.
The waybill was prepared on August 16 and the car was weighed in Rock Island the same day. On August 17 the shipment was across (west) of the Mississippi River at Nahant Yard on the west end of Davenport. The shipment arrived on the Milwaukee Road in Green Bay and was interchanged to the KGB on August 23. The shipment was stamped received by the A&W destination agent on August 27th.
The Car:
The car was RI 90254, a flat car. The car was one of 772 All Steel Flat Cars listed in RI 90000 to 90798 (Jan. 1958 ORER). The dimensional data are:
IL 53' 6"
IW 10' 4"
OL 54' 6"
EW 10' 5"
EH 3' 10"
CAPY 100,000 lbs.
These cars were rebuilt in 1937 through 1941 in RI's Blue Island shops. USRA-like 43' flat cars (similar to the prototype for Red Caboose model http://cnwmodeling.blogspot.com/2013/02/kit-profile-red-caboose-2200.html) were cut in half and a new 10' long section was welded and riveted in the center as the car halves were spliced together. The spotting features are the 2 heavy rivet plates per side at the locations of the splices, the 15 stake pockets per side, and the wide deck with the stake pocket cutouts (http://www.sunshinekits.com/sunimages/sun45b.pdf). In addition to the Sunshine kit, a couple of folks have attempted to model these cars by cutting and splicing parts from 2 Red Caboose cars. This sounds challenging to me because the floor is integrally cast onto the Red Caboose sideframes and would have to be milled off. It might be easier just to start with sheet styrene. Archer rivets would be a big help with the reinforcing plates over the splice.
The Shipper:
The shipper was Swords Veneer and Lumber in Rock Island, Ill. The best historic aerial photography of Rock Island dates from 1945 and the Sword property was undeveloped at the time. I was able to locate the property from a scan I had of the 1957 Rock Island City Directory and that agreed with the Sanborn map published in 1957:
Note that the shipper is served by the Rock Island (not the MILW). In 1957 the name appears to have been Swords-Morton Veneer & Lumber Co. Also note that the facility housed two other businesses; Malco Inc. (window and door manufacturers), and Valley Construction Company (warehouse). This multiple corporate use of a single facility is not uncommon and can make for interesting variations in model waybills. In addition to lumber and veneer, this siding could ship building woodwork and millwork and conceivably receive materials for building construction.
The Consignee:
The consignee was Algoma Plywood in Algoma, Wisc. That facility was covered in detail in this post (http://cnwmodeling.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-prototype-waybill-24.html).
The Route:
The line haul route was:
NAHANT (DAVENPORT) - MILW - GREEN BAY - KGB - CASCO JUNCTION - AW - ALGOMA
I calculated the line haul as:
MILW 325 (90%)
KGB 23 (6%)
AW 14 (4%)
Total: 362 miles
The Commodity:
The commodity was 62,800 lbs (31.4 tons) of rough lumber. This shipment was in ICC Commodity Class 411, Lumber, Shingles, and Lath. The revenue generated for the shipment was $367.38.
Lumber, shingles, and lath was a major commodity flow in the 1950s. In 1957 there were 6149 carloads in the national 1% sample:
Box - 5216
Gon - 149
Hopper - 1
Flat - 783
Total 6149 carloads
Shipments of lumber, shingles, and lath from Illinois were not a major flow:
| From | To | Carloads | Tons | Haul | Rev |
| Illinois | California | 1 | 25 | 1959 | 385 |
| Delaware | 2 | 26 | 941 | 144 | |
| Illinois | 5 | 29 | 216 | 178 | |
| Indiana | 5 | 25 | 148 | 127 | |
| Kentucky | 1 | 24 | 229 | 223 | |
| Louisiana | 1 | 21 | 801 | 420 | |
| Michigan | 3 | 27 | 254 | 131 | |
| New York | 1 | 36 | 793 | 123 | |
| Ohio | 2 | 26 | 370 | 224 | |
| Pennsylvania | 1 | 56 | 743 | 847 | |
| Rhode Island | 1 | 21 | 1224 | 403 | |
| Wisconsin | 1 | 22 | 446 | 128 |
Some (11) of the 24 carloads went to Illinois or adjacent states, but although the state to state flows were modest in number the shipments definitely had a national character. Lumber from Illinois went to the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as well as the gulf coast. Our shipment from Illinois to Wisconsin was a bit shorter, a bit heavier, and generated significantly more revenue than the single corresponding load in the 1% sample.
Special Instructions:
There were no special instructions on the waybill.
Freight Car Distribution:
The car was loaded on the RI lines with a RI car. This is the use of a home road car to an off-road destination, which we designate as a Type 1B shipment. The RI did not participate in the line haul. At the start of the shipment the car was in its home district, as it was at the end of the shipment, for a net change of 0.
Discussion:
Note that the car was loaded at an industrial spur served by the Rock Island. I found it interesting that a RI car was provided for the shipment, but that the RI did not participate in the line haul. All three of the rough lumber shipments from Swords to Algoma Plywood in the AW collection share this characteristic.
This suggests that the Quad Cities area (or at least parts of it) were in a terminal switching district. All of the movements inside the district (in this case prior to the line haul) were accounted for separately - whether by reciprocal switching arrangements, absorption of switching costs, or a fixed allocation of the revenue.
This is one of those real-world complications that makes modeling waybills challenging (and interesting). In the database structure, the shipper "Swords-Morton Veneer & Lumber Co." is associated with the carrier "RI" because the facility is physically located on the RI lines. So a natural thing for an algorithm to do would be to look for routes that start out on the RI and terminate on the AW and we might come up with routes like this:
RI - CNW - KGB - AW
RI - MILW - KGB - AW
RI - CBQ - GBW - KGB - AW
In order to have an accurate model of the process we have to give the route-selection algorithm the information and capability to recognize that a carload originating inside a terminal switching district can originate its route on any of the major line-haul carriers associated with the switching district. In this case, those carriers associated with the Quad City switching district are RI, MILW, and CBQ. So in addition to the RI routes listed above, the algorithm should be able to generate routes like:
MILW - KGB - AW (the actual route for our waybill)
and
CBQ - GBW - KGB - AW (Winona was a major interchange between the CBQ and GBW as we have seen in several other waybills).
This makes the MILW - KGB - AW route feel like a much more natural selection since it has the fewest number of interchanges.
So far, we have been able to identify two major principles for generating model waybills that are associated with the notion of the originating line-haul carrier:
1) You don't need to find header and footer examples for all of the little carriers that existed during your era. If you are going to try to accurately model this "visual scenery", you only need headers and footers for the major carriers that appear as the originating line-haul carrier. This is a tremendous savings in terms of the time associated with cataloging, researching, and generating all the bill blanks.
2) Knowing the major terminal districts is important. From the point of view of modeling waybills, it isn't necessarily to know the particular arrangements that were used to implement the terminal district switching (although this might be important to know from the point of view of model operations). But taking into account that the originating line-haul carrier can be ANY of the major carriers associated with the switching district can help generate more reasonable routes for the shipment.
In reviewing and this post, Andy observed that the details of how a switching terminal district works are a fairly detailed and potentially confusing aspect for operators. For example, on Andy's layout depicting operations in eastern Green Bay, he might not want his operators puzzling over the waybill and wondering "Why isn't the GBW the first carrier listed on the route?" and having to figure out "Oh, this car must be for the CNW/MILW job". I see his point and quite agree with it. I've been on operations-oriented layouts in positions where it was hard to figure out how to get across the railroad, whether it was OK to occupy the main, how does this throttle work again, etc.; with the clock ticking and 10 other operators all humming along smoothly. I don't know that I would want to be fiddling with the details of interpreting a waybill notation in the context of a switching terminal district in that type of a situation.
On the other hand, I envision operating on my Milwaukee harbor layout to be a bit less hectic. Its basically pulling cars off the ferry, pushing some on the ferry, making a few switching moves at a handful of Jones Island industries, blocking the cars for National Yard, and leaving for staging. Since my whole operating concept is built around modeling the flow of commodities, the details on the waybill are of interest to me and I want to have them featured.
My idea is that if these details diminish in any way your enjoyment enjoyment of your layout they should be "compressed" right out of the picture. But I think its at least useful to know that they existed and how they might be modeled so each individual can make their own informed decision about that compression.
Andy Laurent and Charles Hostetler