Running Consists With Foreign Power


Distributed power can be a problem if the locomotive on the rear doesn't closely match the lead units. If it's to slow, it will be a drag to the lead locos and cause straight lining on curves. If it's to fast it will push your cars off the rails in curves or straight track.

Here is a video of DPU activity on my empire using foreign power.

 
There are three basic kinds of foreign power: leased, run through and pay back.

If you are modeling the 1950's or earlier, unless it was joint track, it would most likely be leased power. Railroad A is short of power and railroad B has excess power, so A leases specific engines from B for a specific time.

As you go into the 1960's the run throughs become more prevalent. A run through is where railroad A operates a train that will be interchanged to railroad B and railroad B will operate the train, more or less in tact to someplace on railroad B. To keep from having to swap out engines, they two railroads agree to let the power run through and they will use each other's power, tracking it on a horsepower hours (hphr) basis. If the PRR uses 3 CB&Q SD40's for 50 hours that equals 450,000 hphrs (3 eng x 3000 hp x 50 hrs). Its not a lease per se, the engines are whatever is on the train and the time is however long it takes to make the run.

Once you start run throughs, you run into the problem of balancing the hphrs. If the CB&Q and the PRR have a run through and each railroad puts in 3 SD40's, but the trip to the PRR yard and back to interchange is 50 hours, but the trip to the CB&Q yard and back to interchange is 40 hours, the CB&Q engines will accrue more hphrs on the PRR than the PRR engines will accrue on the CB&Q.

That brings us to payback engines. In order to even out the imbalances, the railroad that owes hphrs will let the other railroad use some of its engines for a certain amount of time in order to accrue hphrs. In the above example the PRR will owe the CB&Q hphrs, so the PRR will let the Q use an engine or engines to pay back the hphrs. In the example above the difference is 10 hrs x 3 engines x 3000 hp or 90,000 hphr per day. If the PRR gives the Q an SD40 to use in general service that would be 1 engine x 24 hr x 3000 hp or 72,000 hphrs per day.

And it can get more complicated than that. In a former life I helped manage a railroad locomotive fleet and hphr balance was a major consideration.
 
There are three basic kinds of foreign power: leased, run through and pay back.

If you are modeling the 1950's or earlier, unless it was joint track, it would most likely be leased power. Railroad A is short of power and railroad B has excess power, so A leases specific engines from B for a specific time.

As you go into the 1960's the run throughs become more prevalent. A run through is where railroad A operates a train that will be interchanged to railroad B and railroad B will operate the train, more or less in tact to someplace on railroad B. To keep from having to swap out engines, they two railroads agree to let the power run through and they will use each other's power, tracking it on a horsepower hours (hphr) basis. If the PRR uses 3 CB&Q SD40's for 50 hours that equals 450,000 hphrs (3 eng x 3000 hp x 50 hrs). Its not a lease per se, the engines are whatever is on the train and the time is however long it takes to make the run.

Once you start run throughs, you run into the problem of balancing the hphrs. If the CB&Q and the PRR have a run through and each railroad puts in 3 SD40's, but the trip to the PRR yard and back to interchange is 50 hours, but the trip to the CB&Q yard and back to interchange is 40 hours, the CB&Q engines will accrue more hphrs on the PRR than the PRR engines will accrue on the CB&Q.

That brings us to payback engines. In order to even out the imbalances, the railroad that owes hphrs will let the other railroad use some of its engines for a certain amount of time in order to accrue hphrs. In the above example the PRR will owe the CB&Q hphrs, so the PRR will let the Q use an engine or engines to pay back the hphrs. In the example above the difference is 10 hrs x 3 engines x 3000 hp or 90,000 hphr per day. If the PRR gives the Q an SD40 to use in general service that would be 1 engine x 24 hr x 3000 hp or 72,000 hphrs per day.

And it can get more complicated than that. In a former life I helped manage a railroad locomotive fleet and hphr balance was a major consideration.
It gets even more complex when you factor in fuel and repair responsibility. If it breaks down or needs fuel while on the other road, does that road repair/refuel, or is it sent back to the home road DIT?
 
It gets even more complex when you factor in fuel and repair responsibility. If it breaks down or needs fuel while on the other road, does that road repair/refuel, or is it sent back to the home road DIT?
I would think those details would be in the agreement documentation. It's not like only the engineers toss each other the keys to locos and just tell em to bring it back with a full tank.
 
It gets even more complex when you factor in fuel and repair responsibility. If it breaks down or needs fuel while on the other road, does that road repair/refuel, or is it sent back to the home road DIT?
Fuel is part of the equation. First thing one has to understand is that railroads don't just give other railroads their engines. Their is a contract between the railroads where they agree on how the use of the locomotive will be compensated. It can be a generic agreement that covers any locomotive anywhere or it can be specific to one train operation. The fuel may be based on physical readings, AEI readings, or a fuel agreement written in the contract. The contract will also specify the cost of the fuel and there will be additives for oil, etc.

Generally, the locomotives get a fuel reading when they are exchanged, and then another fuel reading when they are returned and the railroad using the engine gets either a credit or a charge for the difference in fuel.

If the CBQ gives the PRR a set of 3 engines on a run through and the fuel readings are 2500 gal, 3000 gal and 3500 gal and when the PRR gives the engines back all three have 3000 gals in them. In that case the PRR owes the CBQ 500 gal on the first engine, nothing on the second and has a credit on the third engine of 500 gals. Doesn't matter how much fuel was used when the engines were on the PRR, it just matters how much fuel was in the tank at interchange. Every month the railroads not only balance horsepower hours, but balance fuel charges.

Normal operating supplies and minor repairs, such as light bulbs and brake shoes, are repaired by the railroad having the locomotive and charged back to the owning road. Engines are supposed to be returned to the owning road before periodic inspections are due (unless there is some other agreement) and if the engine fails, the railroad in possession of the engine notifies the the owner (that stops horsepower hour payments) and gets disposition to return the engine.

Actually, mechanical things are pretty straight forward. Where it gets really weird is run throughs with leased power or engines from other railroads. The NS, KCS and UP ran a through train from Atlanta to Los Angeles with pooled power. The NS delivers the train to the KCS with a UP engine, a NS engine, a HLMX engine and a CR engine. The chore becomes keeping track of who pays for what since some of those engines may be on runthroughs twice removed. The NS is charging the KCS hphrs for the CR engine, but CR is charging the NS for hphrs for the same engine. That's why hphrs and fuel equalizations were full time jobs on real railroads.
 
Must have been really interesting for the Q, GN and NP in the days before the ICC would let them keep one set of books, since the GN and NP owned the Q and had interlocking boards of directors themselves. All that was pre-1969. As I think I posted somewhere before, if you were taking the Empire Builder (GN) from Union Station in Chicago to the West Coast, you would see Burlington E-units on the front end of a GN train (except for those cars painted for the Builder, but with C.B.&Q. in small letters on the upper corners of the cars). When the train got to St. Paul, MN, the GN motive power was switched on. Same might be true of North Coast Limited trains of the NP.
Didn't Abbot & Costello have a routine like that? Oh, wait a minute, that was about baseball! :p
 
My railroad wasn't a through route, nor participate in any sort of run-through or joint operation, so foreign units didn't normally show up, although there were a couple of specific times where engines were leased from other railways to fill a power shortage.

There were also several times where excess engines were leased to other railways.

One interesting situation involved both.... in the 1980s it was common for the ACR to lease some of their SD40/SD40-2 units to Canadian Pacific, which was often renting/leasing extra units for seasonal traffic surges through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. Then, on one occasion in the late 1980s, traffic picked up on the ACR when most of their SD40-2 fleet was out on CP for the fall-winter grain rush, so they had to turn around and lease a couple of ratty old F9Bs from Canadian National.

In the early 1990s they also leased a pair of CP GP38-2s, and even a couple of Wisconsin Central SD45s were leased about a year or two before WC ended up buying the ACR, and WC units took over entirely.
 
Must have been really interesting for the Q, GN and NP in the days before the ICC would let them keep one set of books, since the GN and NP owned the Q and had interlocking boards of directors themselves. All that was pre-1969. As I think I posted somewhere before, if you were taking the Empire Builder (GN) from Union Station in Chicago to the West Coast, you would see Burlington E-units on the front end of a GN train (except for those cars painted for the Builder, but with C.B.&Q. in small letters on the upper corners of the cars). When the train got to St. Paul, MN, the GN motive power was switched on. Same might be true of North Coast Limited trains of the NP.
Didn't Abbot & Costello have a routine like that? Oh, wait a minute, that was about baseball! :p

Regardless of any joint ownerships, just consider them as separate entities.

Joint trains operated by multiple (competing) railroads to operate between significant cities wasn't uncommon. They (all the involved railroads) would have had contracts worked out covering operating routes, crews, and who's providing equipment.
 
Two UP's rich history of mergers and acquisitions.

Here's a few pics to enjoy our beautiful family trees!

Once again general info a bit off topic.... Not that it really matters, especially in this context, but It just bothers me a bit that diagrams like this always show the UP starting in 1862. Reality is that railroad went bankrupt and went away, assets purchased by individuals then the whole "Crédit Mobilier of America" scandal (however you count that), assets purchased and "merged" by another which went bankrupt. So without checking my dates I believe the Union Pacific we know today actually started in 1893.

1862 - Union Pacific Railroad Company Known as the Union Railroad (civil war reference)
1872 - Union Pacific Rail Road
1873 - Union Pacific Railway
1893 - Union Pacific Railroad

Companies always keeping similar sounding names for marketing purposes.

There are probably others but the only two class 1 railroads I can think of that never went bankrupt were the CB&Q and the GN. And I believe the only reason the GN didn't go under during the great depression was because it owned about 49% of the CB&Q which sent it (hundreds? of) millions of dollars every year in dividends. The CB&Q paid dividends every year of its existence, hence was known as the "widow's stock".
 



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