That old saw for finding out what really goes on applies to the railroad you are modeling too!
Santa Fe gross earnings for 1943
1 $94,493,000 Los Angeles Area
2 $81,550,000 San Francisco Bay Area
5 $22,231,665 McCune NM (Fort Wingate Ammunition Depot)
10 $17,738,121 Bellemont AZ (Ammunition Depot)
Two of the top
ten revenue producers for 43 were isolated stations in the middle of no where
on the Albuquerque Division. Both
stations moved up in the 44 rankings: McCune to 3rd with $29,561,035 and
Bellemont to 9th with $23,414,024. I
don’t have the corresponding numbers for the metropolitan areas though. The tariff for explosives and charges for
dedicated trains must have been quite lucrative to boost these two locations
into the top tier.
This partial
information only whets my appetite to dig deeper into how the RR made its money
and could afford all the cool locomotives and cars that we love to model. Santa Fe, like its competitors, was in
business to make money. You can see evidence of that in their internal
histories with lots of ink devoted to revenue sources, traffic density, infrastructure
improvements and growth potential.
We have
wonderful modeling resources in the form of conductor trip books, dispatcher
train sheets and station records of trains.
But those are very hard to find because they only indirectly affected
the revenue of the RR. Those operations
oriented documents may have provided source data for the accounting department,
but the bean counters didn’t care that the NEX arrived in Stockton with 67 cars
and departed with 59. They cared that in
1943 at Stockton, ATSF originated 4616 carloads; terminated 9888; received 30,471
from WP, 19,514 from SP, and 1934 from CCT; forwarded 22,685 to WP, 14,799 to
SP, and 362 to CCT along with how much revenue those cars made.
Perhaps a
different line of inquiry to the various archives is in order. One that pursues the financials and how the
traffic paid off for the share holders and charged the public. The good news is that some of this
information was mandated by government to assist in setting rates and shows up
in annual reports to the ICC and state regulators. The railroads had to aggregate the data to
compile the information in the reports.
The ICC reports had required information about commodities handled, the
states got similar reports that included only data for their state. That data had to be sortable to provide those
state reports. RR internal histories
showed selected data by station. What if
we could find the accounting documents that were the basis for these
summaries?
Time for me to
figure out which forms to look for. Fortunately
for me and my fellow Santa Fe modelers, ATSF was a very organized bureaucracy
that wanted its employees to use the right paperwork and get the right
form. Two years ago I reached out to the
Santa Fe community to find the form index.
Every bureaucratic organization needs one if they use forms. And before computers and spreadsheets, paper
forms were the way things got done.
Thanks to John Moore of Albuquerque who loaned me his 1947 and 1948
editions, I was able to scan them and provide them to the Santa Fe Historical
and Modeling Society for the use of modelers and rail historians. You can find the 1947 edition at http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/BarryJohn/47%20Form%201091%20Std%20Form%20Index.pdf
And the 1958
edition at http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/BarryJohn/58%20Form%201091%20Std%20Form%20Index.pdf
Someone else
provided a 1927 edition. http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/Forms/1091%201927.pdf
And I recently
found a 1975 edition that I purchased from eBay for our more modern modelers
These indices
tell you the title and number of the form.
They are arranged by department, so you can find the report of
locomotives assigned and cars repaired in the Mechanical Department section and
the waybill and report of cars interchanged forms in the Accounting Department
section. Knowing what forms to look for
helps your archivist or reference librarian find them by number or title. Having the correct title helps, a lot. Ask me how I know.
Other roads
almost certainly have equivalent information.
If you model another road, work with your historical society to find and
share this kind of information. We all
benefit from better access to information.
The bottom line
is that what affected the RR’s bottom line is what got managed, recorded, and
saved. When you find your golden
nuggets, please share them!
John Barry,
Washington DC
2 April 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment