Living in the Bay area five years ago while recovering from
surgery, I made several pilgrimages across the Golden Gate to the National
Archives Regional Center in San Bruno.
Even without the pressure of having to get back to work, there still
wasn’t enough time to dig in to all that the Archives hold for the
modeler/historian. Now that I’m working
again, I’m expected to show up and produce, leaving less time for pursuit of
the hobby. Tony Thompson’s recent post
on mainline freights elicited a comment from me on the header of his Santa Fe
perishable freight waybill. Tony used a
version for the ATSF Railway with accounting code 22, while I contended that
for a shipment originating in southern California, it should have been on an ATSF
Coast Lines, code 30 bill. (You can read
Tony’s post and our on-line discussion at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-role-of-mainline-trains-on-branch.html#comment-form) We ran in to each other at the Chicagoland
RPM last week and had a good discussion of Santa Fe waybilling practice that
neither of us can definitively characterize without physical or photographic
evidence of actual Santa Fe waybills.
For a company so large and long lived, there are a dearth of examples
and I implore those who may have such samples to share with the rest of the community.
What does this waybill discussion have to do with NARA? Well, the treasure trove of information
gathered has sat, not fully analyzed since shortly after capture on my trusty
Canon 30D and storage on multiple hard drives.
The discussion with Tony and his request for a copy of a Coast Lines
waybill led to me digging into the files to see what’s there. One of the reasons for the shelving of the deep
dive was the early discovery that what the Archives had listed as “Waybills”
were actually memoranda copies of the original “Bills of Lading” for many tank
car shipments followed by the Office of Defense Transportation. The bad news is documents in this form did
NOT travel with the car, that document was the “Waybill” which had a different
format and header. The good news is that
there is even more applicable information than I first thought on these Bills
of Lading. I knew that the ones in the
ODT files at NARA SF had the car numbers, shipper, consignee and lading. What I didn’t realize five years ago that I
discovered this morning is that for the loaded cars, they also had examples of
weight agreement stamps and gallonage of the cars that were loaded to full
visual capacity. All of them, empty or loaded,
included the car routing.
A more interesting example is a later shipment of coconut
oil from Oakland to Ohio. Both WP and SP
originated parts of that traffic. Here
is an example of a WP BoL:
And because ODT was redirecting tank cars where they were
needed to support the war effort, what follows is an example of one of the
world’s shortest return hauls:
Note that these memorandum copies are not all on the
pre-printed memorandum sheet, normally sheet three, with sheet two being the
Shipper’s Order copy. Some examples in
the files have the inapplicable pre-printed title struck out and replaced by a
stamped “Memorandum.” Also note that the
SP bill is on a “Collect On Delivery” pre-printed form. The WP form has a weight agreement stamp and
the weights entered for the Eldorado Terminal originated loads of crude coconut
oil are about 7.5 times the listed capacity of the car in gallons. I suspect that the companion waybill was
in-fact a transit waybill from the notation about storage & refining in
transit in the lower left of the item description.
Although these examples are not the “Holy Grail” of actual
WWII era waybills, they do contain most, if not all the information needed to complete
one, at least at the origin. Sorting
through the images made that day, I have info on 111 tank car movements in the
Bay Area near the end of WWII. In a
couple cases, cars moved from San Francisco to Oakland on one Bill, then were
forwarded east several days later on a different Bill. One has to take care to not read too much
into this info though, as the records that made it into the permanent files are
the ones that took additional attention.
Not there is the day-to-day flow of feed stock in and product out of the
refineries or chemical plants.
Occasionally we see AvGas or asphalt shipments, like some of the latter
to a station in Washington state named Hanford earlier in the war. But those needed attention in the massive
freight flow to make sure they did not delay critical war work. Looking back, I understand why someone
thought a paving project in the middle of nowhere should have that kind of
support and attention, but I doubt that it was understood by most of the participants
at the time. I hope this and my other
posts help you understand how things were done back then. I’ve been having fun researching the history
and recreating it in HO scale.
I will repeat my request for Santa Fe waybills, especially
from the Coast Lines during WWII, but examples are needed from all four
operating companies: ATSF, ATSF Coast Lines, GCSF and P&SF. I welcome comments here or at NorthBayLines@att.net
John Barry
Lovettsville, VA
5 November 2017
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