>The shipment to be sent “collect,” and the Chicago & Northwestern to get one-third of the total rate
Makes me think of “call collect” - might be a borrowed term from railroad payment terminology since phone company history if very strongly connected to railroad networks.
Shipments can be sent with freight paid by the sender or to be paid by the recipient.
Railroads, pre-computer, had tough operational accounting problems. Even with telegraphs, they didn't have enough bandwidth in 1906 to transmit all the paperwork ahead of the shipment. Some of the paperwork was actually nailed to the side of freight cars, like a mailing label.
Each car had a waybill. Each train had a manifest of which car contained what and where it was going. At each switch yard, cars were re-sorted by destination and attached to a train going in the appropriate direction, and that process was guided by the manifest of the incoming train.
Cabooses and freight conductors were where the paperwork was managed. That's what cabooses were for - the paperwork traveled with the train, and the freight conductor was responsible for it.
Copies of the manifests went to accounting offices where interline settlements were computed.
That's where the Chicago & Northwestern was credited with one-third of the total rate.
Interline shipments were complicated.
Every month or so, railroads would settle with their connecting roads over who owed who how much.
Probably with arguments between the various lines.
There was a lot of interline settling. If a railroad car is on another railroad's tracks, there's a rental charge. If a railroad car needs repair when away from its home road, it gets repaired by the railroad it's on, and the owning road is billed at a standard flat rate. All this still happens today. Here are the modern rules.[1]
That's part of what a Harvard economics student had to understand for Railroad Practice. The money followed the trains around, much later. Somebody had to make sure that the money didn't get lost.
Today, US inter-line settlements are handled by Railinc, which is a unit of the Association of American Railroads. Waybills travel around as JSON and there are APIs for submitting and retrieving them.
Waybills still do pretty much what they did in 1906. There are still dispute resolution procedures for when the records of connecting lines don't match. Settlement is still monthly. And the time limits for resolving errors are still measured in months.
Yes. “Freight collect” means the recipient pays the carrier for transportation; it implies nothing about payment for the goods.
“COD” (collect on delivery) means the carrier collects a specified amount of money—typically, the price of the goods plus transportation—from the recipient, on behalf of the seller, as a condition of delivery.
Makes me think of “call collect” - might be a borrowed term from railroad payment terminology since phone company history if very strongly connected to railroad networks.