Nostalgia & History > Those salesmen for Roscoe, Snyder, & Pacific

My dad was with Sears Traffic Department in L.A. and he used to tell me the off-line salesmen working on behalf of the R.S.&.P (Texas) went to great lengths to convince shippers to specify a routing over that line, which connected AT&SF with the Missouri Pacific Lines.
I'm under the impression there was a quite adequate direct connection available (ATSF and MoPac didn't MISS each other) but with the help of goodies like this one, those salesmen did their best to convince people their routing was best.
Feel free to fill in any gaps in my understanding.
(It's a fish-cleaning knife which floats, in case you drop it out of the boat.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/03/21 18:59 by Espee2019.

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RS&P sale force was also excellent in locating car shipments when other railroads were not so adept
at doing that, so I've been told by a retired KCS salesman and historian.

No gaps in your understanding!  Thats how it was in the days of regulated railroding.

A car could be (and was) billed East on the SP from LA to a junction with the Santa FE, then to Roscoe RS&P to Snyder to the TP for the same price as a car direct to the TP.  The RS&P provided excellent service, so apparently there was no delay to  the cars via the circituous route.
G 

Its existance was basically owed to firms who sold products on the move.  Example:   A lumber company has a carload of lumber they need to sell but no one has bought it.   The firm would specify the load to be interchanged with almost every small railroad say from Oregon to the south east part of the country.  Remember when the  car was left at an interchange track it might not be picked up by the small railroad for a day or two, then when it still was not sold it would be routed to the big road again and be taken to another state to another road and the same thing would happen again and again until the load was sold in transit.  Then the routing would be changed for it to go to the buyer.

  The RS&P made a lot  being involved in that.  It would get a car from the Santa Fe  at Snyder Tx.  It would sit on the interchange for a while and then go from Snyder Tx to Rosco Tx and sit for a day or so.  The fact that the car could have continued on the Santa Fe to Sweetwater and then picked up by the T&P would mean less time consumed which was not what the seller wanted..

The RS&P also got into the business of Boxcar investment for retirement plans when a shortage of the cars occured..  For a few years T&P's Lancaster yard in Ft Worth would have lots of RS&P box cars in it.
All this time they were also in the freight car repair business and still are today.

Yes the RS&P sales men were great to work with and there were quite a few of them.

One of the all-time great railroad names in history!

kurtarmbruster Wrote:
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> One of the all-time great railroad names in
> history!
In the weekday comics of the Herald-Examiner, I never bothered looking at the "serious" or "action" strips because there was just too little which could happen on any one day.  For instance, Buzz Sawyer. But on Sundays for the color strips, there was a shift over to "BUZZ SAWYER and his pal Roscoe Sweeney."  So of course I sometimes flash on "Roscoe Sweeney & Pacific."