Re: Railroad Billing

South Park,
Cars are billed on a commodity, mileage, per diem basis.
Most of the time one needs a Freight Tariff to figure out what the heck a customer would be billed.
Since I'm at my away from home terminal and done' have access to my old tariff books, we'll take a hypothetical example. Let's take a load of coal from Baldwin to Greeley, Colo.
The first fee to be charged is the car placement (Inbound) and per-diem (daily) fee. There was a cost to place the car, and after the car was placed, a fee for each 24 hours that the car remained on spot without being loaded and released. When the car is loaded and released, the per diem (demurrage) charges stop. The car is them picked up by the next train and then charged on a mileage/weight/commodity basis. Let's say that coal has a cost of .025 cents per ton per mile. The car will be weighed and comes out to 20 tons of coal. Multiply .025 times 20 tons and that is the price to move the car per mile. So, let's move the car from Baldwin to Gunnison, weigh the car in Gunnison (Yes, there's a weigh charge) and move it 235 mi. to Denver.
If you are going to transfer the car to a broad gauge car, there is a charge for that. If you move the car to Greeley via the C&S, you then get all of the billing. If you turn it over to the UP in Denver (something the real railroads would NEVER do unless absolutely necessary), then the UP gets a portion of the line-haul charge, the 57 miles from Denver to Greeley.
As far as using the example of going to New York, there is a chart of preferred line-haul routings that the Railroads can choose from, depending on the destination (this is determined by the Open and Prepay Station Guide). If you are going to NYC, then you have a choice of the NYC, PRR, Erie, New Haven, etc. If you were the C&S or D&RGW, your preferred choice to east from Denver would either be the CB&Q or the Rock Island. You sure wouldn't choose the UP, as they were the major competition.
Lets say the routing on your shipment from the C&S NG is NYC, the ROuting would probably be C&S/CB&Q/PRR. Why PRR? because in 1917, the largest stockhoulder in the NYC was the Oregon Short Line, a UP subsidiary. You would get the origination fee, transfer fee and your mileage portion of the line haul. With the 3' gauge, there was also a penalty for shipping on the 3' gauge to offset the higher costs for operating those lines.
I hope that this thoroughly confuses you as it did many a shipper.
Rick