Re: the Wheel Report

What JB is describing is called a "Wheel Report:"
[www.globalsecurity.org]
Each car traveling on a railroad had (was supposed to have) a "waybill" indicating the customer, what the car carried, its routing, weight, etc. Waybills were transferred from conductor to conductor (perhaps via a yardmaster) as a car moved.
The conductor created the wheel report from the waybills for the cars handled in his train.
Here are instructions from a Wabash timetable on filling out the wheel report:
[www.cts.wustl.edu]
The order of the cars in the train was not particularly important from a records-keeping perspective.
JAC