Freight Shed

[jwb]

There's another complication, and that's that express and LCL were two different things. Express went in baggage or box-express cars in passenger trains. The Railway Express Agency was something like modern UPS, although you could ship larger things via REA than you can UPS. I've read that families that spent seasons in Maine or Florida would ship their household effects to their summer or winter homes via REA. LCL was different -- that could be the stove or refrigerator, or a crated bicycle, or whatever. Those went in a dedicated boxcar on a local freight. I'm pretty sure that REA express items -- trunks, parcels, etc -- would go from the baggage car to the express room at the depot, which was not the same as the freight house. LCL would probably be unloaded at the trackside freight shed, although this would be at a smaller station. I think at a station with a dedicated freight house, the LCL would go into the freight house from the dedicated LCL box car.

For that matter, LCL ran in its own national network via the individual railroads. It was sorted and reloaded at large freight houses in the cities. Some railroads had box cars specially dedicated and painted for LCL service.