Large Scale Central

Kansas City Southern de Mexico

I like seeing unique road names that catch me a bit off guard. I seen this autorack on the BNSF mainline headed East.

Apparently quite extensive in Mexico. Solely owned by Kansas City Southern and licensed to operate in Mexico.

Yup KCS bought the Mexican line to service all the Auto factories. They couldn’t fit in East to West, but are a Class 1 N/S.

John

Here’s a piece of bar trivia for you… The reason those attacks have the logos on the racks is because the rack is owned/leased by one company (bnsf, ns, kcs, etc) and the 89’ flat is owned by another (ttx). TTX is itself owned by each of the class 1’s… The reason is that TTX feels that owning a 89’ flat is better for equipment purposes than owning a 89’ auto rack. So the railroads buy the rack portion and add it to the TTX car. If you get into the deep details of a car number, often times the car and the auto rack will have seperate road numbers. It might be TTX 998802 but on the side of the rack it will say BNSF 3456531.

Your welcome for that random piece of useless bar trivia…

Craig Townsend said:
Here’s a piece of bar trivia for you… The reason those attacks have the logos on the racks is because the rack is owned/leased by one company (bnsf, ns, kcs, etc) and the 89’ flat is owned by another (ttx). TTX is itself owned by each of the class 1’s… The reason is that TTX feels that owning a 89’ flat is better for equipment purposes than owning a 89’ auto rack. So the railroads buy the rack portion and add it to the TTX car. If you get into the deep details of a car number, often times the car and the auto rack will have seperate road numbers. It might be TTX 998802 but on the side of the rack it will say BNSF 3456531. Your welcome for that random piece of useless bar trivia…

Are there Useless bars?

The KCS is one of the companies that took over for the NdeM (Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México) Railroad in 1995. Originally the railroad was refereed to as TFM (Transportación Ferroviaria Mexicana) and carried that name for several years. Locomotives were painted in standard KCS paint schemes and simply lettered TFM. Most of those locomotives originated in Kansas City, so it was not uncommon to see a TFM loco in a KCS train headed toward Mexico. (I’ve even seen one in a UP train on the Marysville Sub headed toward North Platte)

As a side note, the KCS also owns the Panama Canal Railway. Those locomotives carry the KCS’ Southern Bell paint scheme.

Craig Townsend said:
Here’s a piece of bar trivia for you… The reason those attacks have the logos on the racks is because the rack is owned/leased by one company (bnsf, ns, kcs, etc) and the 89’ flat is owned by another (ttx). TTX is itself owned by each of the class 1’s… The reason is that TTX feels that owning a 89’ flat is better for equipment purposes than owning a 89’ auto rack. So the railroads buy the rack portion and add it to the TTX car. If you get into the deep details of a car number, often times the car and the auto rack will have seperate road numbers. It might be TTX 998802 but on the side of the rack it will say BNSF 3456531. Your welcome for that random piece of useless bar trivia…

Craig,

Glad you mentioned that because for the first time I noticed this. Every one of those cars had a TTX road name and number on the flat. But then various road names on the rack. I figured some sort of leasing agreement but your explanation makes sense of it.

double

Devon Sinsley said:

Chris Kieffer said:

The KCS is one of the companies that took over for the NdeM (Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México) Railroad in 1995.

That adds more to it because there were other racks that had the road name Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México and TFM. So I get the whole picture now.