Missouri Pacific designed electronic waybills for the industry

[peggyrothschild]

There was a question on the Modern Freight Car list on when the railroads adapted only four alpha characters. I was pretty sure it was due to the AAR committees designing the EDI waybills and asked one of our senior IT managers the question. Here’s his response.

“The railroads and AAR adopted the formats and established development and maintenance committees around 1974 and first formats published in 1975. The AAR and railroads pursued the implementation of EDI around 1977 I think. I do remember that the first railroads were MP and CR mainly because CR was looking at adopting TCS at the time and started to develop the front end EDI conversion software that was necessary. Attached is a short history of EDI in general which shows the Car manufacturers being major influence in the prorgress. One thing I due remember is when TDCC had their first meeting it was to support shippers and manufacturers and Neil Spaeth of Marketing asked me to attend in his place. In that meeting the shipping community was adamant about the process being able to support the full content of Bills of Lading and Freight bills so rating and billing of rail and truck shipments could be done by computers without manual intervention. I came back from that meeting and working with Warren Dohack came up with a proposal for the next TDCC meeting. I remembered an idea that that an old IBM systems guy gave me back when I worked for SP TOPS. He said that there needed to be a standard for identifying variable length data in variable length records which flew in the face of the punched card rigid fixed length format. So we proposed a format for the bill of lading and freight bill to that committee which the shippers jumped at. That group refined what Dohack and I proposed and had TDCC expand to support all forms of business documents like invoices and purchase orders. I wish I could remember the dates better but that is the best I can do. I know it is way more than you asked for.
Life is good in Florida and hope all is well with you.
John Henry

[Author]

Posts