Freight house vs. house track

A house track is just a track on which any car can be placed for loading and unloading.  In a sense, it could serve as a temporary freight house on a very small scale.  A freight house, on the other hand, was a warehouse where cars (usually box cars) were spotted for loading and unloading, and in larger cities where freight could be sorted for forwarding elsewhere.  Cars would be unloaded by freight handlers, and people would bring their wagons or trucks to the warehouse to pick up or deliver their goods.

in the early 1950's

  Any town or location with enough business to support a freight house would have had some kind in the past, it might be very small or a combination passenger/freight depot, or even an old boxcar body placed on blocks. I think the railroad started closing their local freight houses after WW2. The small local houses were mostly closed here in Cali by the early 50's.  The buildings were then often removed by the mid 50's. The names of tracks often stick around long after the feature that caused the name is gone so I'd suspect that most house tracks actually had a house sometime in their past or they probably would have been called team tracks instead? .....DaveB

House Tracks on the T&P

Back in the early 70s I spent a short stint working on the Texas and Pacific as a brakeman.  House tracks were so named because they served the freight house.  A track that simply had a platform (or sometimes nothing at all) was termed the team track.  This track was for the use of any customer that didn't have a dedicated siding to ship, or more often, to receive freight.  And this freight was generally large items, such as tractors or farm implements, or an electrical transformer or anything that was large and bulky that rode on it's own freight car.  Loading/unloading was the customer's responsibility.  Smaller boxed or crated items generally went to the freight house.

As Dave was saying, there were a couple towns that no longer had a freight house but the track still remained as the "house track".  Sometimes it then served as a team track, other times it was no longer used at all.  In Donaldsonville, LA, the otherwise unused house track was used to park the local switcher at night.  There was already a dedicated team track about a block down.

I'm sure there were all sorts of variations of this on other roads or in other locales.

Freight Houses on the CN

In Ian Wilson's wonderful series of books on the Canadian National in southern Ontario in the 1950's, many towns, even the small ones had freight houses.  Of course they were starting to be closed down and many of them were leased out to local businesses in the really small towns.  I know I am planning on having them in my circa 1953 layout.

Steve

House Tracks

  Many times the term 'House Track' and 'Team Track' are used to mean the same thing.  Sometimes this is a regional or railroad specific term.  On much of the Milwaukee Road, just about any track that went behind the depot was called a 'House Track'.  Sometimes there was a freight house on that track, or maybe just a wide sliding freight door on the actual depot if this was a small town.

  Team tracks usually had a freight dock/ramp and a wide area for wagons/trucks to transfer goods from a freight car to the truck/wagon.

  When I worked for the CB&Q, these 'House Tracks' were called 'Business Tracks' whether they ran behind the depot or were across the mainline and had a number of industries on them.

Jim

Princeton Fl on the FEC 5th District

Had both a house track by the depot and a team track a bit further south.  I got this from a former FEC engineer that worked the line. Unfortunately all of the tacks of the 5th district have been removed. This was in the mid to late 70s.

Bill Michael