TTX Company HO Scale Models

TTX Company traces its origins to November 1955, when it was established as TrailerTrain through a partnership that included the Pennsylvania Railroad, Norfolk and Western Railway, and Rail-Trailer Corporation. The company emerged during a period of rapid expansion in trailer-on-flatcar, or TOFC, intermodal service, and its founding purpose was to bring order and standardization to that growing segment of freight transportation. Rather than having individual railroads invest separately in specialized flatcar equipment, TrailerTrain offered a cooperative pooling arrangement under which member railroads shared access to a common fleet, reducing duplication of investment and allowing cars to move fluidly across connecting lines. The name "TrailerTrain" was chosen through an unusual process in which Pennsylvania Railroad employees submitted suggestions in a company drawing, with the winning entry selected from among thousands of entries submitted by the railroad's workforce. For several decades TrailerTrain functioned as the central provider of flatcar equipment to the North American rail industry, operating under pooling authority that was first formally approved by regulators in 1974. That authority was subsequently reauthorized at intervals, with the most recent renewal granted in October 2014 for a fifteen-year term by the Surface Transportation Board. In 1991 the company modernized its identity by adopting the name TTX Company, a change that also brought a new corporate logo featuring a yellow and black design with stylized speed lines. A second rebranding followed in March 2008, when TTX introduced a Tuscan red logo as a deliberate tribute to the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of its founding partners. Today TTX operates as a privately held railcar cooperative owned collectively by the major North American freight railroads, each of which holds shares and maintains representation on the company's board of directors. The fleet has grown well beyond its original flatcar focus and encompasses more than 168,000 cars, including intermodal well cars, autorack cars for finished automobile transport, boxcars, gondolas, and various specialized flatcar types. Maintenance of that large fleet is supported by a network of repair facilities, including heavy shops located in Jacksonville, Florida, North Augusta, South Carolina, Waterford Township, Michigan, and Mira Loma, California, as well as field maintenance operations positioned at intermodal terminals across the continent. In late 2023 TTX announced plans to relocate its headquarters and approximately 150 employees from Chicago, where the company had been based since its founding, to Charlotte, North Carolina, with the move planned for spring 2024.