We consider the rail car management at industrial
in-plant railroads. Demands for loaded or empty cars
are characterized by a track, a car type, and the
desired quantity. If available, we assign cars from
the stock, possibly substituting types, otherwise we
rent additional cars. Transportation requests are
fulfilled as a short sequence of pieces of work, the
so-called blocks. Their design at a minimal total
transportation cost is the planning task considered
in this paper. It decomposes into the rough
distribution of cars among regions, and the NP-hard
shunting minimal allocation of cars per region. We
present mixed integer programming formulations for
the two problem levels. Our computational experience
from practical data encourages an installation in
practice.
