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The days of loading railcars and shipping them in volume to distribution centers is going away. Why???? Cost. Tying money into large inventories and sitting on the inventory is not good business practice. Borrowing money to create the inventory and paying interest on the borrowed money is not a good business practice. The company I worked for was based near Milwaukee, Wi. They would ship railcars to us in Cleveland (400 miles) and it would take anywhere from 5 days to as many as 11 days. Part of the problem was the routing of cars through Chicago, from one railroad yard to another. That could take several days. Then if the car was blocked into the wrong section of the train. I had cars stay on a train until they got to the east coast. The car had to be rerouted back to our warehouse. This was back in the 60's, 70's and early 80's. Our parent company phased out railcar shipping and switched eclusively to truckload shipments. The product in a trailer usually can weigh up to 40,000lbs. But the trailer can deliver from MIlwaukee to Cleveland overnight. Today everything is time sensitive and that is why you see more trailers and containers on flatcar shipments. Most of my working career was with warehousing (loading and unloading railcars & trailers) , truckload scheduling, air freight and and container shipping all over the world. I have seen large public warehouses equipped with rail facilities start taking out some of the trackage and fill in the area within the warehouse to get more storage space. They do keep some track as their customer base does change from time to time. But for the most part trucking is providing the faster service. The railroads make out with their volume type shipments. A covered hopper conatining plastic pellets for injection molding would be one example. A 53 trailer and a 50 foot boxcar have close to the same cubic sq. footage. But the boxcar can carry 2 and 1/2 times the weight. All of our shipments to Walmart were by truckloads to their distribution centers all over the U.S.
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