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[quote user="greyhounds"][quote user="gabe"] I(4)  I can't really put my finger on a particular article, as it was never really stated out right, but I seem to remember several articles in Trains and elsewhere kind of referring to extra long trains with disdain--from a business rather than fan perspective.  Have I hit "the sauce" too hard--your response was still too funny Murphy--, or does anyone else seem to remember this?If my memory is accurate, why is a first class railroad like BNSF now running 10,000-foot trains?  Was Trains disdain misplaced, or has something changed? In a way, it is kind of ironic, as I have always associated short fast trains with Santa Fe's Transcon.Gabe[/quote]Well, there's not anything inherintly "bad" about long trains.  Niether is there anything inherintly "good" about short trains.  And, why run two short trains when you can get the job done with one long train?And that's the important thing, "getting the job done".  In the past long trains of general freight tended to fall down on the job.  They were difficult to operate and they provided terrible service.  With this amazing train the BNSF was able to reduce the operating difficulties.  The articulated cars and distributed power reduced the slack and braking problems.  The now largely double track Transcon reduced, if not eliminated, the siding length problem.In other markets, and in other times, long trains provided unreliable service.  Freight cars spent a lot of time sitting in yards so they could be aggregated into those long trains.  If they missed a connection there was a long wait until the next long train.  Service was unreliable with long trains of general freight.BNSF just doesn't have that problem on the LA-Chicago container route.  Those ships disgourge thousands of containers.  Aggregating the boxes into a long train isn't a problem.So the operating problems have been reduced and the aggregation problem doesn't exist.  Things changed.  BNSF was smart enough to understand and accept the change, and then run an "Experimental" train to see what they could do.  The "Experiment" seems to have worked fairly well with a Sunday departure and a Tuesday arrival.  [/quote]Time sensitivity is still an issue for intermodal, and running such absurdly long trains will only add to the time penalties.  Don't forget, all those containers disgourged from those ships have to be marshalled first and sorted, then and only then are they loaded onto the well cars.  And on the operating side of things, such long trains can only cause havoc to the other trains using the Transcon, including those time sensitive UPS trains.  I wonder how UPS feels about this spector of long double stacks potentially clogging up their priority trains?  Are there enough passing opportunities built into the Transcon to allow an Eastbound UPS to glide past a long eastbound double stack without losing speed?[quote]BNSF = "Railroad To The Future".[/quote]You really think our future is doomed to becoming a colony of Communist China, huh?  Because that's the only *future* facilitated by BNSF's continued cross-subsidization of imports at the expense of domestic customers.
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