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[quote user="greyhounds"][quote user="futuremodal"] Ed, Everyone in the biz knows that it is quite simple to fill a reefer like you would a dry van.  California is the world's biggest consumer market, and there's still plenty of production from the Midwest that could have filled those "dry" reefers.  In fact, that backhaul would have been the least expensive way to get consumer goods from the Midwest to California.  The question is - who's fault was it that this backhaul opportunity was missed?  Did BNSF not permit the necessary flexibility in the cycle to allow backhauls to reach the necessary docks?  Or did the ReeferRailer folks just suffer from brain freeze?  I honestly don't know.  But given my experiences with BNSF, I suspect BNSF was principle in denying the backhaul logistics to fully function.  At least that would be consistent with BNSF's other actions. [/quote] Backhauls weren't the problem.  Railroads have been loading reefers west to California for over 100 years.  And Chicago is still a major manufacturing center that produces a lot of freight needing temperature protection.  If you drive by the Nestles' facility near O'Hare you'll see intermodal reefers parked waiting to take chocolat west.   They say "Alliance Shippers" and "England Intermodal" on their sides.  And Nestle isn't alone here - shoot, there's even a suburban station named "Mars" because it's located at the candy factory. The problem was that it was impossible to aggregate the asinine, stupid RoadRailer Reefers into trainload lots in a timely fashion. And you can load the reefers with dry freight like LTL easy enough to go west.  UPS even set up Martrac to balance its moves with reefer freight.  The "ReeferRailers" weren't taken out of service.  They were switched to TOFC service.  This also definately required a backhaul.  It wasn't the backhaul that was the problem, it was the aggregation into trainload lots of the RoadRailer equipment that could not be aggregated with other conventional westbound loads. FM doesn't understand the whole "aggregation" thing.  But then, he's never tried to "balance" 18 loads of bananas into Chicago per week with backhauls.  I have. [/quote] So tell us, how is aggregation for TOFC different from aggregation for bi-modal?  Are you forgetting that bi-modal operations generally cycle 3 vans per bogie?  Greyhounds doesn't understand the whole "cycle" thing.
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