The obvious answer is new boxcars, but one might wonder whether containers might be used as a replacement. Major shippers/receivers being set up to handle well cars, etc?
Or not.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
The Wall Street Journal article stated that current rates do not justify railroads or pool operators expanding investment. The article also mentioned that this offers truckers an opportunity.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-railroads-cant-keep-enough-boxcars-in-service-1434879182
Where sidings already exist boxcars are alot more efficient. I can understand why the paper industry would prefer boxcars over truck or container. Both alternatives are alot more expensive.
Boxcars still have plenty of customers, judging by the trains that come thru here. If rates were raised to make owning them profitable, some customers may go away, but the free market will find an equilibrium as it always does. Or, a satisfactory alternative will be found. My guess is that boxcar customers use facilities and equipment which is a sunk cost; their willingness to make the investments necessary to use an alternative will depend on many factors, and some will be unable or unwilling to do so. It will be interesting to see what shakes out.
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This is yet another example of what John G. Kneiling - Trains' "Professional Iconoclast" columnist and author in the 1960's-1970's - said many times: The shipper ought to own the cars he needs to prevent these kind of problems - an alleged shortage, complaints about the cost, and the whining about same (those are kind of interactive, too). Also, the paper companies depending on the railroad or a leasing company to supply the cars is another way of using OPM ("Other People's Money") to provide part of the capital to finance their business.
There are some inconsistencies here (the article has some very interesting rates/ figures, too). For example, ". . . paper company executives say they will have to rely more on trucks, which by some estimates cost 20% more per ton than shipping by rail."
But: "New boxcars cost around $135,000. The rates that paper companies and other shippers pay for boxcar service typically include monthly equipment charges ranging between $450 and $700. That is decent revenue on a 30-year-old boxcar that has long since paid for itself, but well below the $940 to $1,100 in monthly car-hire fees needed to profitably deploy a new boxcar, said Richard Kloster, senior vice president of AllTranstek."
So the new cars cost roughly $400 to $500 per month more than the old ones.
Now, figure 100 tons net load, 1-1/2 trips per month = 150 tons per month. That's about $2.70 to $3.70 per ton additional.
Figure an average move of 500 miles (many will be longer) = 0.54 cents to 0.74 cents per ton-mile.
For a comparable 22-ton truck load, that would add $0.119 to $0.163 per mile to the matching rate. As compared to $1.50 per mile truck rate, that looks like a mere 8 to 11% increase to me, not the 20% mentioned in the article. An improvement in faster trip time/ more 'turns' and/ or longer miles will decrease that percentage considerably.
For paper that's likely worth a couple hundred dollars per ton (at least), $2.70 to $3.70 per ton added shipping cost doesn't seem like a 'show-stopper'.
So, to the shippers: Buy your own cars, and then quit your whining.
- Paul North.
We were expecting a boxcar of oriented strand board from western Canada. To our surprise, today, instead we got a center beam car of oriented strand board with each unit individually wrapped. No complaints on our end.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Murph, the wrapped product on centerbeam cars are frequent eastbound loads through Tehachapi, and a lot show up through Rochelle. It seems that dimension stock is more likely to be unwrapped on centerbeams
Paul, John Kneiling made those comments in another era. The railroads need to evaluate how important the paper business is to their own bottom line. with coal going down the tubes and oil traffic light, they might conclude that paper is worth saving. They must therefore do what it takes to allocate the equipment... it isn't the customers' responsibility to supply the equipment. The provision of equipment is part of the service.. otherwise what comes next.. should they also provide the locomotives and crew?
Center door containers?
jeffhergert http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-railroads-cant-keep-enough-boxcars-in-service-1434879182
Unfortunately the article is blocked as "subscribers only" when I tried to access it..
"I Often Dream of Trains"-From the Album of the Same Name by Robyn Hitchcock
My colleague friend says the problem is ONLY one, that the railroads don’t admire clocks. If they did, he says, there would be a whole bunch of boxes running around … especially old ones.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- K.P.’s absolute “theorem” from early, early childhood that he has seen over and over and over again: Those that CAUSE a problem in the first place will act the most violently if questioned or exposed.
K. P. HarrierMy colleague friend says the problem is ONLY one, that the railroads don’t admire clocks. If they did, he says, there would be a whole bunch of boxes running around … especially old ones.
Carload shipping is increasingly a niche market thing. There's still a market for general service box cars, but they're looking like 60', hi-cubes (110 ton?) that can handle stuff like lumber, beer and breakfast cereal....
...the market is shrinking all the time.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
chutton01 (6-26):
The colleague says if railroads admired the clock they would reduce the use of or get rid of classification yards because classification yards are time wasters. Boxcars need to be kept moving, at least more than they are now. If they were kept moving, they could make two or three or maybe four trips instead of one. Presto! No more car shortage!
Furthermore, the more trips a car makes in a given timeframe the more it enhances the railroad’s bottom line. Makes sense to me!
A real life example of wasted time is one I am personally familiar with. A boxcar load overshoots its destination by nearly a hundred miles. Then, it is classified at a classification yard. It returns to the area of destination, but overshoots it by 25 miles. It is then switched, and finally backtracks again 25 miles and delivered to the receiving customer. Float around a-go-go! No wonder there is a boxcar shortage.
The colleague says he is so over the hill now that he has absolutely no interest in being a part of a success story. My interpretation of that is that he realizes because of his age he will now never benefit from the railroad’s speeding things up in a common sense way, so he is not willing to share his thinking with them. What if he was right? And, because no one listened, the boxcar shipment went the way of the dinosaur? Isn’t this thread kind of about that eventuality?
Best,
K.P.
K. P. Harrier chutton01 (6-26): The colleague says if railroads admired the clock they would reduce the use of or get rid of classification yards because classification yards are time wasters. Boxcars need to be kept moving, at least more than they are now. If they were kept moving, they could make two or three or maybe four trips instead of one. Presto! No more car shortage! ... Best, K.P.
...
The railroads do admire the clock and would dearly love to consign hump yards to the scrap heap, their marketing aims these days are trainload movements, not single car movements. Single car railroading demands the switching capacity of hump and all the other yards. Trainload movements can be hauled directly from the shipper to the consignee and require no switching in route and no car shortages.
So long as you are dealing with single car customers, that don't own their own cars, car shortages can occur.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
K. P. HarrierThe colleague says if railroads admired the clock they would reduce the use of or get rid of classification yards because classification yards are time wasters. Boxcars need to be kept moving, at least more than they are now. If they were kept moving, they could make two or three or maybe four trips instead of one. Presto! No more car shortage
It is difficult to know if this isn't an elaborate leg-pull on your 'colleague's' part.
Hey! I've got an even brighter idea than that one! Since all switches are instrumented under PTC, why don't we retrofit all couplers with proven Lionel technology, control them with a superset of DPU commands, and use the equally time-honored Great Western slip-coach technique to drop off all the intermediate boxcars at just the right time (factoring in wind, rain, and other resistance via up-to-data from the cloud) to arrive at each consignee's loading dock? Not only does this keep trains moving, it reduces both the length of the train that arrives at a class yard, and the number of moves that need to be made in that yard for the next grand round of slipping.
Of course, as with all silver linings, there are a few clouds, and one of these is that many thoughtless consignees do not have sidings that conveniently face into the direction of travel. So you would have to take the train to the next class yard and hump cars into a 'return' rapid movement to slip them appropriately into the sidings facing the other way. But hey! that will only take what? a couple of hours at track speed, and then just a quick couple up to the cars already waiting to go that way, and run the power around the train...
There are a few other minor details, like tying down the cars once they arrive on the siding, but i'm sure your buddy that knows so much about how to keep cars moving will certainly have ideas on how to stop them, too.
Furthermore, the more trips a car makes in a given timeframe the more it enhances the railroad’s bottom line. Makes sense to me! A real life example of wasted time is one I am personally familiar with. A boxcar load overshoots its destination by nearly a hundred miles. Then, it is classified at a classification yard. It returns to the area of destination, but overshoots it by 25 miles. It is then switched, and finally backtracks again 25 miles and delivered to the receiving customer. Float around a-go-go! No wonder there is a boxcar shortage.
And you would do what, precisely, to fix this? Ensure that there are Perlman-style short, rapid trains that go everywhere directly? Drop cuts of cars on the main so trains going the other way can push them directly where they go? Perhaps adapt Google self-driving technology to trackmobiles ... or, I know! Big drones! That can push all the dropped cars the 'last mile' into their sidings. Then we can start working on the infrastructure that permits all those last-mile switch moves while all those express moves are thundering along on the same tracks! Sarah might know some of the answers to how to do that safely!
All sarcasm aside -- the problem of keeping cars moving has been a topic of concern (and innovation on many levels) for a very long time. The problem is that there are fixed characteristics of loose-car railroading that just don't lend themselves to 'get every car from origin to destination ASAP' and 'route every car directly to destination' at the same time, let alone achieve either one effectively, let alone cost-effectively.
It's all well and good to point out where problems are, wave a magic wand, and say "GO THERE". One of Shakespeare's characters said "I can call spirits from the vasty deep!" The question there, as here, is "but will they answer?" And in many cases, they just can't.
Even in intermodal operations, I was told long ago that 'saving effort' by moving loaded containers 'both ways' when working on a given consist is by no means either as fast or effective as pulling all the containers that go 'off' first, to wherever they go, then putting on all the loads. I suspect anyone who knows intermodal operations can confirm how true this is. There are surely corollaries for how mainline movements are coordinated with effective last-mile moves, and like them or not there are limits on practical improvements either in overall speed or in either cost-optimal or time-optimal routing for the system as a whole.
carnej1 jeffhergert http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-railroads-cant-keep-enough-boxcars-in-service-1434879182 Unfortunately the article is blocked as "subscribers only" when I tried to access it..
Try this one. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/shortage-of-railroad-boxcars-has-shippers-fuming-2015-06-21
I'm not a subscriber to the WSJ, but the wsj link works for me.
Jeff
There are two facts in play:
Railroads trains are a batch operation.
Carload shipments are not.
So, you have to create batches. You do this by building blocks in classification yards.
The way to the highest car velocity is through minimizing the number of classifications you have to make during the trip. Railroad work hard at this all the time, figuring out blocking definitions and train plans that minimize classification work and minimize circuity.
The goal is the best result for the entire network. Some individual trips will look really goofy, but they occur because so many other trips are helped.
For large volumes, flat switching is more costly than operating a hump yard. That said, hump yards are elaborate, expensive pieces of infrastructure. You don't want to own more than you need. You generally put them where you have traffic nodes with large volumes going in several directions. Conrail used to have one in each corner and one in the middle of the "Big X". Bailey on the UP is at the center of the large "X" of the original UP. Bellevue on the NS is a hub for northern part of the whole RR.
K. P. HarrierBoxcars need to be kept moving, at least more than they are now. If they were kept moving, they could make two or three or maybe four trips instead of one.
In 185 years of railroading no one in the world has figured out how to do this. The slow, erratic movement of carload freight is an inherent characteristic of such shipments.
oltmanndCarload shipping is increasingly a niche market thing. There's still a market for general service box cars, but they're looking like 60', hi-cubes (110 ton?) that can handle stuff like lumber, beer and breakfast cereal.... ...the market is shrinking all the time.
So, mostly things that cube out before they weigh out? What has more volume; a hi-cube boxcar or two doublestacked 48' containers? I understand that there are markets for boxcars but could some loads be transferred to intermodal units?
NorthWest oltmannd Carload shipping is increasingly a niche market thing. There's still a market for general service box cars, but they're looking like 60', hi-cubes (110 ton?) that can handle stuff like lumber, beer and breakfast cereal.... ...the market is shrinking all the time. So, mostly things that cube out before they weigh out? What has more volume; a hi-cube boxcar or two doublestacked 48' containers? I understand that there are markets for boxcars but could some loads be transferred to intermodal units?
oltmannd Carload shipping is increasingly a niche market thing. There's still a market for general service box cars, but they're looking like 60', hi-cubes (110 ton?) that can handle stuff like lumber, beer and breakfast cereal.... ...the market is shrinking all the time.
As to volume, it would depend on how tall and how long the boxcar is...
The 85 feet high cube would obviously have more volume than two 48 feet containers, even 9'6" high containers.
The actual size of the items being carried is important. You might be able to stack items two or three high in a boxcar and not in a container.
Specialised Container Transport in Australia have recently built more than 100 very high cube boxcars, 75 feet long and nearly as tall as a double stack container well car.
These are understood to be used for things like breakfast cereal and furniture.
M636C
M636CAs to volume, it would depend on how tall and how long the boxcar is... The 85 feet high cube would obviously have more volume than two 48 feet containers, even 9'6" high containers. The actual size of the items being carried is important. You might be able to stack items two or three high in a boxcar and not in a container. Specialised Container Transport in Australia have recently built more than 100 very high cube boxcars, 75 feet long and nearly as tall as a double stack container well car. These are understood to be used for things like breakfast cereal and furniture. M636C
True; I understand that this is why the majority of large paper rolls are shipped in boxcars. I think that almost all the 85ft hi-cubes are for auto parts (I see paper mostly shipped in the 60ft variety) but there is no reason why they could not be adapted for other freight. What is cheapest will prevail.
For the curious, SCT boxcars can be seen here, note the well cars for size comparison and the standard boxes behind the taller cars. These boxes are for unit train service and not for carload freight, as M636C was kind enough to explain to me a few weeks ago. Thanks again!
My prediction about the paper loads. If they (paper companies) decide to switch away from box cars, they are going to load trailers and not containers. Very few of those loads will ever go by rail again if that happens. I think that most of the loaded moves will not be long enough to interest some of the railroads in retaining that business using intermodal equipment.
On a related note, the Des Moines Register used to have a special sports edition once a week printed on peach colored newsprint. They received the paper by box car, like all the rest of their newsprint at that time. The service got so bad they discontinued that edition, just printing on regular newsprint. Eventually they discontinued receiving by rail altogether, building a new plant without rail access.
I hope I'm wrong. With other threads about the decline of the low hanging fruit (coal), the railroads should be thinking about how to get more business. Maybe retain what they do have. I'm not sure some of them are up to that challenge. They have gotten so used to 100+ car trains going a 1000 miles, that anything that doesn't fit that mold is not on their radar.
Great points Jeff..with the decline of coal the railroads do need to look at other options... maintaining or improving service to the paper industry would be one. Another might be targetting certain shorthaul business that might work on rail. The conventional wisdom is that rail isn't competitive on shorthauls under 500 miles, yet that is where 70% of all freight moves. If the railroads could somehow tap into that market then that would go a long way to making up for the shortfall in coal. Railroads also need to get away from the "conveyor on rails" mentality and upsell the customer on services such as consolidation and distribution: focus on first mile/last mile services and working directly with shippers/manufacturers. At present the railroads outsource the consolidation/distribution to third parties who effectively cream off a disproportionate amount of the profit with nothing or very little invested in infrastructure. Ideally a little shipper like a 10 person metal shop in Denver, CO (for example) should be able to call Union Pacific directly.. UP would then send in one of their own trucks for pickup and send it off to a UP service center for consolidation with other shipments. Now all that is done by outsiders who then hire UP as the low cost conveyor belt. The railroaders need to go back to taking ownership of the entire transportation supply chain, from initial sale to delivery of the goods.. instead of just being the go between as they are now.
If I'm reading Ulrich's post properly, he appears to be suggesting that the railroads need to get back into the LCL business. I'm not sure that would be the wisest allocation of assets, that sort of business is labor-intensive and was lost to trucking decades ago.
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