Hi, I'm trying to make my model railroad as real as possible. I use several paperworks where I want to count with load/unload time. So I wonder how long does it take to load/unload boxcar, tank car, flat car, covered and oper hopper etc. I think it is much more real to count with time for load boxcar about one hour (for example) than spot him to load track and after 5 minutes pull him back to yard.
In the real world the railroads have Demurrage Rules that specify how much time customers have to load or unload cars without accrewing additional charges for delaying the cars.
For the most part, tank cars are not covered by Demurrage. The cars are privately owned - the owner may be the shipper or a thrid party. Tank cars are normally operated under a lease agreement between the shipper and the consignee. Depending on the product and the consignee - the unloading time can be within 24 hours or extending for weeks. The 'trip lease' between shipper and consignee will specify when and how much additional charges are payable to the shipper for excess detention of the car.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Like most things on the railroad, it all depends.
Short answer figure one work shift. Most of the times that works out to roughly 24 hours between appearances of the local or switch run.
Unloading can take longer due to bunching of inbound cars and if the consignee is using the car(s) as a storage bin.
It depends on what the lading is and where the material is placed once off thecar. A flat car of lumber can take 4 or 5 hours. A pipe load is quicker. A Rapid Discharge car of stone is about a minute, if the undercar material handling system is capable, a standard hopper of stone may take a half hour. Boxcars depend on how many lifts need to be made. 2 dozen large rolls of paper are quicker than 54 double stacked pallets of bagged material.
The list can go on and on, but you get the idea.
I imagine the time/era, location etc. would make a difference. A boxcar of lumber spotted at a small town lumber yard that's being unloaded one or two sticks at a time by a workman is going to take a lot longer than a forklift unloading wrapped lumber. If the industry is on a shortline or a branch of a large railroad, there may only be one train a day, so no matter how quickly the car is loaded or unloaded, it's going to stay there til the next day anyway.
wjstixI imagine the time/era, location etc. would make a difference. A boxcar of lumber spotted at a small town lumber yard that's being unloaded one or two sticks at a time by a workman is going to take a lot longer than a forklift unloading wrapped lumber. If the industry is on a shortline or a branch of a large railroad, there may only be one train a day, so no matter how quickly the car is loaded or unloaded, it's going to stay there til the next day anyway.
NORMAL - railroad frequency is a daily switch. Some branch line industries only recieve service two or three days per week.
High Volume industries may arrange for more frequent switching. In most cases the industries the get several switches per day are located in terminal areas and the switching is done by yard crews.
Outlying High Volume industries may have jobs assigned to them that start and stop their tour of duty at the industry.
Many High Volume industries have their own employees perform the switching using motive power that the industry owns.
I used to work a local job that would spot a flat car load of lumber at a team track on our outbound trip from Glenwood. Usually the consignee would be waiting with a truck and forklift. By the time we returned 4-6 hours later the car would be empty ready to be picked up.
Mark Vinski
I can speak to the etc. part. A carload of lumber can be unloaded by one man in about 3-1/2 hours. A boxcar of plywood takes about double that.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
PNWRMNM "Like most things on the railroad, it all depends." Short answer figure one work shift. Most of the times that works out to roughly 24 hours between appearances of the local or switch run. Unloading can take longer due to bunching of inbound cars and if the consignee is using the car(s) as a storage bin.
"Like most things on the railroad, it all depends."
Depends; is the operable phrase!
Each location will have its own parameters TO UNLOAD OR LOAD:
Time between railroad switch moves- local agreement with the servicing railroad. [Could be based on the car volume at a customers location(?)].
Product being handled in, or out of a location. Number of 'hands' assigned to do the job; mechanical equipment being utilized[hand trucks or fork lifts(?) in the process. Rough lumber can be banded in bundles, or loaded by hand in a boxcar. Finished lumber is generally bundled(?) for convenience of the shipper, and the receiver is left to deal with the unloading process.
Tank cars, depending on the viscosity of the product received and the plumbing of the unloading facility ( pump size will play a major part in this; as will the tankage receiving the product.) Oils and other petroleum products will generally lend themselves easier to load or unload(viscosity, again(?) out of tankcars. Agricultural oils ( cotton, soy, corn, palm) will be harder to pump in or out due to a level of sediment in them. Again, the 'time' to load or unload is generally a product of when the servicing railroad will 'switch the facility' and demurage charges , if any?
Thank you guys! Now I have the idea. I see it really depends on type of industry (if it is small or big) and type of commodity and unloading facility (forklift, pump). All this is very interesting.
My memory is a bit hazy on this, but I remember seeing boxcars in grain service being emptied at Thunder Bay ON at one of the provincial grain elevators. It took about 15-20 minutes on a mechanical device that tilted the car to either side.
For the model world, the rule of thumb is usually one operating session, which generally equates to one shift, give or take.
The local switcher will drop the cars it is carrying at the appropriate industries, and they stay there for the rest of the session. The local will also pick up any cars at those industries, which is where the fun is - pulling one car to replace it with another.
If you're running a card order system, you pick up anything in the industry's box and drop the cars you have cards for in your hand.
As noted, except for certain industries, service is generally once a day, so once per operating session would be appropriate. Even high turnover customers, like the auto industry, often only switch about three times a day (at shift change).
The local here might go north one day, and south the next.
For added variety/challenge, require a car to be left in place (or respotted in the same place) when the other cars have been picked up or dropped. Then it gets picked up at the next operating session.
I recall seeing boxcars of lumber being unloaded one board at a time, down a roller ramp into the shed. Not a two hour job...
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...
[quote user="BOB WITHORN"] Sam, you said "mechanical equipment being utilized[hand trucks or fork lifts(?) in the process". Thank you. They are Hand Trucks, Pallet Trucks, Forklift Trucks. 40 years of selling them and 90% called them anything but a truck, hand cart, pallet jack, hand jack, fork lift. It took us most of an hour to unload a semi trailer load of steel strapping because of all the wood blocking nailed to the floor keeping the load in place. A rail car load was 4 truck loads with all the same wood blocking / bracing and more!!
[/quote] Bob, "40 years in Sales"; You certainly earned a "A tip of the Kromer Cap"!
I grew up in a family surrounded by Salesmen. Father in Bread [Continental Baking Co] Uncles in Construction, and Lumber. Myself , in Trucking[20+years]. I am certainly, intimately familiar with the products {'Armstrong variety', and powered!} You had mentioned, and sold, for loading and unloading, not only with trucks but railcars. Having learned a long time ago; Manual Labor is not jost a hispanic name.
tree68 If you're running a card order system, you pick up anything in the industry's box and drop the cars you have cards for in your hand. For added variety/challenge, require a car to be left in place (or respotted in the same place) when the other cars have been picked up or dropped. Then it gets picked up at the next operating session.
I'm using car card and waybill system and yes, I often left cars in place when they have been dropped. I know it is better way to return them to the yard tracks, because for example for 4 move waybills I need to make first move from yard track to industry one (then move #2--from industry to yard, #3--from origin yard to destination yard and #4--drop in consignee's industry track).
Bob your mention of pallet Jacks reminded me of the worst job I ever had in unloading. We received the materials for building a mezzanine; I do not rememberf how long the bundle was, but I do remember taking it off with a short pallet jack which I ran in under the middle of it--pull out, back and fill, back and fill, etc. until I was able to get the jack off the truck
Johnny
Johnny,
...They are a very useful style of truck. Had a customer buy several with a 4500 lb capacity, worked great for years. Got a call one day saying that one was defective. Not possible after 3 years of use so went to see why. They had tried to lift a 4000 lb capacity fork truck with one fork. Didn't know that a fork truck basically weighs double its capacity. They bought a new one. The 'jacks' were special to roll across the rail siding inside the building that was built into the concrete floor.
All this talk of loading and unloading reminds me of my last job before the railroad. I was the inventory clerk for IBP at Perry, IA. My shift began a few hours before the end of the production day. The plant then ran two shifts. Day shift was all export to Japan, the night shift IBP domestic product.
One night the loadout crew finished an export load, a K-Line container as I recall, with hand-loaded boxes direct into the container. I believe the driver was resting, because by the time he left I was the only one left in the dock area. Normal practice for drivers was to go downtown where there was a scale to check their weight and distribution. Anyway, he came back and was OK on gross weight, but over on the trailer axles. Boxes needed to be moved forward to balance the weight. So I had him back into one of the bays and went to work. I think he had to come back two more times before he was OK. I ended up moving about 1500 lbs of meat in mostly 5 and 10 lbs boxes. When I first started, I was doing a pretty good and orderly job. By the time I finished... well, lets just hope that when they opened the container, they figured the seas were rough and the ship got tossed around.
Jeff
After I graduated from High School my father "persuaded me to come to work for him at this building: http://historichoodriver.com/index.php?showimage=31
which, at the time, was a three story cold storage building in which fresh D"Anjou pears packed in cardboard cartons were stored and later shipped out either on trucks from an improvised loading dock on the street side of the third floor, or on refrigerated Pacific Fruit Express cars spotted, like the ones in the photo, at loading doors on the first floor. At he time the photo was taken, fruit (in wooden boxes at that time) was moved from room to room on wooden framed, steel castered "dollies", with movements from floor to floor by means of hydraulic freight elevators. By the time I started work the building had been "modernized", meaning a powered conveyor belt system had been installed.
Loading a rail car involved a crew of five men (if they all showed up for work that day) unstacking catons in one of the thirteen cold rooms and placing them on the conveyor. Cartons had to be spaced twelve to eighteen inches apart to prevent them from jamming on curved sections of track. This was especially important if boxes were being sent from the second or third floor because this involved the boxes being directed off the powered conveyor to a spiral metal slide ramp. At the car unpowered "rapid roll" conveyor track was set up in the car door, and curving to the end of the car being loaded. The loading crew usually consisted of four men (ditto my comment above), two stacking cartons which were pushed to them down the "rapid roll" by one of the other men (their own momentum made cartons caught "on the fly" easier to swing up onto the stack) while the fouth man pulled out sections of rapid roll as the stacking operation progressed abd set them up in the opposite end of the car ready for use. Once the ends were loaded the load doors had to be unshipped, swung into place, and locked down. Once that was accomplished the center section between the doors could be loaded, the dock plate removed and the door closed and sealed. Start to finish the process took about two hours if nothing went wrong (something usually did). That is how we did it without those fancy forklift trucks, my favorite saying in those days was "it's American know-how like this that beat the Kaiser". At least I missed out on having to load ice blocks (made in the same building and dragged to the ice hatches on th catwalk visible in the photo) into the pre mechanical reefers.
Slightly off topic: sometimes the UPRR would have more cars to drop off than there were loading doors, so they would spot an extra car on the same track between doors. In that case we had to spot the cars ourselves. For this we had a couple of devices we called "car jacks" available. They had long wooden handles about as thick as the business end of a baseball bat and a steel shoe shaped to fit between the rail and the wheel. Once the parking brake was released, weight applied to the end of the handle caused a hinged pad in the shoe to try to lift the back of the wheel, forcing it (eventually) to roll foreward. Has anyone out here picked up one of these devices, maybe at a railroadiana meet?
Also, foamers might be interested to know that part of the building has recently been converted into condominiums.
FWIW column, for truckload shipments, for live loads of unloads, ie where the driver and power(tractor) are present, most truckload companies allow 2hours before they charge detention. This is for a dry can or temperature controlled(refridgerated) trailer. The common load for those trucks is 20 to 22.5 tons(45,000lbs), 3300 cubic feet, or approximately a maximum of 50-60 40" x48" pallets.
My experience in Salinas was a good loader could really move. There were several times when the loaders would have contests to see who could load the fastest(this changed after a couple of serious incidents). On one occasion I had a fork lift driver loaded 54bins of lettuce in under 5 minutes. (he was moving up to 24 pallets at a time).
A hundred years ago when I was working in the power plant a 100+ car coal train could be unloaded whilst moving in about 4 hours on a good day. This doesn't count the time to weigh the train full and then empty.
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