From the January issue, to fix carload service. Most places that might benefit from carload service no longer have sidings if they ever had them in the first place. And what sort of a car might we need. A container, that is too big and heavy.
Let us look at the containers that the air lines use. A light weight aluminium container in a variety of sizes. The railroad drops the containers on the team track, and the consignee sends a truck to come and fetch it. It can be rolled off of the special made container flat cars on to the team platform. It can be rolled on to the consignees truck, and thence onto his shop floor.
Or better yet the railroad sets up a last-mile agreement with a courrior company, and he will deliver them to the required consignees on his route. With this model the courrior company will help to drum up business. A smart operator could pick up containers before 9 am put them on a train for Chicago and his corresponding currior service would pick the up and deliver them the next morning.
The advantage of this is that the container does not ship all the way on one car being andled by many railroads. Instead it will be transferred from one train to the next at some sort of a hub or or intermediate statioon. They keep pushing these containers onto trains going in the right direction. A bunch of contaiiners are pushed off of train ABC at "Interstation 235" some are pushed onto train DEF and others on XYZ without the benefit of being laid up at sidings waiting for the correct train to pick them up. Trains could even meet somewhere to interchange the containers.
With any planning at all containers moving within a zone can be delivered the next day. The size and shape of a zone is determined by how many trains a day are serving the area and by the geography.
Imagine over night freight srtvice between New York and Chicago. On a Train.
ROAR
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS
You are not talking car load. Your container sizes discribe less than car load; a business model the carriers got out of over half a century ago; a business model that no part of the current operating plant is able to support without massive capital investment both in your containers and the facilities to load and unload them.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Maybe they are on to something? NSFW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCquCm35Lgg
Very labor-intensive to transfer containers. And airlines charge accordingly.
What the Lion is describing sounds a lot like the containers that where developed in the 1920's and used by a few railroads until the ICC told tem to charge higher rates. While labor intensive compared to unit trains, they used a lot less labor han LCL. Comared to current ISO or domestic containers, these smaller containers could be handled with reasonable sized forklifts thus needing considerably less capital investment for a terminal than what would be needed for a ISO container.
The modern day equivalent would be the PODS storage. I wonder how much of an effort it would be to make/modify a flatcar to handle PODS?
Erik_Mag... The modern day equivalent would be the PODS storage. I wonder how much of an effort it would be to make/modify a flatcar to handle PODS?
Looking at the PODS containers, I wonder how much of the routine slack impacts, buff and draft, that those boxes could withstand.
CSX built a system to transfer containers between railroad cars at North Baltimore and Hunter Harrison stopped using it for that purpose. The new facility at Pittsburgh has been convertd to a storage yard for plastic pellet cars.
mvlandsw CSX built a system to transfer containers between railroad cars at North Baltimore and Hunter Harrison stopped using it for that purpose. The new facility at Pittsburgh has been convertd to a storage yard for plastic pellet cars.
CSX wisely re-opened it after EHH passed...
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...
BaltACD Looking at the PODS containers, I wonder how much of the routine slack impacts, buff and draft, that those boxes could withstand.
The thought had crossed my mind as well - may need a flat car with a cushioned underframe or shock absorbing mounts for the containers.
Erik_Mag BaltACD Looking at the PODS containers, I wonder how much of the routine slack impacts, buff and draft, that those boxes could withstand. The thought had crossed my mind as well - may need a flat car with a cushioned underframe or shock absorbing mounts for the containers.
Even with cushioned underframes there can be serious impacts when the equipment comes to the end of its travel. In todays world of PSR sized gargantuan trains - there is a 'whole lot of slack' within a train - slack that in many cases that the engineer is powerless to control.
The PODS containers are 16', 12', and 8'. They'd have to have their own cars, never mind slack, etc.
Keep in mind, too, that PODS containers are provided to the consumer for the consumer to load. If, say, the market were to include moving household goods across the country, there comes the question of whether the contents of the container are suitably packed to handle the stresses we've mentioned.
OTOH, I've seen trash trains with somewhat smaller containers than the usual 20', 40', 53' we see on intermodal now. I think there are usually four to a car.
What it comes down to, though, is whether or not there is a market for such a service beyond the folks already using it?
And what would be the interface between the user and the railroad? Right now, if I wanted to ship a container, I'd have to have it drayed some 70 miles to the nearest intermodal facility. I'm sure there are places even further from a rail facility. This happens on a regular basis - I see cans on the Interstate all the time.
Taking from the airline example - perhaps a car like the Thrall all-door car could be outfitted to handle such containers. But they still have to have a place to be loaded and unloaded.
Given the railroads' apparent distaste for single car railroading, I don't see anything like this happening, unless some third party can make the system palatable for the railroads.
greyhoundsWell, here we go again. Someone comes up with an idea on how to grow rail revenue and tonnage. Then we get at least one of the usual suspects insisting that it can’t possibly ever work. It would be more constructive to figure out how to make it work. Anyway, this is a YouTube of an LTL driver making deliveries. Just so we all can get on the same page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEI_NXAfGHg Please note that he is using a trailer equipped with lift pads for TOFC service. The company he’s driving for, Estes, is a regular user of TOFC/COFC. They have their own rail containers for double stack operation. So, evidently, the derided long trains do not give the freight too bad of a ride. Other LTL truckers regularly using rail include FedEx and Yellow. Those are number one and two in the US LTL market. And let’s not forget all those UPS packages that move along just fine by rail. I don’t see a lot in the video that requires significant investment. The trick is to make rail participation grow profitably. But we’ve always got these people who insist “It Won’t Work.” BTW, I did start out on an LTL/LCL freight dock at 1601 S. Western Ave. in Chicago. The railroads never did entirely quit hauling LTL. But they were shoved out of a lot of it by government regulators who didn’t have a clue.
3rd Party LTL can and does work. 3rd Parties are making the investments in equipment, facilities and manpower - NOT RAILROADS. 3rd Party LTL carriers are using railroads for what they are designed for - moving completed shipments from the 3rd Party's origin terminal to the 3rd Party's destination terminal. The 3rd Party is on the hook for everthing necessary to originate a full trailer to ship and everything necessary to deliver whatever the trailer contains at the destination terminal.
Were railroads to seek ENTRY to the LTL business they would have to compete against existing 3rd Party LTL carriers, financially that is a very high barrier to surmount; a barrier that railroads have made a business decision not to attempt.
greyhoundsWell, here we go again. Someone comes up with an idea on how to grow rail revenue and tonnage. Then we get at least one of the usual suspects insisting that it can’t possibly ever work. It would be more constructive to figure out how to make it work.
I'm sure it would work - but you have to have buy-in from all of the involved parties. And I think that's where the problem will lie.
Based on previous discussions, the problem will be the railroads and their currently abysmal record for moving anything but unit trains in a timely manner. I'm not even sure unit trains are moving in a timely manner.
The problem isn't the railroads themselves, though. I'm sure they could pull this, and other such services off just fine. They've provided such service in the past. It's the "activist investors" out to wring every last penny out of the companies with no concern about things like providing new or better service.
The system is in effect at this time, only using UPS, FedX, and Amazon. There are certain trains in which the operation is set up for these carriers, primarily UPS. For example, today's CSX I20 had over 60 UPS containers/trailers and a couple of Amazon containers.
As mentioned above, the LTL market uses rail. ABF is a big user in certain markets. The key is the origin destination pairings, as these points need to correspond to either heavy volumes for the LTL terminals or proximity to break bulk terminals.
Overnight service between Chicago and NYC - probably not going to occur via rail. Back in the 1960's the New York Central's 20th Century Limited provided overnight service - 430pm departure from Chicago with 930am arrival in NYC. That is 16 hours for 960 miles which works out to 60mph, which was with 79 mph (if not faster) limits. The practicality of running a freight train at 60mph average is difficult, but in order to push off at 430pm, the containers would need to be loaded and available much earlier. In order to pickup the freight and have it at a central staging area by 330pm for sorting would require a dedicated operation, not to be utilized by LTL or cartage operators in Chicago or NYC. Difficult to accomplish, even before tendering to the rail.
Ed
MP173The system is in effect at this time, only using UPS, FedX, and Amazon. There are certain trains in which the operation is set up for these carriers, primarily UPS. For example, today's CSX I20 had over 60 UPS containers/trailers and a couple of Amazon containers. As mentioned above, the LTL market uses rail. ABF is a big user in certain markets. The key is the origin destination pairings, as these points need to correspond to either heavy volumes for the LTL terminals or proximity to break bulk terminals. Overnight service between Chicago and NYC - probably not going to occur via rail. Back in the 1960's the New York Central's 20th Century Limited provided overnight service - 430pm departure from Chicago with 930am arrival in NYC. That is 16 hours for 960 miles which works out to 60mph, which was with 79 mph (if not faster) limits. The practicality of running a freight train at 60mph average is difficult, but in order to push off at 430pm, the containers would need to be loaded and available much earlier. In order to pickup the freight and have it at a central staging area by 330pm for sorting would require a dedicated operation, not to be utilized by LTL or cartage operators in Chicago or NYC. Difficult to accomplish, even before tendering to the rail. Ed
Intermodal Ramp cut off times don't mean for the customer to show up with 20 trailer/containers on the minute and expect all 20 to be on the train and on the move at the scheduled departure time - Customer can show up with one or two boxes and expect on time service. Reality has limits.
BNSF (former Santa Fe) has an operation at Willow Springs, Il that was created in the late 1980's to handle UPS. Fred Frailey had a story in Trains where he spent 24 hours there documenting the Santa Fe - UPS operation.
It still functions very efficiently. There are BNSF Z symbol trains currently operating between Willow Springs and points west to the Pacific coast.
For those who say "airlines do it, why can't railroads?", much airfreight is done by consolidators, the airline just does the transportation (sound familiar?). The reason that they use airline containers is because different size airliners use specific containers.
Many shipments don't require high speed but reliability is expected.
BroadwayLion From the January issue, to fix carload service. Most places that might benefit from carload service no longer have sidings if they ever had them in the first place. And what sort of a car might we need. A container, that is too big and heavy. Let us look at the containers that the air lines use. A light weight aluminium container in a variety of sizes. The railroad drops the containers on the team track, and the consignee sends a truck to come and fetch it. It can be rolled off of the special made container flat cars on to the team platform. It can be rolled on to the consignees truck, and thence onto his shop floor. Or better yet the railroad sets up a last-mile agreement with a courrior company, and he will deliver them to the required consignees on his route. With this model the courrior company will help to drum up business. A smart operator could pick up containers before 9 am put them on a train for Chicago and his corresponding currior service would pick the up and deliver them the next morning. The advantage of this is that the container does not ship all the way on one car being andled by many railroads. Instead it will be transferred from one train to the next at some sort of a hub or or intermediate statioon. They keep pushing these containers onto trains going in the right direction. A bunch of contaiiners are pushed off of train ABC at "Interstation 235" some are pushed onto train DEF and others on XYZ without the benefit of being laid up at sidings waiting for the correct train to pick them up. Trains could even meet somewhere to interchange the containers. With any planning at all containers moving within a zone can be delivered the next day. The size and shape of a zone is determined by how many trains a day are serving the area and by the geography. Imagine over night freight srtvice between New York and Chicago. On a Train. ROAR
Not to be funny OP.... You just reiterated what JB Hunt, Schneider, and IMC's currently do. They market, solicit the traffic, and perform drayage. The C1's just hook and haul.
However one problem I see with your system.. It has way to many "transfers" of equipment due to their smaller size. This would eat time and increase cost. Not to mention consolidators and LTL companies do provide this service already albeit in a 53' or 28' Pups in TOFC service. Which is slowly on its way out for line haul intermodal.
Truth be told I would like to see boxcar LCL(I know NS has trialed this however I don't know if the service is still running)make a comeback. Using a locking rack system for pallets eliminating dunnage in priority intermodal service. Imagine a cross dock inside of a intermodal ramp. However I would sell space to my customers; UPS, ABF, IMC's, etc. Or let them and/or a 3PL like WATCO, or Kuehne+Nagel market the service and solicit the traffic. They could buy a slot(s) in the boxcar. The C1's could even build the cross dock and lease it out to these LP/3PL's.
Remember intermodal doesn't have to just be COFC or TOFC..
P.S. The 3PL I was working for earlier this year. We had what's called Small Box Solution. Which means we could utilize ocean cans anywhere from 20'-45' to move product domestically. It's a small market these days yet still survives. A 20' ISO box would work for a LCL just as well.
That is a great idea; however, in principle, if you replace "mini container" with "pallet" it is already working like this and has for some time. CHEP and a few others have for the most part become the standard in compartmentalized transportation.. easy to handle although like any conveyance they have weight and take up space.. a tradeoff most consumer commodity shippers today are willing to make for the added flexibility pallets provide.
BroadwayLionImagine over night freight srtvice between New York and Chicago. On a Train.
This was ISO-outline containers sideloaded on skeleton underframes, with special asynchronous installations for gang-loading and unloading. At each "stop", unloading slots would be arranged on one side of the track, loads staged on the other, so that there would be minimum dwell. Containers would then be sideloaded (or Letra-Portered or PiggyPacked or whatever) onto road underframes, again with at least semi-automatic registering of chassis and powered transfer.
Thw plan was to have standardized internal modules, wrapped pallets, and modular dunnage within the container outline to simplify LCL access 'away from the railroad' -- we expected at some point to do an ISO standardization effort for this.
Problem was, and problem still is, that not enough people who ship things care to pay what it costs "overnight every night". What they value more is very precise arrival just when the shipper says they want or need it, for the lowest possible out-of-pocket cost, and the highest guarantees of service quality. You are unlikely to find a PSR railroad that cares to optimize any of that. Of course, logically, "PSR" practiced correctly would provide this, even at the cost of some delay and slack, and perhaps some of the Wall Streeters will come to realize that.
PSR and JIT are mortal enemies.
JIT is awful not to mention outdated. Nowadays shippers and receivers are able to plan well ahead to manage inventory levels, and for the most part JIT has given way to "Day Definite" or "Time Definite" where there's room to adjust appointments. JIT is to be avoided like the plaque as breach of delivery in the hour of need almost always comes with penalties..
Well....ARGH!
Once upon a time, boxcars were how things moved. The PRR lived (and died) moving box cars of raw material into the northeast and manufactured stuff back out in the same box cars.
Backhauls were everything. Rate-wise, the raw material in part of the cycle WAS the backhaul. There was no money in moving raw materials in and then empty back home.
Reload rate on box cars now? Like 5%. It's boutique business. You have a high volume lanes with specific commodities that often need special care (like a roof that doesnt' leak - or internal bracing system) - you have boutique lane.
A brewery may get grain in in covered hoppers, and cans may go out in box cars. The box cars arrive empty, the covered hoppers leave empty.
A lumberyard may get lumber of various types in on center beam cars. Cars go home empty.
There is nothing to fix here! It's how things have evolved. Commodity specific equipment for specific customer-consingee lanes.
Intermodal is where the present is and where the future is and the boutique carload has to fit in.
RRs need to get busy optimizing their plant for their intermodal future. By:
1. fixing the slower speed connections, junctions, interlockings, curves so that trains can maintain track speed longer.
2. Get serioius about train braking. Stop playing with 30 year old trials of ECP braking that clearly don't work. Get going on smart freight cars that have smart braking.
3. Get serious about DPU. Don't just use it to run longer trains. Use it to greatly reduce buff/draft car construction requirments.
Results of all this? Faster trains service, longer crew districts, fewer line of road mishaps, lighter and more modern equipment, reduce energy lugging around high tare equipment.
Your short blocks of boutique carload can move in the network on intermodal trains or can move on a simplified hub and spoke daily carload network.
STOP TRYING TRYING TO REVIVE CARLOAD TRAFFIC! It is what it is and it ain't ever gonna be what it was.
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
A wise man once said:
oltmannd I just want people to stop doing complicated, new things when simple, proven and better ways already exist. Good chance, in the long run, it'd be cheaper, too.
I just want people to stop doing complicated, new things when simple, proven and better ways already exist.
Good chance, in the long run, it'd be cheaper, too.
Seriously, is it the physical aspect that is hampering growth, or is it the operational/managing/financial side that's the issue?
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.
oltmannd Well....ARGH! Once upon a time, boxcars were how things moved. The PRR lived (and died) moving box cars of raw material into the northeast and manufactured stuff back out in the same box cars. Backhauls were everything. Rate-wise, the raw material in part of the cycle WAS the backhaul. There was no money in moving raw materials in and then empty back home. Reload rate on box cars now? Like 5%. It's boutique business. You have a high volume lanes with specific commodities that often need special care (like a roof that doesnt' leak - or internal bracing system) - you have boutique lane. A brewery may get grain in in covered hoppers, and cans may go out in box cars. The box cars arrive empty, the covered hoppers leave empty. A lumberyard may get lumber of various types in on center beam cars. Cars go home empty. There is nothing to fix here! It's how things have evolved. Commodity specific equipment for specific customer-consingee lanes. Intermodal is where the present is and where the future is and the boutique carload has to fit in. RRs need to get busy optimizing their plant for their intermodal future. By: 1. fixing the slower speed connections, junctions, interlockings, curves so that trains can maintain track speed longer. 2. Get serioius about train braking. Stop playing with 30 year old trials of ECP braking that clearly don't work. Get going on smart freight cars that have smart braking. 3. Get serious about DPU. Don't just use it to run longer trains. Use it to greatly reduce buff/draft car construction requirments. Results of all this? Faster trains service, longer crew districts, fewer line of road mishaps, lighter and more modern equipment, reduce energy lugging around high tare equipment. Your short blocks of boutique carload can move in the network on intermodal trains or can move on a simplified hub and spoke daily carload network. STOP TRYING TRYING TO REVIVE CARLOAD TRAFFIC! It is what it is and it ain't ever gonna be what it was.
100% physical. Trucks and highways happened and the genie flew out of the box.
Actually started happening in the 1920s
zugmannSeriously, is it the physical aspect that is hampering growth, or is it the operational/managing/financial side that's the issue?
I think the financial side factors in heavily. Even if the will is/was there to offer such a service, there is the question of whether it can make enough money to keep the investors happy.
On the physical side, most, if not all of the infrastructure that would make it possible is gone.
It's going to take an outside push to change things - the railroads have little incentive to offer such services these days.
zugmann A wise man once said: oltmannd I just want people to stop doing complicated, new things when simple, proven and better ways already exist. Good chance, in the long run, it'd be cheaper, too. Seriously, is it the physical aspect that is hampering growth, or is it the operational/managing/financial side that's the issue?
None of the above.. it's a visionary thing..The industry needs new thinking and a shakeup..i.e. a vision. Railroads need to give up the conveyor belt mentality and focus more on the retail side of the business by becoming transportation companies rather than just railroads. A good start would be to look at what shippers generally want. Most care about responsiveness, consistent service levels, and a wide range of service offerings that include courier, trucking, LTL, LCL, and of course rail. Price is usually not the most important selling point, if it was the couriers, the air freight people, and the truckers would be starving; and the post office, the railroads, and the barge companies would have the freight market to themselves. Think like a shipper and go from there.
Years ago I had a memorable conversation with a shipper. I asked him the usual 301 questions every sales person asks, and growing exasperated he finally said "Ulrich, just ship my GD load". Shippers just want their stuff moved.. they don't care if it goes via train, plane, truck, barge, other..
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