Take a look around 19 seconds into the video. Look at the backup of semi's. Can't some creative mind come up with a way for railroads to profitably handle more shorter distance freight moves. Remember Kneiling's Trains articles?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/2-dead-in-fiery-crash-involving-2-tractor-trailers/ar-AAD8dfB?ocid=spartandhp
In Dallas we have a solution, it's called a toll road. Remarkably, not a whole lot of trucks transit those but move on over to a parallel freeway just 5-6 miles away and you can see trucks everywhere. Noticed the same is starting to become true with the likes of Super Shuttle as well. A lot of Uber and Lyft drivers avoid the toll roads as well if they reasonably can.
Honestly, I think we should sell more of our freeways to private entities to make them tollways. In Dallas I used the tollway system as much as I can along with airport parking (same tag). I never exceed $100 a month and a large chunk of that is 4-5 days of airport parking at Dallas Love Field (B Parking lot). I would be willing to spend more if it meant more traffic would shift to rails and we also got better mass transit / rail passenger service.
Railroads work best at aggregating what they transport, whether large numbers of people who want to go between particular pairs of points A and B at the same time or large quantities of freight.
The John Kneiling solution to aggregate freight other than bulk commodities was containerization. It reduces the costs associated with switching moves to make the last few miles -- he called its replacement by truck movement of the containers "switching on rubber tires." It reduces both the time delays as well as impact damage from switching and from hump yards.
Like all inter-modal systems, the key is the interface between modes. Kneiling advocated for a system based on side transfer between the spine car and the truck chassis. The mechanism to effect the transfer was in the truck chassis, where hydraulically powered arms would drag the container between the rail and the truck platforms -- there was no lifting involved. The Stedman (Steadman?) company in Canada was said to have developed this system.
Kneiling claimed that an intermodal terminal in his system was no more complicated than a strip of tarmac parallel to a rail siding. By going with single-level instead of stacked containers and with the random-access transfer system, sole-proprieter owner-operaters could be their own intermodal companies. This simple, low capital expenditure intermodal "interface" would allow such terminals much closer to their destinations, greatly reducing the drayage, meaning the truck portion of the intermodal trip and getting more semis off the urban highways.
The success or failure is always in the details. What was the "cycle time" of the side-transfer system? How much skill did it require from the truck driver/operator to park the truck in the exact spot to effect this sliding side transfer? On account of loss/damage/insurance/liability considerations, would a railroad allow truck operators into even this bare-bones intermodal terminal? How would late arrivals of the train or late arrivals of the trucks be handled -- would all parties have to be on time or this whole plan would slip into chaos?
I would like to learn more about Kneiling's thinking on this, but information on the Stedman side transfer system is hard to come by. It was a market failure because someone was once trying to sell this and it didn't end up getting adopted. Why didn't it sell -- were the railroad executives ignorant as Kneiling was quick to claim, or was it much more complicated than what Kneiling made it out to be?
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Paul MilenkovicLike all inter-modal systems, the key is the interface between modes. Kneiling advocated for a system based on side transfer between the spine car and the truck chassis. The mechanism to effect the transfer was in the truck chassis, where hydraulically powered arms would drag the container between the rail and the truck platforms -- there was no lifting involved. The Stedman (Steadman?) company in Canada was said to have developed this system.
Something you have to remember is that Kneiling couldn't spell very well; he got me into discussing "Letraporters" for far too many years, and Steadman Containers Ltd. (of Brampton, Canada) will likely remain invisible to a detail search if you use his version of the name.
The TL;DR of this is the (usually unmentioned) requirement that the full sideloading equipment reside on each and every trailer underframe, which rapidly ran the cost of any particular size of 'intermodal company' out of the range of likely competition. Many of the other contemporary 'horizontal transfer' systems, such as Railiner in the '50s or CarConTrain in the '70s, have this same reliance on specialized terminal equipment that must be present and fully functional to move a container. In my opinion this makes the tare-weight reduction in an original RoadRailer look almost trivial.
A basic overview of the system as marketed is here and this is a useful overview into many of the things that should be kept in mind when designing explicitly low-tare-weight solutions for containerized intermodal transfer. (The big standardization, of Tantlinger's design into ASA and ISO standards in 1965, changed this game dramatically, and even by the mid-Seventies when I was addressing it the assumption could be made that ISO series I boxes (and their 'amenities') were the thing around which sensible designing would be done.
Note the particularly interesting detail that the Steadman system was adopted by REA, and 'union interference' supposedly led to its discontinuance. It's interesting to consider what REA might have done with this had they evolved to compete effectively with the likes of UPS... although this might have been little more than providing a large number of used underframes after corporate failure...
What was the "cycle time" of the side-transfer system? How much skill did it require from the truck driver/operator to park the truck in the exact spot to effect this sliding side transfer? On account of loss/damage/insurance/liability considerations, would a railroad allow truck operators into even this bare-bones intermodal terminal? How would late arrivals of the train or late arrivals of the trucks be handled -- would all parties have to be on time or this whole plan would slip into chaos?
All these and more are important, and the 'usual' answer seems to involve the use of special yard chassis (this particularly true of Railiner and 'CarConTrans Plus') that inherently move one container at a time -- this is useful for prospective REA business where any stop might be a ramp, but not at all good for 'gang unloading' as in the case of a dedicated high-speed train. This was of course part of the functional disaster of FlexiVan, where you might need tens or even hundreds of the hostler units, even if you have other vehicles shuffling the bogies around, to service even one train where significant mode transfer was necessary.
I would like to learn more about Kneiling's thinking on this, but information on the Stedman side transfer system is hard to come by.
Your best bet, since you're uniquely qualified to assess these things, is to review the patents issued to Albert Michael Hand, who was the unsung genius behind the evolution of the Steadman ratcheting side-loader and the Steadman System. That will tell you what they considered as well as what they proposed to build 'in commerce'.
By the time craft and other opposition to this was likely overcome (as I think it clearly has been with the current age of Mi-Jack etc. operations with ISO containers) the Steadman approach was no longer current. (In the interests of fair disclosure, I adopted the 'Stedman' idea direct from Kneiling in my original high-speed container-train design of the mid-Seventies, without really questioning how (or how well) it worked -- Kneiling was a PE and I was not. It would of course probably work, just as for example the BR 'self loading vehicle' apparatus would; I envisioned a more direct method of lateral transfer that was not critically dependent on active underframe suspension, the key being that the loading and unloading to and from the container train itself was done to leveled frames at appropriate spacing, the containers could happily dwell however long without holding up use of either the train or the underframes, and truck transfer could be quickly arranged for any particular position on the 'off side'. (As the train would have left Ivy City after 11:00pm or so, making multiple 'stops' enroute, and needed to arrive at the last of the Boston-area terminals before 7:30am or so, you can recognize the need for 'expedited' container handling both in loading and unloading the train!)
The "other" approach to gang-loading and unloading that is workable is a variant of the original CargoSpeed system (another thing that has become virtually undocumented over the years!) which has all the specialized loading equipment running in a well between the rails. Any number of trailers can be driven to (dynamically-determined) position at a roughly 45-degree angle, and are lifted and rotated onto what can be very little more than a FuelFoiler unit with kangaroo pockets; virtually simultaneously, trailers can be lifted and turned to 45 degrees for either hostling or road tractors to bind on. The effective dwell is virtually determined by the number of lifting units running in the well, which of course would be large for any particular dedicated terminal. Various considerations and concerns will suggest themselves to you, but it is at least reasonably possible (given adequate trailer framing, far short of what something like a straddle loader imposes on trailer construction) to get full-parallel asynchronous loading and unloading in near-minimum time, both with respect to rail and to ground operations.
Steadman, it is, then.
Thank you very much for those links and references.
So I guess the Steadman story is that the transportation regulatory environment, which included concerns of unions representing groups of workers with different interests, held off its adoption until interest in it or money supporting it ran out? But even if it hadn't been impeded, there would have been problems with the tare weight and cost of the specialized trailer? Along with the scheduling problem of choreographing the train and the truck arrivals also mentioned in the linked dissertation?
But the notion is that this technology worked, that it didn't need unusual skill from the driver to line up the trailer for the transfer or the 5-6 minute "cycle time" was reasonable? I kind of wonder about that more recent side transfer systems lift the container rather than dragging it?
The best solution, I believe, is the GM-Canada (EMD) Voyagier (Sp?) system. Worked fine, could run in regular freight trains, one chasses per container, could not meet the economics of double-stacks. But might meet the economics for trucking per-se? 4-wheel chassis but advanced suspension technology gave decent ride and steerring characteristics. Trains had a good article about five or six years ago. (Or was it Classic Trains?) Yes, side loading.
How refreshing, to read a series of posts about technical issues and come away feeling informed. Thanks Paul and Overmod.
daveklepperThe best solution, I believe, is the GM-Canada (EMD) Voyagier (Sp?) system. Worked fine, could run in regular freight trains, one chasses per container, could not meet the economics of double-stacks. But might meet the economics for trucking per-se? 4-wheel chassis but advanced suspension technology gave decent ride and steering characteristics. Trains had a good article about five or six years ago. (Or was it Classic Trains?) Yes, side loading.
Unless I'm mistaken, what you're describing is the Portager system. The two important things to realize about this -- promptly -- is that the tare weight was definitely too low, and the suspension decidedly too wretched, for any kind of high-speed service in general interchange. Bear in mind this is more than half a decade before Wickens even figured out theoretically how to build a proper two-axle freight car -- and the approaches that work are very, very different from the low-unsprung-mass "solutions" GMD designed.
We should look more intensively at why, theoretically, there are really, really good reason double-stacking on a Portager wouldn't work. First, there isn't the room. The center units of a good modern articulated stack car rely on larger-diameter wheels to get the appropriate 'two-axle' equivalent carrying capacity, and these are accommodated between the dropped wells to allow both lower center of gravity and better restoring force on 'perturbation' than on a lightweight underframe that has the container or swap-body perched up artificially high in the first place for automated sideloading. You can imagine the fun providing 40" or larger wheels, plus a suspension capable of proper riding whether light or double-stacked, on anything better than perfectly lined and surfaced main without crossovers, wind, or the other things that "down in the dip might start her a'rockin'", even before we start with the longitudinal pitch oscillations making type F shelf couplers a desirable option... or fun over on String Lining.
To me, one of the 'lessons learned' from Portager was the original Fuel Foiler, which rather well solved the question of how to implement the wheels for absolute minimum tare weight; a somewhat different lesson was the HPIT and 'Iron Highway' approach to what you actually provide to move 'pure' trailer traffic, as opposed to containers, expediently. (I'm sure someone will bring up Rail Runners here. There are reasons this is not the done thing.)
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