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[quote user="edblysard"] Gabe,From the moment the container seal is snapped in place to the moment the container is opened at the WalMart distribution center, a "clock" starts and the container is tracked.The time it takes to load onto the ship, the ocean transit time, the time required to unload and drop on a boogie truck or straight to the railcar is a known, anticipated part of the shipping time.You don't have to "marshal" the containers...they are already sorted, stacked and inventoried in the ship, already assigned a train, down to the car they go in.Container shipping and operations are the most efficient type of railroading, in that every single movement of the box is already planned, and its movement is refined down to within a few minutes.The shipping lines who own and operate the ship can tell you where in the ship the container is, how much the container weights, when it will hit the railcar,  down to the expected departure time of the train, from the moment the door closes on the box at its point of origin.The lift operators have a computer generated "map" of the containers; they can drop one on average in 30 seconds or less from the ships hold to platform, truck or railcar it will travel on.The shipping lines pay a stiff penalty if they delay these things even to a time frame as small as 30 minutes.The stevedore company in charge of unloading them also works on a clock, and pays if they miss the trains scheduled departure time...zero tolerance there for the most part.Both BNSF and UP have mobile repair crews that can swap out wheels, replace brake shoes, do pretty much anything to the railcars, while the other cars in the same train are being loaded. The shipping lines have it down to the point they can tell you how much money they allocate in fuel cost to each container, depending on where it is picked up and delivered to and how much it weights, and the total transit time for that one box from any given point in transit to any given point you choose...you can log on and track your container and it's ETA to your load out facility, and usually that ETA is accurate to within a hour...not too shabby.  If FM had done real research, he could, (but most likely wouldn't) have told you that these things are scheduled so tight, and run on such a demanding time frame, that they would have made the old Santa Fe passenger trains look sloppy.BNSF has such a tight time frame on these things they almost squeak!I have listened on the radio to the TD3 Spring dispatch center shut down the hump operations at Strang yard, so they can give a bunch of green boards to the stack train headed to Barbors Cut...think about that, shutting down the hump crew so a stack train can make up 25 minutes time by not running under restricting signals.  We run a small stack train out to Barbors Cut, an intermodal terminal on the Houston ship channel.If our crew isn't standing trackside to relieve the BNSF crew when they pull in to Pasadena, we get a nasty call from the BNSF corridor manager, followed by an equally nasty call from the local BNSF trainmaster.If we don't have the train checked in at the gate to Barbors Cut at the required time, not early and defiantly not late, but right on the dime, we don't get paid for the move.The facility manager has an employee who stands at the gate, and notes the exact time the nose of the locomotive passes the gate...their clock to load the ships starts right then.BNSF is serious about stack trains.[/quote]Someone want to remind Ed B that the heavy containers go on the bottom, the lighter ones on top?  Same for well car, same for the ship's hold.So to state that the containers are normally sorted on the ship ready to go directly to the well cars is a rather miseducated statement, but par for that course....There was talk in the shipping trades a while back regarding the concept twin-lifting containers directly from ship to railcar to avoid the marshalling yards and to cut the cost per lift in half (think longshoreman wages), but of course that would require (1) the pre-double stacked containers to be pre-weight distributed, and (2) a logistical game plan presented in a tight formation to prevent any flusterclucking foulups.  For #1 to work, you must have two 40's of relatively equal weight distribution - you can't have the heavy-on-bottom/light-on-top pre-stacked arrangement on the ship because that would throw the ship's weight distribution out of kilter.  And you can forget about trying to pre-stack the two-20's-on-the-bottom/one-40-on-top arrangement......Thus, only if you have a shipload of homogenous container loads can you use the direct twin-lift concept.Of course, if railroads would just revert back to single stacking container trains, then direct ship-to-rail container transfer could become the norm.......hey, if train length is no longer an issue, then single stack could make a comeback in the USA......[(-D][(-D][(-D]....yeah right, when pigs fly............or when open access is instituted on the US rail system and all these rail execs end up flipping burgers while the trucking companies dominate rail operations!
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