Car Load Network Revival

[overall]

It has been suggested, by columns in Trains Magazine and Railway Age, that railroads could replace some of the coal traffic that has been lost by reviving the single car load network again. As we all know, the industry pretty much stopped serving this market and allowed it to be taken over by trucks because the railroads deemed it to be unprofitable. A lot of us have seen customer side tracks removed. My question is this; If the railroads decided to pursue this business in a meaningful way, could they recapture it?

[tree68]

I would opine that it'll be a tough sell.  The railroads would probably have to offer comparable service - which would probably be considered expedited in the railroad world.

Per a popular map/directions program, Boston/Oakland is just over 48 hours by road.  A tractor-trailer with team drivers can make that time, door-to-door.  Even adding some down time, they can do the trip in well under three days.

I don't know that any railroad would be able to match that in loose car operations.  The Super C discussion would also be illustrative here.

One would probably have to look to the last traffic the railroads lost to see what would be first to return to the rails.  I don't know what that traffic is.

 

[diningcar]

I suggest that those shippers who might be customers would opt instead (as many already have) to containers and piggyback loads because their warehouses are now modified for that expedited handling. Boxcars require specific sites for spotting and if multiple loads they must be moved or more than one door available.

Except in special situations I suggest that most shippers are happy with their current options.

 

[Wizlish]

overall

It has been suggested, by columns in Trains Magazine and Railway Age, that railroads could replace some of the coal traffic that has been lost by reviving the single car load network again. As we all know, the industry pretty much stopped serving this market and allowed it to be taken over by trucks because the railroads deemed it to be unprofitable. A lot of us have seen customer side tracks removed. My question is this; If the railroads decided to pursue this business in a meaningful way, could they recapture it?

 

There's been some interesting discussion in tha past few years, including in Trains and on this forum, about different kinds of single-car and small-block traffic that railroads or 'consortia' of railroads could target and promote effectively.

 

I doubt much of this is a 'return to loose-car railroading profitability', nor do I see many niches (outside specific corridors or lanes) for any kind of LCL traffic unless its cost is so low as to represent only nominal contribution to profitability.  As noted, the competition is trucks running on newly-cheap diesel, either with team drivers and a sleeper cab to cut end-to-end delay to a minimum or with a single dedicated driver (or owner-driver) if hiring is too difficult in a particular market.  Add in the idea that so much current traffic is time-critical in delivery but not time-limited in point-to-point service and current loose-car delivery to sidings ... only after the cars have humped and bumped their way to the nearest yard, been incorporated into a peddler freight of some sort, and that has inched its way down some perhaps crowded main compromising heaven knows how many other more lucrative cars ... does not look like either a particularly rapid or particularly well-schedulable alternative in actual practice.  Some of the 'fun' alternatives -- things like Trackmobiles that could be driven to a common 'pick-up' yard area on-road, then put on rails to move a small number of cars directly to a dedicated siding, and then be driven away -- fall foul of safety and operating conditions; they must be so heavy, and so armored, and so carefully equipped with shunts and warning devices and special brake apparatus that they don't have good marginal utility as road vehicles, and might be too heavy to use the road network for the 'required' quick and agile return for the "next" car delivery.  Picture changes for autonomous-vehicle technology, but still, perhaps, not enough to make the trick work consistently.

 

As long as you need a called crew and a full locomotive to deliver cars to sidings, I see relatively few ways -- again, other than cutting prices and hence contribution to profitability -- to get the loose-car first and last mile costs down to anything that competes well with OTR trucking for 'general freight'.

 

There's also the uncertainty of operation for most things, like produce and perhaps meat, that DO require quick end-to-end timings to uncertain or unspecified-as-long-as-possible ultimate destinations.  How you expedite this stuff effectively in yards with limited numbers of class tracks or departure tracks is as fun a question as accommodating fast trains on a network of slower trains.  And it doesn't take many mistakes to cause shipments to miss their specified delivery, or exceed their range of sell-by date, and then you have a harder time convincing customers about the supposed advantages of your railroading approach.

[DARREN OTTE]

Wizlish

 

 

overall

It has been suggested, by columns in Trains Magazine and Railway Age, that railroads could replace some of the coal traffic that has been lost by reviving the single car load network again. As we all know, the industry pretty much stopped serving this market and allowed it to be taken over by trucks because the railroads deemed it to be unprofitable. A lot of us have seen customer side tracks removed. My question is this; If the railroads decided to pursue this business in a meaningful way, could they recapture it?

 

 

 

There's been some interesting discussion in tha past few years, including in Trains and on this forum, about different kinds of single-car and small-block traffic that railroads or 'consortia' of railroads could target and promote effectively.

 

I doubt much of this is a 'return to loose-car railroading profitability', nor do I see many niches (outside specific corridors or lanes) for any kind of LCL traffic unless its cost is so low as to represent only nominal contribution to profitability.  As noted, the competition is trucks running on newly-cheap diesel, either with team drivers and a sleeper cab to cut end-to-end delay to a minimum or with a single dedicated driver (or owner-driver) if hiring is too difficult in a particular market.  Add in the idea that so much current traffic is time-critical in delivery but not time-limited in point-to-point service and current loose-car delivery to sidings ... only after the cars have humped and bumped their way to the nearest yard, been incorporated into a peddler freight of some sort, and that has inched its way down some perhaps crowded main compromising heaven knows how many other more lucrative cars ... does not look like either a particularly rapid or particularly well-schedulable alternative in actual practice.  Some of the 'fun' alternatives -- things like Trackmobiles that could be driven to a common 'pick-up' yard area on-road, then put on rails to move a small number of cars directly to a dedicated siding, and then be driven away -- fall foul of safety and operating conditions; they must be so heavy, and so armored, and so carefully equipped with shunts and warning devices and special brake apparatus that they don't have good marginal utility as road vehicles, and might be too heavy to use the road network for the 'required' quick and agile return for the "next" car delivery.  Picture changes for autonomous-vehicle technology, but still, perhaps, not enough to make the trick work consistently.

 

As long as you need a called crew and a full locomotive to deliver cars to sidings, I see relatively few ways -- again, other than cutting prices and hence contribution to profitability -- to get the loose-car first and last mile costs down to anything that competes well with OTR trucking for 'general freight'.

 

There's also the uncertainty of operation for most things, like produce and perhaps meat, that DO require quick end-to-end timings to uncertain or unspecified-as-long-as-possible ultimate destinations.  How you expedite this stuff effectively in yards with limited numbers of class tracks or departure tracks is as fun a question as accommodating fast trains on a network of slower trains.  And it doesn't take many mistakes to cause shipments to miss their specified delivery, or exceed their range of sell-by date, and then you have a harder time convincing customers about the supposed advantages of your railroading approach.

 

rail beats trucks on price. It's convincing the shipper on the added time. Also you can team runs aren't as fast as they used to be . With current regulations the truck has to sit for a few hours

[Victrola1]

The logistic park would help fill a void in bulk transloading facilities in Iowa, provide cheaper shipping options and divert tons of goods off highways, according to CRANDIC. The park would include a conveyor belt to move bulk dry goods between rail and truck, as an additional service to the vacuum and pneumatic transloading offered at a hub near Wilson Avenue.

http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/government/crandic-might-return-grant-for-cedar-rapids-facility-20160212

Rail cars are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to multipal pick up and delivery points. What is the potential for bulk and general merchandise transload facilities? 

[BaltACD]

21st Century railroads are all about squeezing the cost out of the revenue stream.  Loose car operations increase costs per unit handled.  Carriers of today no longer have the facilities or manpower to support loose car operations. 

[dehusman]

overall

It has been suggested, by columns in Trains Magazine and Railway Age, that railroads could replace some of the coal traffic that has been lost by reviving the single car load network again. As we all know, the industry pretty much stopped serving this market and allowed it to be taken over by trucks because the railroads deemed it to be unprofitable. A lot of us have seen customer side tracks removed. My question is this; If the railroads decided to pursue this business in a meaningful way, could they recapture it?

 

I think most of these "railroad's abandoned the loose car business" concepts are missing the boat (or train as it were).

 

Loose car shipments are still out there, probably 1/3 of a railroads trains are "loose car" business (with about 1/3 bulk and 1/3 intermodal).

 

The part people are missing is that the "loose car" business is now in the intermodal arena.  LCL is still hauled by the railroads every day, thousands and thousands of carloads.  What do you think is in all those containers and TOFC trailers?  That's where the business went.  It didn't leave the railroads, it just moved from one big metal box to a different big metal box.  That was a win-win for everybody.

 

Its not that they need to go after loose car shipments per se, they just need to go after market share, regardless of whether its in a boxcar or TOFC.

[BaltACD]

dehusman

overall

It has been suggested, by columns in Trains Magazine and Railway Age, that railroads could replace some of the coal traffic that has been lost by reviving the single car load network again. As we all know, the industry pretty much stopped serving this market and allowed it to be taken over by trucks because the railroads deemed it to be unprofitable. A lot of us have seen customer side tracks removed. My question is this; If the railroads decided to pursue this business in a meaningful way, could they recapture it?

I think most of these "railroad's abandoned the loose car business" concepts are missing the boat (or train as it were).

 

Loose car shipments are still out there, probably 1/3 of a railroads trains are "loose car" business (with about 1/3 bulk and 1/3 intermodal).

 

The part people are missing is that the "loose car" business is now in the intermodal arena.  LCL is still hauled by the railroads every day, thousands and thousands of carloads.  What do you think is in all those containers and TOFC trailers?  That's where the business went.  It didn't leave the railroads, it just moved from one big metal box to a different big metal box.  That was a win-win for everybody.

 

Its not that they need to go after loose car shipments per se, they just need to go after market share, regardless of whether its in a boxcar or TOFC.

Railroad intermodal is securing traffic as the generally increasing intermodal counts attest. 

Posters here, for the most part, discount intermodal as being a part of 'real railroading' and 'loose car railroading'.  The loose car load railroading that existed pre Staggers is gone and and costs too much to return in today's 'bring it to the bottom line' railroads.

[rockymidlandrr]

BaltACD

21st Century railroads are all about squeezing the cost out of the revenue stream.  Loose car operations increase costs per unit handled.  Carriers of today no longer have the facilities or manpower to support loose car operations. 

 

 

Carriers today DO have the facilities AND the manpower, but they don't use the facilities and furlough the manpower.  Instead of crews waiting on trains, now we have trains waiting on crews.

[Wizlish]

dehusman

I think most of these "railroads abandoned the loose car business" concepts are missing the boat (or train as it were).

But that is not at all the question here.  This is about whether the profit that was contributed by the coal and oil trains can be restored by an increased emphasis on selling new loose-car business.  Which I don't think is possible.

Look at the number of carloads that would have to be moved ... even to newly-established break-bulk and transload facilities 'strategically' located at the center of local redistribution or last-mile delivery lanes ... and add in the additional cost of yarding and operating the trains that deliver the loose cars there.  To me this is out on the ragged opposite edge of all the operating economies that unit trains provide, and has to provide 'price advantages' over other functionally-equivalent modes to boot.

I'm not saying railroads can't find additional loose-car business, or provide quite a bit of loose-car service as cost-effectively as modern practice can do it.  Just that -- following the original question that was asked -- I severely doubt you can make up the losses in mineral and oil traffic, or downturn in import intermodal, with just about any loose-car business.

Note that any marginal profit from "LCL" distribution that was carried in containers isn't shared by the railroad directly, nor is the stripping or stuffing generally conducted while containers are still on the cars (I'd like to see the Chinese fire drill of doing this in well cars even if there is enough end clearance to pop the doors!)  Now, there may be some additional business possible for a modern analogue of 'express companies' that use surplus ISO shipping containers for LCL in the 'backhaul' capacity of many of these intermodal trainsets, but there's also much more to operating a shipping company than the part where the boxes move efficiently/cheaply between the intermodal yards, and I think many of those functions are not present in modern 'downsized' railroad line and staff structure, nor could they be cost-effectively provided only for the additional revenue actually generated.  I'd like to be proven wrong -- very wrong -- but I also suspect that a great many fairly bright people both in the railroad and logistics industries have looked at this, and there may in fact be good reason why none of them seem rushing to do it.

(EDIT:  It occurs to me that a very logical intermediate assumption - that intermodal containers could be used as if they were 'loose cars' for dispatch to sidings or deployment directly from rail delivery as 'warehouses' or storage pods - has had almost zero traction for at least the past 30 years, despite quite a bit of lively effort.

We now have an enormous stock of both single and articulated intermodal cars, including pig flats and spines in addition to the well cars.  We've had marketing pitches from things like the Adtranz Sprinter (which is like a 2-to-3-car self-powered railcar analogue for rack flats) to various kinds of RoadRailer (including one, the RailRunner, that takes an ISO container as the load).  At some point in the last few years, I read about one of the little industrial carriers in central New Jersey trying to set up 'expedited delivery' and pickup of traffic from some of their locations using cheap 'intermodal' handling from endpoints served by a congested road infrastructure more or less direct to intermodal-train access ... haven't heard from them lately, or anyone else succeeding at this.

Meanwhile, there's all sort of success locally with lots and lots of containers going onto lots and lots of chassis going in many directions from the facilities here at Forrest and Tennessee Yards.  And, in fact, I do see the occasional loaded well triple going eastbound past Collierville ... not sure where it's going, someone here will ... but not, in years of watching, more than that.

Perhaps this is just a failure of vision: an organized effort to sell rail last-mile delivery of intermodal containers might succeed.  But I do NOT think the developed volume will come anywhere close to relieving either the revenue or the deleterious effect on OR that's being produced by the fall in traffic now.)

[Norm48327]

rockymidlandrr

Carriers today DO have the facilities AND the manpower, but they don't use the facilities and furlough the manpower. Instead of crews waiting on trains, now we have trains waiting on crews.

It's about the cost of labor and associated benefits. People standing around waiting are not productive. Ever been in the check out line at Wal Mart? Nobody waiting for you there.

[schlimm]

BaltACD

Railroad intermodal is securing traffic as the generally increasing intermodal counts attest.  Posters here, for the most part, discount intermodal as being a part of 'real railroading' and 'loose car railroading'.  The loose car load railroading that existed pre Staggers is gone and and costs too much to return in today's 'bring it to the bottom line' railroads.

Agree.  Containers and TOFC are today's method of 'loose car railroading' or could be. There is a lot of business that could be developed by aggressive and creative marketing, as Ken Greyhounds has suggested.  Marginal revenue and cost analysis is necessary as well.  

[carnej1]

Victrola1

The logistic park would help fill a void in bulk transloading facilities in Iowa, provide cheaper shipping options and divert tons of goods off highways, according to CRANDIC. The park would include a conveyor belt to move bulk dry goods between rail and truck, as an additional service to the vacuum and pneumatic transloading offered at a hub near Wilson Avenue.

http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/government/crandic-might-return-grant-for-cedar-rapids-facility-20160212

Rail cars are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to multipal pick up and delivery points. What is the potential for bulk and general merchandise transload facilities? 

 

Bulk transload facilities are quite common in the industry for things like plastic pellets and other relatively high value items. 

Team tracks still exist but aren't often used for loading/unloading boxcars, being more commonly utilized for freight shipped on flatcars and the like.

[Wizlish]

carnej1

Victrola1

The logistic park would help fill a void in bulk transloading facilities in Iowa, provide cheaper shipping options and divert tons of goods off highways, according to CRANDIC. The park would include a conveyor belt to move bulk dry goods between rail and truck, as an additional service to the vacuum and pneumatic transloading offered at a hub near Wilson Avenue.

Rail cars are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to multiple pick up and delivery points. What is the potential for bulk and general merchandise transload facilities?

Bulk transload facilities are quite common in the industry for things like plastic pellets and other relatively high value items. 

Team tracks still exist but aren't often used for loading/unloading boxcars, being more commonly utilized for freight shipped on flatcars and the like.

Part of the problem is that the capital requirements for any economically viable level of railborne traffic are so high as to require (perhaps very substantial) external subsidy or support.  This will almost certainly be government rather than privately funded, especially when the facilities won't be 'dedicated' to particular users or some 'oligopoly' of users (like local grain-elevator owners)

Handling multiple origin and destination points for a given 'bulk' load involves two different senses, both I think relevant here:  assembly of a given set of arrivals into one effective 'carload' for dispatch, and break-bulk/LCL stripping for subsequent distribution or last-mile conveyance.

For bulk transload, I had thought most of the 'economics' for rail pointed toward using third-party "distributors" for car- or trainload-level delivery.  This is not so much delivery as it's a mode change, but to the extent there is specialized handling required, the economies-of-scale considerations are going to become important, as are requirements for 'special employee capabilities' to get the transloading accomplished without disaster.  I am not sure all this will be easy to set up and then accomplish, as opposed to more simple forms of mode transfer like blowing the covered hoppers into silos on delivery to an elevator, or dumping coal into barges by the trainload for cheap export.

What I thought he was getting at was not so much bulk as general delivery.  For that to work at all, some assumptions (not very difficult ones to achieve, perhaps) ought to be made: the cargo to be transloaded should be palletized; the internal packing in a container should be documented and expected; fast handling of cargo out of and into a given container should be provided without 'excuse'; dunnage should be easy to remove, handle without excessive volume or risk, and be easy to deploy when loading -- etc.

You then need some kind of secure location for the break-bulk stuff from the container to sit, or go, until someone puts it somewhere.  That could be into waiting trucks, perhaps onto some automated version of an airport luggage system that moves packages to a more convenient area, or one of those warehouse system that tags and manipulates delivered stock accurately without a bunch of hands-on uncertainty.  But I don't see much place for this  at single container scale, or provided at a general common-carrier sort of facility.  More likely it would be something dedicated like a UPS terminal, where the level of operational procedures and infrastructure match a meaningful volume throughput on a regular basis...

[rockymidlandrr]

Norm48327

 

 

rockymidlandrr

Carriers today DO have the facilities AND the manpower, but they don't use the facilities and furlough the manpower. Instead of crews waiting on trains, now we have trains waiting on crews.

 

 

It's about the cost of labor and associated benefits. People standing around waiting are not productive. Ever been in the check out line at Wal Mart? Nobody waiting for you there.

 

 

I'm sure the railroad's customers will completely understand why their cars are waiting for 4-8 hours at each terminal for a crew don't mind getting those said cars that they paid to arrive yesterday will instead be there tomorrow. 

[BaltACD]

Customers want assured delivery cycle - if their plant is switched at 1800 daily except Saturday and Sunday - all they care about is having their cars make their switch on the days that the anticipate.  Movement (and the lack of it) in line of road and terminal operations are a part of the service that the customer is sold.  The customer is not paying for 'UPS Next Day Air' service and they cannot expect such service; they get the service they pay for.