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TP&W is still in the intermodal business although not to the extent it was. The railroad (and its owner, RailAmerica) won the 2000 Short Line Marketing Award for a deal done with CN on Caterpillar intermodal traffic. Parts from Europe come in to the port of Halifax. CN brings them into Chicago and then down to the T{&W interchange at Gilman, IL. TP&W brings the traffic into East Peoria, where the containers are grounded and trucked to Caterpillar facilities both locally in Peoria and regionally. <br /> <br />TP&W had been an intermodal agent for BNSF. The big customer served from Hoosierlift was Isuzu Motors. Isuzu shared space at Subaru's assembly plant in Lafayette, IN, and many of the imported parts for Isuzu came via BNSF from the west coast to the TP&W, and then TP&W to Hoosierlift. In addition, TP&W terminated containers for the BNSF at East Peoria for such customers as Misubishi Motors' Bloomington Assembly plant, Wal-Mart, HON, and others. All that business has gone away. The Isuzu business went when Isuzu stopped assembling vehicles in the U.S. The BNSF traffic into East Peoria stopped after BNSF opened Logistics Park in Joliet. <br /> <br />The biggest issue with a short line doing intermodal is cost vs. revenue. Running a ramp, even a small ramp, is an expensive proposition. Track conditions on many short lines preclude running a speed- how viable is an intermodal service with a maximum authorized speed of 25 MPH? Since the short line is not going to have a haul of any great length, the revenue split with the Class I is not going to be very good. My analogy for a short line doing intermodal was the guy with a giant trash bag on the side of the road picking up cans to recycle. You might survive doing that, but you won't prosper and you'll have do find an awful lot of cans just to survive!
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