TRIPLE CROWN QUESTION

[NS SD70M-2]

What type of products do the triple crown roadrailers carry?

[HankDiggs]

I'm sure that folks along the old Wabash routes can tell you in detail, but I know that there are a lot of auto parts transported to various plants in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois.

[Railfan1]

Auto parts.....Furniture..... Beer........ I think those are the biggies.

[Modelcar]

....It is my understanding it carries auto parts among other items, south towards Atlanta, Ga. and maybe Jacksonville, Fl.

[joemcspadden]

About 35% of the Triple Crown cargo is auto parts. The other 65%
consists of just about any other dry goods trucks in general would
carry. When TC started in the late '80's, it was exclusively auto
parts, but that has really changed as the company has expanded
and gotten so much more successful.

I believe that the 260 and 263, which run between Detroit Oakwood
Yard and the Voltz Automotive and Intermodal Distribution Center
just east of Kansas City are mostly--if not exclusively--auto parts.
All the other trains--could be anything.

The May, '07, issue of TRAINS magazine has a nice little article
which summarizes the current state of TC affairs.

Joe

[wabash1]

What type of products do the triple crown roadrailers carry?

it is no differant than any other trailer what ever they can fit in one is what is in there like  tires, computors , tv, washer dryers refridgerator,toilet paper soap food paint .... get the picture.

[Modelcar]

....Triple Crown headed south through here sure seems to be doing well....I've counted as many as 140 trailers making up the consist.

[NS SD70M-2]

I'm sure that folks along the old Wabash routes can tell you in detail, but I know that there are a lot of auto parts transported to various plants in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois.

I'm near the wabash ,plus i'm in michigan.

[chicagorails]

if road railer works so well on 2 rrs what is taking so long on expansion? i think   trial runs on the steel freeway, atsf rr ...chi to la....good place to start.they run thousands of trailers a day thru streator on heavy trailer cars.eliminate the cars eliminate a engine. save the planet

[mavrick0]

I see them all the time up here in southern ontario on the highways all the time and finally found the yard about two months ago at the Vaughan CN yard which is where they pull them out of and run them on the rails to Detroit.  But I know from seeing where they pull out from loading it is everything and anything for frieght.

Now the reason we don't see more is because they are weight restricted to a point.  If you compare what a standard wabash trailer to a roadrailer trailer will carry in weight the standard can hold more only because of the extra parts added to the trailer for strength and the roadrailer application makes it heavier then a normal trailer which decreases the load capcity which is why you still see a lot of TOFC cars out there for companies that want to move more freight in the same sized trailer.  Also you don't need a special train to move the trailer.  Just load it on any TOFC and way you go.

[joemcspadden]

Norfolk Southern has succeeded with Triple Crown, whereas
every other railroad has failed with roadrailer technology.
There are reasons for this, and they need to be considered
when thinking about possible expansion of this technology.

1) Every Triple Crown train runs through Fort Wayne, IN,
which is the headquarters and central yard for these
operations. This allows for a true hub-and-spoke system
and assures adequate traffic for daily trains to and from
all the service areas. Thus, when a TC train leaves Minneapolis
(on UP track) to head to Fort Wayne via Chicago, it is
pulling trailers bound for Fort Wayne, Atlanta, Jacksonville,
Kansas City, St. Louis, Fort Worth, Sandusky, Bethlehem, PA.,
etc. (There were some TCs that didn't run through Fort
Wayne when NS was doing joint TC ventures with Conrail,
but these routes were discontinued after the Conrail buyout).

2) Other railroads who have failed with roadrailers usually
tried to run them between one pair of cities. Among other
problems, they quickly ran into trailer availability issues.
NS TC runs about 16 trains a day in the US. and has a fleet
of 7000 trailers!! Even allowing for the fact that some of
these trailers only run on highway routes and never see the
rails, that's still over 400 trailers per daily train run. That's
the kind of management commitment it takes to make this
method of shipping work.

If you stop to think about a TC trailer arriving at its railroad
destination, then being hooked up to a tractor, then being
drive to a factory, say, within a 150 mile radius of that RR
terminal, then being unloaded, then being driven to another
warehouse or factory in that service area to be loaded with
stuff for a return railroad trip--then the trip back to the
terminal, being re-set on bogies, etc--it's easy to see how
you need lots and lots of trailers for this operation. You're
seldom going to get a 24-hour turnaround for a trailer
in these service areas.

3) TC is wholly owned by Norfok Southern, but it does run
trains on three other railroads: UP between Minneapolis
and Chicago, BNSF between Fort Worth and Kansas City,
and CN between Detroit and Chicago. Expansion is coming
soon. Service to the Great Plains will be inaugurated later
this year, and service to Southern Ohio is slated for 2008.
But TC will not start a train until it already has sufficient
traffic for scheduled trains. If necessary, it will run on
highways until the traffic has built up. That's another
secret to its success. See the May issue of TRAINS
MAGAZINE for more on this.

4) Other than service between Fort Wayne and St. Louis,
all TC trailers travel at least 600 miles on the rails. This
also helps the service make economic sense. So, for instance,
even though TC trains go to Toronto via Detroit, and even
though both Detroit and Toronto are TC service areas and
have terminals--no Triple Crown service is offered between
Detroit and Toronto. The distance is too short. All traffic
for Toronto comes from one of the more distant service
areas I've already mentioned (and vice-versa).

5) When you start talking about New York to La, or Miami
to Seattle, I would guess the economic advantages of
roadrailers disappear at these distances. TOFC and COFC
make more economic sense. It seems to be the 500-
1500 mile trips where TC can really shine.

Regards, Joe McSpadden, Wabash, In.

[daveklepper]

Excellent analysis.   And, of course, NS has boosted its TOFC and container dual-mode business at the same time time as Triple Crown has been growing.  The one transcontinental service that Triple Crown might invade sometime in the future is Southern California fruit and vegetables to eastern markets, which is almost entirely pure truck at the present time.  This would, of course, require refrigorated trailers, and the question of what to do with backhaul remains unsolved at the present time and must be solved for such an operation to make economic sense.

[NS SD70M-2]

Norfolk Southern has succeeded with Triple Crown, whereas
every other railroad has failed with roadrailer technology.
There are reasons for this, and they need to be considered
when thinking about possible expansion of this technology.

1) Every Triple Crown train runs through Fort Wayne, IN,
which is the headquarters and central yard for these
operations. This allows for a true hub-and-spoke system
and assures adequate traffic for daily trains to and from
all the service areas. Thus, when a TC train leaves Minneapolis
(on UP track) to head to Fort Wayne via Chicago, it is
pulling trailers bound for Fort Wayne, Atlanta, Jacksonville,
Kansas City, St. Louis, Fort Worth, Sandusky, Bethlehem, PA.,
etc. (There were some TCs that didn't run through Fort
Wayne when NS was doing joint TC ventures with Conrail,
but these routes were discontinued after the Conrail buyout).

2) Other railroads who have failed with roadrailers usually
tried to run them between one pair of cities. Among other
problems, they quickly ran into trailer availability issues.
NS TC runs about 16 trains a day in the US. and has a fleet
of 7000 trailers!! Even allowing for the fact that some of
these trailers only run on highway routes and never see the
rails, that's still over 400 trailers per daily train run. That's
the kind of management commitment it takes to make this
method of shipping work.

If you stop to think about a TC trailer arriving at its railroad
destination, then being hooked up to a tractor, then being
drive to a factory, say, within a 150 mile radius of that RR
terminal, then being unloaded, then being driven to another
warehouse or factory in that service area to be loaded with
stuff for a return railroad trip--then the trip back to the
terminal, being re-set on bogies, etc--it's easy to see how
you need lots and lots of trailers for this operation. You're
seldom going to get a 24-hour turnaround for a trailer
in these service areas.

3) TC is wholly owned by Norfok Southern, but it does run
trains on three other railroads: UP between Minneapolis
and Chicago, BNSF between Fort Worth and Kansas City,
and CN between Detroit and Chicago. Expansion is coming
soon. Service to the Great Plains will be inaugurated later
this year, and service to Southern Ohio is slated for 2008.
But TC will not start a train until it already has sufficient
traffic for scheduled trains. If necessary, it will run on
highways until the traffic has built up. That's another
secret to its success. See the May issue of TRAINS
MAGAZINE for more on this.

4) Other than service between Fort Wayne and St. Louis,
all TC trailers travel at least 600 miles on the rails. This
also helps the service make economic sense. So, for instance,
even though TC trains go to Toronto via Detroit, and even
though both Detroit and Toronto are TC service areas and
have terminals--no Triple Crown service is offered between
Detroit and Toronto. The distance is too short. All traffic
for Toronto comes from one of the more distant service
areas I've already mentioned (and vice-versa).

5) When you start talking about New York to La, or Miami
to Seattle, I would guess the economic advantages of
roadrailers disappear at these distances. TOFC and COFC
make more economic sense. It seems to be the 500-
1500 mile trips where TC can really shine.

Regards, Joe McSpadden, Wabash, In.

NS runs Triple crown between detroit and chicago.

[joemcspadden]

Eric--I made a careless mistake in paragraph 3. I meant to write
"CN between Detroit and Toronto. . . " Sorry about that.

Joe

[RRFoose]

When was the TC terminal in Fort Wayne built?  Why was FW chosen as the hub for RR operations?

[cacole]

Swift Transportation, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, is reported to be setting up their own container terminals and is planning to have their own container fleet so they can get their trucks off of the highways due to the high diesel fuel costs, and is exploring the use of roadrailers.

[wabash1]

When was the TC terminal in Fort Wayne built?  Why was FW chosen as the hub for RR operations?

I can say that at the time there was a company called north american van lines who was baught by the railroad and operated for several years by them then along came the idea to run these on the rail, so it became triple crown. and they still use the original base in fort wayne

[alcodave]

i see quite a few triple crown trailers coming out of the whirlpool dryer plant in marion ohio. a roadrailer train started running this summer from sandusky ohio to atlanta.

[oltmannd]

When was the TC terminal in Fort Wayne built?  Why was FW chosen as the hub for RR operations?

Given the markets TCS was aiming for and the rail routes that would support them and that FW was a natural hub on those routes with room for a Terminal in an existing yard, FW was the best location.

[Convicted One]

When was the TC terminal in Fort Wayne built?  Why was FW chosen as the hub for RR operations?

The terminal used by TC is the PRR's former "Piqua" yard...once a high volume operation. Probably picked up fairly cheap, considering the former PRR mainline along side it was laid to atrophy.

As for "why?"...well I'd imagine that location, location, location played a big part of it, look at the service areas they offer, and FW is a convenient waypoint. And Piqua just happened to be laying there, available.

 

[rrnut282]

Piqua Yard (the former PRR division point hump yard in Fort Wayne) was not the first base of operations for Triple Crown.  They started operations at New Yard which sits just East of the intersection of the former Wabash (Huntington District) that runs from Detroit to StL to KC and the former NKP (New Castle District) that ran from a connection with the Chicago-Buffalo line to Cincinatti and on to Atlanta via the former Southern "rathole".  It was just four tracks and TC trains used either the Huntington District Main or the connection track to the New Castle District Main as a switching lead.  Neadless to say, as the switching got more complex it tied up the busy HUGO interlocking and all the streets in the area, too.  It was also short, so any train over about 60 trailers had to double up. 

After Penn Central downgraded the Pittsburgh-Chicago line, Piqua Yard was also downgraded.  NS came and asked if they could buy a piece of it for Triple Crown.  At the time the TC yard was built, TC trains were only allowed to be 75 trailers long, so longer trains today still have to double over.    After two upgrades, there are now four switching leads.  Each lead connects to half of the tracks in the yard with two on each end of the yard, so up to four trains can be switching at the same time.  Sometimes the extra leads are used to get TC trains off of the main while they wait their turn.

[RRFoose]

Thanks for all the answers - very informative.  But does anyone know WHEN the TC facility was built at the Piqua yard?  I'm guessing early 90s some time?

[rrnut282]

I used to work with the guys who did the actual staking of the yard tracks when Triple Crown built a new yard at Piqua.  I did the staking on the upgrades.  Unfortunately, we have all moved on to other companies and locations.  I started working with them in 1996 so it was definitely before that.