Chicago Intermodal Madness

[CShaveRR]

The perception of the original poster may be that these things are "chaos" (and I won't deny that it even appears that way to railroaders!) is an insult to those who coordinate our operations systemwide. From their origin at various points on the west coast, it is known which of the three "Global" facilities will handle each of the stack trains.

I remember a few years back, when an independent study (yes, UP took flak for spending money on that, too) gave their intermodal network a thorough revamping. I'm not involved with intermodal, but I could see the changes--chief among which were fewer trains moving more product more efficiently. I don't know how well this plan has survived the years, the weak economy, or the addition of most of the Hub Group's rail business, but it's a safe bet that container times, origin to destination (and Chicago may be only the westernmost of the eastern destinations involved), is being monitored very closely. You can expect changes as soon as the new terminal (Global 4?, southwest of Joliet) comes on line.

[oltmannd]

gabe

My only thought is, if I am Joe Taxpayer, and I hear a railroad say, why don't you give us X dollars for this funding project because it will take trucks off the road, I would find that argument a lot more convincing if the railroad could state that it transfers trailers via rail rather than road in all but the most inefficient instances.

They do. NS runs a solid train for LA and San Bernadino from Harrisburg everyday. The train goes to the BNSF at Corwith. The blocks are made by most of the eastern terminals on the system and are assembled in Harrisburg to a solid train. They run another solid train for BNSF in Willow Springs. They also build and consolidate blocks for the west in the Southeast to run over Meridian and Memphis. I am sure CSX does the same.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

gabe

  [snip] P.S.  Although I have every reason to believe what Jay and others state above, it seems to me that the percentage of trucks with an intermodal container on them is noticeably higher in Chicago when compared to other cities.  Could be just me, as I am interested in such things; but that has certainly been my observation. 

Ahh - but how can you tell if those trucks with containers are transferring them from one railroad's IM yard to another - or instead are on their way to making a final delivery of the load in the greater Chicago area's expansive marketplace ?  Unless, of course, it's being hauled by one of those 'yard tractors' instead of an OTR tractor. 

And for what it's worth - I too notice the same things on the roads here in the Lehigh Valley.  And what I too can't tell is if they are delivering, or running back to the NY-NJ container terminals - or just back to the LV Rail Management terminal in Bethlehem . . .  

- Paul North.  

[gabe]

I guess my point is more public perception. 

I do not doubt Jay's assertion that the vast majority of Chicago intermodal transfer jobs are not done by rail rather than truck.  I knew that when writing my above-listed post. 

My only thought is, if I am Joe Taxpayer, and I hear a railroad say, why don't you give us X dollars for this funding project because it will take trucks off the road, I would find that argument a lot more convincing if the railroad could state that it transfers trailers via rail rather than road in all but the most inefficient instances.

That may already be the case.  I just think it would be good for railroads to convey that perception rather than the perception that such transfers are entirely driven by market factors.

Gabe

P.S.  Although I have every reason to believe what Jay and others state above, it seems to me that the percentage of trucks with an intermodal container on them is noticeably higher in Chicago when compared to other cities.  Could be just me, as I am interested in such things; but that has certainly been my observation.

[beaulieu]

To expand a little bit, there was a time when there used to be a lot of traffic bound for the East Coast that was landed from container ships in Los Angeles and sent by train cross country, now that traffic has diminished quite a bit. That is why the railroads are not very concerned about the Panama Canal enlargement, there is very little traffic to lose. Most of the transcontinental traffic in maritime containers is traffic from shipping companies who don't have the volume to operate ships directly to the east coast, or there is time considerations. East of Chicago traffic arriving on BNSF or UP will only move on NS or CSX if it is for points east of Buffalo or Pittsburgh, otherwise it will be trucked directly to the customer from Chicago. As jeaton pointed out there is less trucking than you may believe, because there is less transcontinental Intermodal than you believe, and there are too many Origin-Destination pairs that can only be served by sorting out complete trailers and containers in Chicago.

[jeaton]

Absent readily available statistics, I am willing to bet that only a very small percent of intermodal traffic on Chicago area streets and highways is interchange business.  I seem to recall someone in the know pointing out that at least 50% of the intermodal traffic in and out of Chicago is from or to businesses served by the Chicago ramps.  As these things run, I would not be surprised to find the 80% of the interchange business moves by rail transfer.

Consider this:  Carload trains are broken up and cars are sorted by destinations and made into new trains on tracks in yards designed for that purpose.  Intermodal terminals are designed to sort the containers by destination using lifting machinery and trucks.  Generally, you won't find any of the Chicago intermodal yards with trackage designed to switch cars to make blocks for multiple destinations.  Adding such trackage would be extraordinarily expensive and from an operating view might not be a less expensive method of sorting loads than the current practise of lifing loads off and on and using yard trucks to do the sorting.   

It may come as a surprise to some forum members, but railroad operating managers are fairly good at figuring out the least direct cost to move freight around.  I suspect that Chicago area ramp managers all have some numbers in mind to guide the decision on rail vs highway interchange. 

In the best of circumstances, some highway interchange is inevitable.  Suppose a train arrives at Ramp X with 6 containers for interchange to Ramp Y and the loads are spread out in the train.  To accomplish a rail interchange, they will be offloaded, yard trucks will reposition them next to some empty cars where they will be reloaded.  A two man train crew with a multimillion dollar locomotive will then tie on and quite possibly take a full shift to deliver the loads to Ramp Y.  At Ramp Y, it is possible that the containers will be again offloaded, moved and reloaded on different outbound trains.  It is not hard for me to believe that a highway transfer of those 6 loads would be less expensive.

[Paul_D_North_Jr]

First, to address Semper Vaporo's question - no, it's not the contents of the railcars or containers that are being unloaded here.  Instead, the entire intermodal container is picked up by a crane or lift truck, swung over, and set down on a truck chassis.  It takes about 2 minutes if well-organized and reportedly and credibly costs less than $10 per lift.  At the other end, the same process is repeated in reverse, for about the same time and cost. 

This topic has been discussed several times here within the last year or two, perhaps captioned under ''St. Louis'' instead at least once.  The best exposition was a multi-part dissertation by Railway Man - what's happened to him, anyway ? - where he pointed out that the railroads are essentially using the streets of Chicago as a spread-out sorting yard and interchange facility - an extension of the railroad's infrastructure, evidently to gabe's dismay as above.

The root cause of these operations is in the diversity of ''Origin-Destination'' pairs for the several hundred containers on each train.  While most of them typically unloaded on the West Coast are from a ship that originated in Asia, and then put on a double-stack train are bound for the U.S. MidWest or East Coast - otherwise, they wouldn't be on that train, eh ? - they're not all bound for the same or similar or close-by destinations. 

So when a train rolls into Chicago with 280 containers on board - randomly loaded, by the way - that are bound for - say, 30 different destinations across the Eastern U.S., but not uniformly - some get only 1 container, others may get 20 or 30 boxes.  So - now how do you sort those containers out and then aggregate them for forwarding and delivery in a single block of cars or train for each of those destinations ?  If you don't do that, then you're either sending them to the wrong place, or running a train with a lot of unloaded/ empty wells.  [It's kind of like a post-office sorting and delivery operation in a city, except with much larger 'parcels' or 'envelopes'.]  You might be able to find a few 'platforms' of well cars that are mostly all going to the same place - but then you'll have to weed out the ones that aren't - and how many of those are going to be the bottom container ?   

More typically, any one 'car' of say 5 'platforms' and 10 containers will be going to almost 10 different destinations, so there's not much to be gained by trying to keep the box for one of those destinations on board, and then finding and bringing the others going to the same destination to it.  The machines that lift those boxes are not very agile or mobile either, esp. when carrying a load of that size and weight, so they can't easily drive a mile or so to the other end of the train - hence they'd be putting the box on a yard tractor-trailer rig anyway.  Keep in mind too that most of the Chi-town IM yards are very much space-constrained, and doing this kind of operation within their 'fence' only will result in a lot of cross-traffic, congestion, interference, etc.  So it's better and easier in many cases to spread it all out by loading the box on a trailer as they would be doing anyway, and then sending it out the gate and letting the sorting function occur on the ramps and roads over to the outbound IM terminal.

One of the 'brave new worlds' in this field is software to identify all the inbound containers on a train and their destinations to optimize this 'unload, sort, and haul' operation, so that it isn't done any more than it has to be.  As the volume of IM freight builds it will be more common and easier to accumulate a solid block or train of containers for a single O-D pair, and accomplish the transfer by rail instead of by rubber. 

This is only a brief and general explanation.  There are whole professions, consultants, groups, and offices in the industry and carriers that are devoted to managing and optimizing this flow - one used to be the ''Rail Applications Special Interest Group'' or ''RASIG'' that was run by a guy named Muten, if I recall correctly.  Perhaps some references to those publications would provide some more insight into this. 

EDIT - See, for example - http://www.informs-ras.org/informs2k7.htm which is ''the presentations given at the INFORMS 2007 National Meeting in Seattle, Washington'' for the Railway Applications Section, such as this one (note that I have not reviewed it, though, because it doesn't seem to be available 'on-line'): 

Load Planning Problem At An Intermodal Railroad Terminal
Ashish Kumar Nemani

- Paul North. 

[samfp1943]

Beaulieu and Gabe are absolutely.

                                        Anyone bothered to price a cab ride in/around NYC lately? 

THAT will be a real eye-opener, let alone the tip/and or the abuse if it is too small! 

As was alluded to earlier,by several other posters. Most people outside the environs of "Da Windy!" have a tendency to thing in terms of convienience (certaily. in THEIR place).                                                                  As Beaulieu pointed out a five position container car (potentially, can have ten destinations), for the railroad, it becomes somewhat of a convienient move for them, but you can take it to the bank. The 'Bean Counters' will be in the cost analysis of those expenses up to their Mont Blanc's. To paraphrase Telly Savalas, ( It's all about the costs,Baby!' 

Crosstown 'Roading' is a fact of life in rail transportation of trailers and TOFC business, and now COFC is in the Chicago market area and that the equation as well.

Oh, Yeah!  Cab rides are always more expensive for the arrivee, than the Dearly, departed one's wallet,

The cabbie's ability to size up his"fare" is in line with his ability to understand English, let alone his desire to speak fluently. 'Beware the broken meteter ploy''

 

[Murphy Siding]

Sawtooth500

So there has to be a method to the chaos - let's say there's a UP intermodal train coming into chicago from the overland route. It can go to Global I, II, or III? Are there any hard and fast rules which yard it goes to? And then, the question of drayage comes in. I've heard that in Chicago railroads frequently interchange intermodal by unloading them at their yard and then TRUCKING them to the yard of the other railroad. How can this be so? It must undoubtedly be cheaper just to run a train to the other yard rather than unloading the whole train, trucking it, and then loading it up again!

    I think you kind of answered your own question.  If the whole train was going to the other yard, that's where they would take it, and be done.  But, the train cars are going to several places, not just one.

    Conceptualize this idea:  The railroads are using the streets of Chicago as a big sorting yard, for traffic coming into, and going out of the main yards.  Part of the reason that this is more cost efficeient than sorting the cars by use of railroad tracks, is that someone else owns and maintains the infrastructure utilized during sorting(the streets).

[beaulieu]

Look at it this way, a train comes in to a Intermodal terminal in Chicago from the West Coast with 280 containers, 140 are for the Chicago area or somewhere close (100 mile radius). The rest are for every state east of Chicago and north of the Mason-Dixon line, plus two Canadian provinces, whose and which railyard do you send them to? And anyway the first five-well stack car on the train  has containers that need to go to Montreal on CP, Pittsburgh on NS, Harrisburg, Syracuse on CSX. Toronto on CN, plus a couple for Chicago.

[gabe]

greyhounds

Sawtooth500

I just can't understand how trucking could be cheaper... I'm not trying to be rude here I just want to figure this out... a cab ride from one of the intermodal facilities to another in Chicago could run you close to $100, so how can you truck something for significantly less than $100? Not to mention your onload/offload costs, times how many containers do you have in a train? It was my understanding that drayage in the Chicago area occurred because of rail congestion, not economics.

You can truck between rail terminals for less than $100 because the truckers charge less than $100.  I've never had a $100 cab ride in my life.

It's the whole aggregation thing into units of production.  Something you don't understand.  Something you call people who do understand "MAD" about.

It's midnight.  I'm going to bed.  I'll explain latter.  Try to meditate.  Be kind to animals.  Chill.  Hopefully, you'll eventually understand this whole transportation thing.  Maybe not.  You don't have a good start. 

(1)  Fly in to Bush International Airport in Houston and take a cab downtown, with an appropriate tip, the cab fares will be close to $100.  The racket is betray by the fact that the cab ride back to the airport is about half the price of the cab ride to the airport.

(2)  I certainly agree with you that the use of trucking is nothing to get mad about, and I even more strongly agree with you that the reason railroads do it is because it is the most efficient means of transportation--they are not dumb, why else would they do it.

(3)  However, here is why I "lament" the use of trucking to transfer containers in Chicago: 

There are dozens of railroad advertisements that promote intermodal transportation because it takes trucks off the road.  Also, although it is nothing compared to the dole that is dished out to trucking, increasing government resources are provided to railroads under the theory that such funding ultimately saves the tax payer money because it takes trucks off the road.  As Joe Taxpayer, when I drive to Chicago and get squezed off the road by a truck driver carrying a container from one intermodal facility to another, I tend to view proposals to expend government resources to encourage intermodal use less favorable and view with suspicion rail advertisements that promote the idea that they are serving the common good by taking trucks off the road--if the use of intermodal saves me 10 minutes driving to Chicago but then makes me sit on I-90 in traffic gridlock for 40 minutes, it certainly hasn't increased my common good . . .

That having been said, I realize that railroads will continue to use trucking for such transfers until it is less efficient than rail.  I can't say I would do it any differently were I in their shoes.

Gabe

[oltmannd]

Steel wheel interchange can be very cost effective if you have enough volume. That's a pretty big IF, however.

The problem is that you have to have enough volume going from the origin ramp to the destination ramp to justify the move. Most of the high volume lanes do have run-though train service or steel wheel interchange at Chicago.

Most of the other lanes don't generate consistent intermodal car loads and/or sufficient quantity of car loads to justify the time and money for the steel wheel move. Getting a train from one side of Chicago to the other is no quick, cheap thing!

There have been some "load centering" efforts that allow some more steel wheel interchange for smaller volume lanes by grounding and reloading boxes to and from multiple inbound and outbound trains. NS does this at Rutherford PA and Ashland Ave in Chicago, I believe.

But, greyhounds is right. If it were cheaper, they'd be doing it.

[greyhounds]

A simple question would have been answered differently.

An accusation of "Madness" brought the appropriate response.    

I'll explain more when I have time if someone else doesn't do it first.  Basically people need to understand that the street transfer process in Chicago does more than transport trailers/containers to different rail IM facilities.  It performs a necessary sorting function at a hub and facilitates aggregation into production units.  These production units are called "Blocks" or "Trains". 

When it is more efficient to do this with a truck it is done with a truck.  When it id done more efficiently with a rail transfer it is done with a rail transfer.

[Semper Vaporo]

Hey Grayhounds... to put aside your abusive response to a simple question let's try wording it another way.

How come it is cheaper to take the time and personnel pay to unload a rail car, whether it is simply hooking up a hose or using a forklift or using a crane/scoop, put the goods into a similarly sized truck trailer unit, then take the time and personnel pay to transport that quantity of goods to another rail yard where we also take the time and personnel pay to put the goods back on/in another rail car?

This seems to incur the additional pay for at least two more people, assuming the trucker and the engineer earn similar pay for the time to move the goods (one to unload and one to reload)... Okay, okay, maybe only one additional person, since it usually takes two to run a train and only one to drive a truck locally. But, still there is one additional paycheck to cut with the present method than just moving the goods via rail.

To us poor ignorants of lessor intelligence that sure seems to be a more expensive proposition than hooking up an engine to the rail car and towing it via rail lines to the other rail yard.

My limited knowledge of economics says that if there were multiple cars of goods to be moved then doing so with just one train would be much cheaper than multiple trucks. Let's see... two train crew could move 20 cars, or 20 truckers and between 2 and 20 ground crew... wow, engineers and conductors must command some paycheck if the truck routing is cheaper.

I suppose that if there is no direct route via rail then it might take longer than the truck transfer but one tends to doubt the lack of a connection from one RR to another if they are both in the same urban area... especially one named Chicago.

This transfer method beggars logic to those of us that do not understand the economics of railroads. It does appear to be a "mad" process based on maybe some individual that doesn't want "his" rail car to be on a foreign set of tracks and thus imposes this restriction on the movement of goods.

Do you suppose you could use your superior intellect and explain it in language that makes sense, instead of belittling the questioner?  Please?

 

[greyhounds]

Sawtooth500

I just can't understand how trucking could be cheaper... I'm not trying to be rude here I just want to figure this out... a cab ride from one of the intermodal facilities to another in Chicago could run you close to $100, so how can you truck something for significantly less than $100? Not to mention your onload/offload costs, times how many containers do you have in a train? It was my understanding that drayage in the Chicago area occurred because of rail congestion, not economics.

You can truck between rail terminals for less than $100 because the truckers charge less than $100.  I've never had a $100 cab ride in my life.

It's the whole aggregation thing into units of production.  Something you don't understand.  Something you call people who do understand "MAD" about.

It's midnight.  I'm going to bed.  I'll explain latter.  Try to meditate.  Be kind to animals.  Chill.  Hopefully, you'll eventually understand this whole transportation thing.  Maybe not.  You don't have a good start. 

 

[Sawtooth500]

I just can't understand how trucking could be cheaper... I'm not trying to be rude here I just want to figure this out... a cab ride from one of the intermodal facilities to another in Chicago could run you close to $100, so how can you truck something for significantly less than $100? Not to mention your onload/offload costs, times how many containers do you have in a train? It was my understanding that drayage in the Chicago area occurred because of rail congestion, not economics.

[greyhounds]

TRUCKING! 

Well, the fact is that it is frequently much more efficient to unload the trailer (or container), pay much less than $100 to TRUCK it to the destination intermodal facility and place it next to the proper departure block directly with a TRUCK than it is to use a rail transfer system.

Of course, if it becomes more efficient to use rail transfer, they'll switch to rail transfer.

The fact that you don't understand economics, business or efficiency does not mean that the other folks are MAD.  It really just means that they know more than you do.  For example, they know and understand the need to aggregate truckload shipents for rail movement.  A need that is basically absent in TRUCKING!  This need cost money and can be eliminated by TRUCKING the loads between rail yards in Chicago.  The people in charge understand the situation.  You Don't.

[Sawtooth500]

So there has to be a method to the chaos - let's say there's a UP intermodal train coming into chicago from the overland route. It can go to Global I, II, or III? Are there any hard and fast rules which yard it goes to? And then, the question of drayage comes in. I've heard that in Chicago railroads frequently interchange intermodal by unloading them at their yard and then TRUCKING them to the yard of the other railroad. How can this be so? It must undoubtedly be cheaper just to run a train to the other yard rather than unloading the whole train, trucking it, and then loading it up again!