There are 6 shuttle grain loaders west of Iowa Falls on the IC. Since that is Iowa they likely load Corn bound for either export via Louisiana or Poultry feeder operations in the SE. It is my understanding that this is one of the major reasons the IC bought back the Chicago Central.
As always, Greyhounds provides us with excellent analysis and I WISH so much that the CN would be smart enough to take a hard look at this. My only question and concern would be the tunnel at East Dubuque, Illinois. Am guessing that there would have to be some work done on this to accomodate double-stack (presumably anyway) traffic.
I wonder if this line would be a good triple crown roadrailer candidate? There would be a lower initial cost for a terminal.
Great discussion and number crunching.
LA Ram...I knew there was a tunnel on that line, but it flew right by me and I drove right past the tunnel 10 days ago.
I think that tunnel is a game changer. Perhaps the Roadrailer system would work.
Anyone have an idea of drayage costs on both ends? Also, gotta figure in the refer lease costs for containers.
I will be in contact with a couple of my industry folks about lease rates.
Ed
beaulieu There are 6 shuttle grain loaders west of Iowa Falls on the IC. Since that is Iowa they likely load Corn bound for either export via Louisiana or Poultry feeder operations in the SE. It is my understanding that this is one of the major reasons the IC bought back the Chicago Central.
Yes....
I thought the reason that IC/CN Officially gave for buyback of this line was increasing the line haul of Iowa products via their routing to Gulf Coast Ports from Chicago to Iowa itself. Only going off long-term memory here so I could be wrong.
Just checked the map for Tobyanna, Pa...not a good fit for CN/CSX. It is about an hour north of the Bethlehem, Pa. intermodal terminal, but that is on the NS. I dont see CSX working without a huge drayage charge.
I would think the drayage charges for Iowa and out of Bethlehem would consume about $500-600 of the line haul charge of $1800. That leaves about $1200 perhaps a little less.
What kind of backhaul opportunity exists out of that area to Chicago/Iowa?
What kind of ROI hurdle rate do the rails have these days for new projects, particularly when there seems to be a need for capital?
MP173 Great discussion and number crunching. LA Ram...I knew there was a tunnel on that line, but it flew right by me and I drove right past the tunnel 10 days ago. I think that tunnel is a game changer. Perhaps the Roadrailer system would work. Anyone have an idea of drayage costs on both ends? Also, gotta figure in the refer lease costs for containers. I will be in contact with a couple of my industry folks about lease rates. Ed
I think greyhounds would have known about the tunnel in East Dubuque, since tunnels are rare in the midwest. These days a lot of the loads are ethanol. Today I saw an afternoon WB with UP power up front hauling mostly grain cars.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
Regarding your Council Bluffs questions, BNSF does have an intermodal facility at Gibson Yard and Iowa Interstate has a fairly robust intermodal business, with room for more growth.
As far as the CN trackage, there is carload traffic on the Omaha side, but not much. Word is that they have filed to abandon the Iowa trackage west of the yard to the bridge and the Omaha trackage. Supposedly this is the first step to getting the old bridge removed across the Missouri River as the Corps of Engineers has deemed it a navigation hazard.
MP173Just checked the map for Tobyanna, Pa...not a good fit for CN/CSX. It is about an hour north of the Bethlehem, Pa. intermodal terminal, but that is on the NS. I dont see CSX working without a huge drayage charge. I would think the drayage charges for Iowa and out of Bethlehem would consume about $500-600 of the line haul charge of $1800. That leaves about $1200 perhaps a little less. What kind of backhaul opportunity exists out of that area to Chicago/Iowa? What kind of ROI hurdle rate do the rails have these days for new projects, particularly when there seems to be a need for capital? Ed
I like the way this discussion is going. Good questions and ideas with no flaming.
Ed, I perceive you are way high with the drayage costs in Iowa. Slightly too high in the northeast. I'll try to get to them next. It's true that Tobyhanna would be better served off the NS instead of CSX. But remember we're going "Everywhere East" out of Cedar Rapids. Not just Tobyhanna. I'd like to run the CN train in to a Chicago IM terminal of an eastern carrier, either CSX or NS, to avoid the Chicago transfer charges an delays. So we may have to suboptimize a few destinations, such as Tobyhanna, for the overall efficiency of our system.
I have no idea what CN's ROI "hurdle rate" is. (That's the rate of return a capital investment must be projected to earn in order to have a chance of getting funded.) I used a 18% annual rate for the Cedar Rapids terminal calculations.
I know about the tunnel at E. Dubuque. I rode through it twice in a locomotive cab. AFAIK, it will not clear full height double stacks. But right now I do not conceptualize use of DS west of Chicago. I'm thinking of "TEEING UP" the containers west of Chicago. They'll go TOFC on their chassis on that part of the trip. That will avoid the hassle of matching up containers and chassis at the small Cedar Rapids terminal. It will also simplify terminal operations and reduce the required handling at CR. It should also save some space. If the traffic really takes off opening up the line for DS can be considered at that time.
RoadRailers might work if we were only going from Cedar Rapids to RoadRailer terminals in the East. In concept we're going to many different terminals located from Montreal to Miami. The containers to be sorted at the eastern carrier's Chicago facility. Many concept destinations do not have RoadRailer service. RoadRailers would be very limiting as to possible destinations.
Next up - estimated drayage costs. We'll deal with backhauls down the road.
mbv9415 Regarding your Council Bluffs questions, BNSF does have an intermodal facility at Gibson Yard and Iowa Interstate has a fairly robust intermodal business, with room for more growth. As far as the CN trackage, there is carload traffic on the Omaha side, but not much. Word is that they have filed to abandon the Iowa trackage west of the yard to the bridge and the Omaha trackage. Supposedly this is the first step to getting the old bridge removed across the Missouri River as the Corps of Engineers has deemed it a navigation hazard.
The IAIS does the intermodal work for the UP in Council Bluffs.
The buzz has been that the old IC bridge is going away. Although I'm less sure of them (CN) abandoning trackage in Omaha that they actually use to serve their customers. They have been using the UP and BNSF to access the Omaha side for years.
Jeff
jeffhergert mbv9415 Regarding your Council Bluffs questions, BNSF does have an intermodal facility at Gibson Yard and Iowa Interstate has a fairly robust intermodal business, with room for more growth. As far as the CN trackage, there is carload traffic on the Omaha side, but not much. Word is that they have filed to abandon the Iowa trackage west of the yard to the bridge and the Omaha trackage. Supposedly this is the first step to getting the old bridge removed across the Missouri River as the Corps of Engineers has deemed it a navigation hazard. The IAIS does the intermodal work for the UP in Council Bluffs. The buzz has been that the old IC bridge is going away. Although I'm less sure of them (CN) abandoning trackage in Omaha that they actually use to serve their customers. They have been using the UP and BNSF to access the Omaha side for years. Jeff
I won't wade too deeply into this object lesson in railroad marketing, since Greyhounds is a very qualified teacher who has done this for a living. Those of you following the exercise will learn from him. However, as someone else who has also done this for a living, I'd like to add a background comment. (Greyhounds can probably guess what's coming, as he's heard this from me before.)
I think you're all being too hard on CN's marketing people here. True, they control the origin, but the destination roads (CSX and, for arguments sake, BNSF) have just as much, if not more, at stake. It is they who will get the lion's share of the linehaul revenue, and it is both the quality of their overall intermodal networks and their focus on this particular move that will determine the success of the venture. It would be relatively easy for CN to handle a daily block of 40-50 intermodal loads to a single Chicago facility and get it right - especially on a line that has excess capacity. It's what happens after that, when you fan out to all the destinations nationwide and try to push those loads through a strainer that's already gummed up, that's the trick to manage. (Take a look at some of the other recent discussions here about capacity issues and performance on CSX and BNSF in general.)
And then there's perhaps the biggest question (which Greyhounds has said we'll get to in due course) of equipment supply. CN on their own can't ensure that someone is loading 40-50 intermodal units a day into that part of Iowa, nor can they magically make 40-50 empty intermodal units (plus railcars to move them) appear every day in Chicago.
So, I would suggest that this is more than just a railroad cultural issue. It's structural. This example illustrates the reasons why the U.S. intermodal industry has evolved as it has. The question we should be asking is not why CN isn't jumping all over this, it's why isn't J.B. Hunt, or Hub Group, CH Robinson, or any one of a dozen other national intermodal logistics providers? They are the ones whose businesses are set up to manage intermodal loads and equipment moving all over the country on multiple railroads.
I'm sure if Hunt came to CN with a solid plan to go after this business, CN would happily support them. I suspect the reason it hasn't happened has to do with the aforementioned issue of backhaul/equipment supply. Opportunities like this are actually a dime a dozen. Substitute frozen meat with paper out of International Falls, baled cotton out of west Texas, containerized ag exports out of northern Alberta, or bananas coming in via the port of Mobile - I've seen all sorts of these in my time, and the problem has always been the same: How do you get an adequate equipment supply into the origin when there isn't a major metropolitan market nearby to drive inbound demand?
So how do the truckers do it, you ask? (Correct question at this point.) Since they were at one time on my beat, I've had top management at Werner and other major trucking companies explain this to me directly. They search high and low for any load they can find, from anywhere in the country, going anywhere within a couple hundred miles of the loading point. When they've exhausted those opportunities, they'll taking anything moving partways back in more or less the right direction. Or, they'll triangulate. Maybe there's another plant near our shipper in Iowa receiving large quantities of raw material from Minnesota. So, they'll grab that leg, and then figure out how to get equipment into Minnesota. Over-the-road truckers have way, way more flexibility in staying loaded and balanced than anyone tied to a point-to-point, linehaul intermodal network - even if it's a national network.
That's not to say that a determined, creative team couldn't make it work. Here's a real-world object lesson: paper products out of Green Bay. Wisconsin Central teamed up with Schneider to move large quantities of loads out of Green Bay to destinations all over the east and south. WC ran a more or less dedicated train into Chicago and then handed off to CSX. There wasn't enough inbound traffic to Green Bay to send trailers there loaded, but Chicago was close enough, so Schneider focused on loading trailers back into that area and WC moved them empty from there.
On paper, it should have worked fine, and it did last for as long as WC was independent, thanks to their incredibly hard work. When CN killed it not long after buying WC, I'm sure the railfan community shook their heads and blamed CN for being a lazy Class 1 suffering from a 'too-big' mentality and culture. The reality, however, was that even though WC had been bending over backwards trying to make it work, the program had encountered serious problems and had been suspended for weeks at a time more than once.
The reason? CSX, the primary beneficiary of WC's hard work, couldn't be bothered to reliably provide WC with a supply of flatcars to handle the inbound empties goint to Wisconsin. When equipment was surplus, everything was fine, but whenever they were short of cars - even though WC was giving them upwards of 20-30 loaded flatcars per day - they hoarded the flats in their system and let WC starve. Why? Because they knew Schneider could run over the road between Chicago and Green Bay at only slightly higher cost than using WC, so if the WC service went down, CSX would likely still get the loads from Schneider at Chicago. CN killed the program because they quite rightly saw it as being an extension of CSX, and weren't going to expend resources on a rail move that CSX didn't care enough about to support consistently.
I'll leave it to all of you to decide whether that's cultural, structural, economic or whatever. But it's generally why these sorts of seemingly obvious opportunities continue to be passed up by the industry. If the origin is relatively lightly populated; if the outbound loads are going 'everywhere'; and if more than one railroad is required to make it work - it's likely going to stay with truck. Especially now that the railroads are, in general, choking on more business than they can handle.
Having rode this line as a Hobo...Traffic is pig feed and paper products from Cicero to Dubuque and on to Waterloo IA. After Waterloo traffic is distributed to other short lines and feed lots and then peters out and there are few trains west of Waterloo. The Chicago Central railroad acted as a seperate short line and still kinda does in the CN System with its own little yard in Cicero S of the BN Yard
This is all very interesting and it seems a major hurdle is passing the IM loads onto another line, such as CSX. But the Chicago-Naperville, IL-IN-WI Combined Statistical Area has a population of 9,912,730. I would think that could support one meat train inbound daily.
A few comments:CN...thanks for your great discussion on this matter. Until we have true transcontinental lines, this type of move (Iowa - East Coast) will be difficult to achieve unless there is big volumes, or big profits. Great point on any of the large truckers staying away from this. That is probably the best reason this is not occuring.
Second point. I talked to a person who sells refer trailers today and asked him what a typical monthly lease rate is for 53 ft refer trailer and he indicated $1500 per month. Now, that is probably for smaller companies, no doubt the rails or big truckers could do better and granted it is for a trailer, not a container. So, lets say you can drop the pricing down to $1200 per month. How many Iowa - East Coast turns would be made in a month? I dont think you could do 4 per month, so you would be looking at somewhere about $350 - $400 per trip in trailer or container costs, this doesnt include TTX flats. Possible margins are eroding quickly.
CN...I see all these JBH containers moving west on NS from Harrisburg and other DC locations. I have no idea of the percentage of which are loads, but probably not too many. Do the railroads charge same pricing moving containers empty as loaded?
I've got a health problem (which is not going to kill me ) and I've been slow participating. Hopefully, I'll get back in this very interesting discussion soon.
CNSF knows what he is talking about. He formerly did this for a living too. But he did it at a much higher lever than I ever reached.
He's cited a valid problem that needs to be dealt with. But I'm confident it can be successfully dealt with.
Now if I could just remember where I put those pills.
Most valuable info from CNSF. The scales are lifted from my eyes, and I see how it is easier to manage, on a daily basis, one 53-ft. trailer as opposed to 20 empties + the flat or well cars to accommodate them.
I will take no more cheap shots at railroad management.
It's true: There are inherent advantages and disadvantages to every transport mode.
Maybe we really would be better off with only two more or less competitive rail systems in North America. Just to lose situations like CN's (ex-WC's) disadvantage to CSX in the situation described by CNSF.
So -- maybe Hunter Harrison is right?
OK, CNSF has raised some valid concers that need to be dealt with. There are several methods of dealing with such concerns.
1) Just give up and quit. Wait for someone else to show up with a solution. In the meantime do nothing. Enjoy life as best is possible. This is sometimes referred to as "The French Solution."
2) Just ignore the issues. Plunge on ahead as if they didn't exist. If things go wrong blame CSX or another entity to the top of your lungs. How dare they use the rail equipment to cover real, existing, ready to go, loads instead of returning it to you empty. Just plunging on ahead is sometimes referred to as "The Titanic's Solution." since it usually leads to a similar result.
3) Solve the identified problems. This is the least favored method. It requires thought, reason and analysis. You might miss a round of golf if you actually work on solving problems. This is sometimes referred to as "The How Did I Get Stuck With This Assignment?" solution.
All three tend to get used by commerce and government on an international scale.
Before we go further, it is important to note that the failure of the Wisconsin Central operation was not due to a lack of economic viability. It failed becuse the interests of the WC and CSX diverged. Managing and preventing such a divergence in any future such effort is a newly identified problem to be solved.
How do we solve it?
Well, part of the problem was that CSX wouldn't turn flatcars back to WC when CSX needed those cars to handle its own traffic needs. (A perfectly reasonable thing for CSX to do.) To solve this one I suggest we need to make a change in the proposed opeation.
Don't let CSX ever get its hands on the flatcars. They can't keep what they don't have. We need to use street interchange in Chicago for the containers. We'll incur some added expense in Chicago. But we can also generate costs savings by taking our containers to different IM facilities in Chicago. i.e., we can use the NS terminal at 63rd street for our loads to Tobyhanna. The NS terminal at Bethlehem is much closer to Tobyhanna than any CSX terminal. We'll save hundreds in destination drayage per load and that will more than offset the added cost of the street interchange in Chicago. At least for Tobyhanna.
Another part of the problem was that CSX wouldn't turn trailers/containers back to WC when CSX needed that equipment to handle its own traffic needs.
Solution: Do not ever give control of the trailer/container over to CSX. The containers/trailers do have to be moved on CSX (or now, NS too) trains. But there's nothing that prevents the CSX consignor as being shown as CN and the CSX consignee as being shown as CN. The desination drayage to be done by a CN contracted trucker. CN will maintain control of the trailers and/or containers to the extent that the CN can ship them back to itself empty if it gets that desperate.
CSX and NS don't want anymore business? Well, maybe they won't offer anything special such as receiving a block of freight intact from a western carrier at one of their IM facilities. But we're now not doing that. We're just showing up of the highway with a few extra loads for an existing train. They'll haul em'.
We gotta' get westbound loads. Yes, we do. But how many and what percentage of westbound miles need to be covered with revenue loadings is yet to be determined. Anyway if we control our own equipment in the East we'll have a better opportunity to get the westbound business developed than we would working through another railroad that will have different priorities. This was always going to be a tough nut to crack. CN controlling its own fate in the east would make this easier for them to do.
The solutions aren't perfect. Perfect solutions do not exist. But they are workable solutions.
Now, back to the drayage cost estimates.
My question on IC/CN was for greyhounds. Why doesn't it carry refrigerated trailers of meat to the Chicago area to be distributed around here? There are ~10 million folks in the area and several large food distribution centers. Incompetence/laziness as above or no profit?
Ethenol may have been a factor here but with low oil prices that may not have played out as well as we thought
schlimm My question on IC/CN was for greyhounds. Why doesn't it carry refrigerated trailers of meat to the Chicago area to be distributed around here? There are ~10 million folks in the area and several large food distribution centers. Incompetence/laziness as above or no profit?
Oh, it's beyond no profit. It would be a flat out loss. I don't think anyone is incompetent or lazy. The railroads just no longer have the skills needed to aggregate shippers into market segments. Not having a particular skill is in no way the same as being incompotent. I have intentionally avoided showing how the government regulatory morons drove a wedge between the railroads and the potential customers here. When the railroads were not allowed to use this marketing skill they lost the skill. Let's leave it at that for now.
One way to look at the cost of a rail intermodal service is:
TC = TDO + (RLHCPM * RLHM) + TDD
Where:
TC is Total Costs
TDO is Terminal and Drayage Costs at Origin
TDD is Terminal and Drayage Costs at Destination
RLHCPM is Rail Line Haul Cost Per Mile
RLHM is Rail Line Haul Miles
TDO and TDD really are insignificant for competing motor carriers. They don't go through termnals. The driver just picks up the load at origin and drives it through to destination. Basically, the only costs on an over the road truckload shipment are the line haul miles.
Rail line haul cost per mile are generally less than motor carrier line haul cost per mile. It's only when there are enough miles between origin and destination that rail intermodal can be competitive with trucking. The total reduction from using the lower cost rail line haul miles must be enough to offset the added expenses of terminal and drayage at each end.
The CN's Iowa line is 500 miles in length. That's right on the lower end of the distance at which rail intermodal has a chance of being competitive. There are some shorter IM lanes. CP's Expressway between Montreal and Toronto is one example. BNSF's UPS based service from Chicago to St. Paul is another example. Of course there's FEC and now, the Indiana Rail Road.
But, in general, it's very difficult to avoid a loss on a 500 mile intermodal haul. It would take some very special circumstances and I just don't see such circumstances here. The focus needs to be on the longer hauls into the east.
To get more competitive at lesser distances the railroad would have to reduce the TC result.
One way to do this would be a one person crew on short haul, lower capacity, trains such as these. I don't want to get crosswise with the good union people out here, but I really wish their labor organizations would allow trials of such operations. That would reduce the RLHCPM factor in the equation and reduce TC as a result. This could make rail more competitive at shorter distances. Most freight moves these shorter distances. It would conceivably open up new markets for rail freight and increase the number of railroad union jobs.
Another way is to reduce TDO and/or TDD by putting in small, low cost, IM terminals located near the shippers and receivers. This will allow substitution of lower cost rail miles for higher cost drayage miles. Overal cost (TC) will be reduced as a result. Alas, this would require the marketing skill most railroads no longer have. In this case small, low cost IM terminals at Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, Storm Lake and Denison, IA could be considered along with terminals at Council Bluffs and Sioux City.
At Denison, IA you can still see where they loaded trailers at the IBP (now Tyson) plant. I never noticed it, it was hiding in plain site, until a few years ago a retired IC dispatcher gave a presentation at the monthly Ames Railfan show. He had slides he took of his familiarzation trips riding freight trains over the Iowa Division. He mentioned the TOFC loading there.
He said one of the reasons they stopped loading TOFC was that many of the trailers being supplied for loading at the plant were being rejected by IBP.
I like Greyhounds' point that the US railroads no longer have the capacity to manage moves like this. In my view it's due to numerous government regulatory and policy decisions made over the years, as well as the fragmented structure of the industry. Biased, nonsensical ICC decisions, the advent of the interstate highway system, even the Railroad Retirement Act which makes railway employees more costly than those of companies covered by Social Security, all conspired over time to force the migration of these sorts of skills from the railroads to truckers, freight brokers, and third-party logistics companies - all of which could use rail, but have no particular mandate to.It's ironic that the railroad in question here is CN, because if this move was inside Canada, they'd be handling it. Unlike the US, where we still don't have a railroad that can offer a shipper direct service to every significant market in the country, Canada has essentially had two competing transcontinentals since the 1920's. As a result, CN has one of the largest trucking companies in Canada, used entirely for intermodal drayage, plus a special logistics arm which does really sophisticated work to promote use of both intermodal and carload service. It works great, because it's their railroad, their tractors/drivers, their trailers, their integrated computer systems. But when you start involving other railroads and have to rely on independent local drayage companies, it can fall apart pretty fast. I was at CN during an early attempt to extend their door-to-door 'retail' intermodal service to the US, on the recently-purchased IC and... wait for it... an interline marketing alliance with CSX. The CN sales guys and gals were ecstatic - booking all sorts of loads from Alberta or Quebec to Memphis, Florida, etc. which they'd always known about but never could compete with the truckers for before. It lasted a few months and was a disaster. Once the load went outside of their in-house control system, they just couldn't manage the service and maintain the necessary quality. The US intermodal marketing companies, such as Hub Group or Alliance Shippers, built their whole business model, systems, and processes around managing multiple railroads and truckers, and do a pretty good job. The historical problem with them was they always seemed to prefer going after the low-hanging fruit (and then pilfering it from each other) while leaving tougher nuts like the Iowa example on the tree. I suspect they've gotten better with time, plus competition from the likes of Hunt and Schneider. CN's solution to their US problem was to cut a deal with a couple of the big IMCs, in which CN salespeople would handle the customer, CN's in-house system would handle everything taking place in Canada, but on the US end CN would book the load into the IMC's operating system and pay them a flat rate management fee. The IMCs liked it because they got incremental revenue and volume without any sales effort. And that worked reasonably well.At the time (early 2000s) CN had some really good sales people. Illinois Central (after they lost their in-house marketing skill and had to depend on the IMCs) had spent a decade or more trying in vain to balance the Chicago-New Orleans corridor (which once upon a time had been balanced). Once the new CN model was in place, with CN selling and IMCs simply managing the logistics, they had the corridor balanced again in less than a year. I don't know what's happened to their US sales ability since then. I'm guessing they ignored this particular move because most of the linehaul (and thus the potential profit) was off their rails, they didn't already have a terminal in place, and they had lower-hanging fruit to pick. But it could be that their abilities have atrophied again.
[quote user="greyhounds"]
[/quote
@greyhounds. Thank you for such a factually interesting response. First of all, I know nothing about the locations and daily output of Iowa-based meatpacking plants. What I am now wondering is this. I realize the drayage costs are high. Elimination of them at one end, therefore, could reduce the total cost. Specifically I am thinking of unit RTOFC trains from the plant in Iowa to Chicago, one or more times per week. This service could possibly be offered to any other plants on the RoW. Once the train reaches Chicago, trailers would go to food distribution warehouses in the metro area or to the CSX or NS yard as drayage, same as in other proposals.
Drayage Costs!
OK, after spending fruitless time trying to get actual numbers I'm going to SWAG the drayage costs.
If I assume the CN Cedar Rapids intermodal terminal goes at the current CN yard, this picture becomes relevant:
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=484112&nseq=14#remarks
That's the Quaker plant in the background. Remember, the drivers will be shuttling the containers between that close by plant and the yard. They'll be operating used day cab highway tractors. So I'll guess this dray can be had for $65/load. The General Mills facility is five miles from the Quaker facility. So I'll budget another $10 to serve that plant, $75/load total.
For the points farther from the ramps I'll guess $50 + $3.50/running mile. It's 52 miles from Waterloo to Cedar Rapids so the charge is $50+($3.50*104) or $414/load. It's 50 miles from the NS terminal in Bethlehem, PA to Tobyhanna so the charge is $50+($3.50*100) or $400/load.
Does anyone have any objections to these numbers?
greyhounds Drayage Costs! OK, after spending fruitless time trying to get actual numbers I'm going to SWAG the drayage costs. If I assume the CN Cedar Rapids intermodal terminal goes at the current CN yard, this picture becomes relevant: http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=484112&nseq=14#remarks That's the Quaker plant in the background. Remember, the drivers will be shuttling the containers between that close by plant and the yard. They'll be operating used day cab highway tractors. So I'll guess this dray can be had for $65/load. The General Mills facility is five miles from the Quaker facility. So I'll budget another $10 to serve that plant, $75/load total. For the points farther from the ramps I'll guess $50 + $3.50/running mile. It's 52 miles from Waterloo to Cedar Rapids so the charge is $50+($3.50*104) or $414/load. It's 50 miles from the NS terminal in Bethlehem, PA to Tobyhanna so the charge is $50+($3.50*100) or $400/load. Does anyone have any objections to these numbers?
Ken - The numbers sound reasonable.....I would only add the possibility of shippers in the Iowa City/Coralville area; a relatively quick hop down I-380 from Cedar Rapids.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.