How to double capacity of U.S. railroads (without even building a single mile of new track)

[Junctionfan]

Overmod

I am suggesting that say if Home Depot and Beaver Lumber was to get a half a boxcar full of tools from Black and Decker and Home Depot was to get almost a 50 foot boxcar of tools from Black and Decker and they are going to be picked up at a railroad transloading facility, use a 60 foot or greater box and just seperate the Home Depot going loads from the Beaver Lumber loads. It works like a marshalling yard except you are not breaking up a train and shunting cars, you are breaking up the contents of a railcar and shunting the loads. Could even work for some chemicals if done safely. All that would be required is if the industries rented or leased storage tanks or bins for the desired chemical but I would say non hazardous materials would be more likely a plus. Since a lot of thease loads are not very profitable for the railroads as say some chemicals and coal, it makes sense to try to find away to consolidate on the less profitable loads.

[Overmod]

I think the primary thing about the 'stack-and-a-half' is that it's somewhat more complicated to get the containers on and off the bridged frames. I concur that the idea seems reasonable, but would like to see some directed reasoning why existing services haven't adopted it.

I'd be interested to see a listing of prospective "rail whale" car types that have good current business cases -- with grain and perhaps coal being possibilities. My understanding of the logic behind the FRA ban was that it involved tank cars, and more particularly hazardous-material tank cars: the construction of the large cars made them somewhat more 'fragile', and the large volume per car made consequences of even single-car incidents more troublesome. I would think that volumetric limits might apply to some 'mega' bulk cars before weight limits were reached, and this in turn might pose some metacenter, balance, or suspension-oscillation issues that might be difficult to address with conventional cost-effective freight truck technologies. This isn't a particularly valuable thing for intermodal traffic, however, since articulation is a more workable solution all 'round, and a solution for TOFC is more likely to resemble CargoSpeed than an "Auto-Max for van trailers".

I like the idea, in principle, of limiting rail loadings for large cars, perhaps in similar ways to how Cooper loadings on bridges are adjusted for multiple axle loadings that are relatively close. How did you pick 65,000lb/axle? Seems to me that you could carry a larger nominal axle load if appropriate equalization over the multiple axles on a big car were implemented, which would increase the potential attractiveness (and reduce the unavoidable opportunity risks) associated with larger units.

I do not believe much existing ocean-shipping capacity is compatible with 53' containers, even those specifically designed to take marine stresses. Even 48' containers are specialized. There's more than just the issue of deepwater ship cells; for example, the elevators on ro/ro vessels, load limits on river and canal traffic (especially in Europe), spreader or crane limits based on ISO series 1, etc.

The Army field manual 55-80 notes

Because of incompatibility with most ship cells, these longer units (particularly the 45 and 53 footers) have generally been considered a domestic asset. Forty-eight footers, 8 feet wide, are becoming popular on some international routes, with the servicing carriers moving these assets either in specially modified holds or above deck.

But I think that expecting a major shift to make these containers common in overseas end-to-end "lanes" will require considerable political and economic 'push' -- and the money to accompli***hat would have to come entirely out of the marginal contribution from the larger containers, which I think is almost incredibly unlikely within the next several years.

There may be some merit in the Amtrak-rerouting scheme, and I suspect that the current Administration might find particular interest in it -- both in terms of helping freight transportation, and perhaps in helping sabotage retention of part or all of the long-distance service!

The open-access system approaches are the most interesting part of this debate for me. The single great problem with it involves main lines at or near capacity, which would be expected to have 'fair' allocation of traffic slots for any approved operating company. I think that in the near term, it's still a good idea to have the company or companies with authority over the track structure also be the company or companies actually operating trains over it.... which differs very, very little from the current paradigm for intermodal operations, the principal difference being that the 'railroad' company might not own the freight-transporting vehicles, and perhaps not all the locomotives.

Junctionfan -- if you look at the beam loadings and equalization for two 'well cars' with double-stacked 40' containers in them, you'll see why it isn't done that way (given current wheel loadings). Note that even adjacently-loaded conventional well cars require special wheels and loading accommodation.

With regard to transloading -- yes, if you're putting LCL loads into cars running between well-defined destination pairs, or in established lanes, there are benefits to it. Given palletized shipments, cheap stevedorage, and a bunch of other things. Are you suggesting that the "60 foot high cube box" is being shunted from one siding to another until filled, then dispatched to the transloader's dock? Might be some security, dunnage, or time considerations there, not to mention the mickey-mouse switchout and associated train delays involved with it. Note how much simpler, in actual practice, this operation is if the various shippers all are using 20' or 40' standard containers, cheap as dirt and about as ubiquitous these days, and can send those either by rail or road to the transloading facility... after which the container is available for other moves to a wide variety of standards-compliant destinations, via a wide variety of standards-compliant modes...

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by JoeKoh

Dave
you might have some clearance issues with some of your larger cars.
stay safe
Joe

Yes you start to get some major "dimentional load" issues if you are going to constantly have a whole bunch of oversize rail equipment.

If you were to start making them all that large then everything from the positioning of signals to entire railyards would have to be re-designed.

It opens up an entire can of worms.

[JoeKoh]

Dave
you might have some clearance issues with some of your larger cars.
stay safe
Joe

[jeaton]

Number 1. What is it?

[Junctionfan]

One way of increasing capacity is trucking companies use 53 foot containers on a chassis instead of 53 foot trailers. This way you can stack and so a 100 car trailer train can be as little as a 50 car train which means a hundred car train could fit as much as 200 truck loads.

Another thing to look at is for the well cars to be extended to 80 feet so you could have 2 40 foots on the bottom and 2 on top or 4 20 foots on the bottom and 2 40 foots on top. Tofc and Cofc flats are 89 feet in length so size wise, it wouldn't be anything new really.

For transloading purposes, delegate more functions with the high capacity cars. If you can get 2 customers into one 60 foot high cube box instead of two 50 foot boxcars, as long as the loads are from the same industry and are heading to the same transloading facility, why not?

[daveklepper]

Wrong on the SF Transcon. The freight moves via Amarillo and the Southwest Chief through Alburqurque. Check the maps and schedules. Is the NP line in good shape? How expensive would it be to put it good shape? The congestion that bothers Amtrak is not prevelant on the BNSF, but is definitely on the Coast Starlight and the Sunsset Limited. What secondary lines would do for them? In the east would you take the Lake Shore's Boston Connection off the B&A though Pittsfield, Springfield, Worcester? Let David Gun run Amtrak please. He is professional and just try to get him the money he needs.

I feel others can comment on the value of your freight suggestions better than I can.

As far as I know, "Schnable" multi-wheel cars are still occasionally used.

[Anonymous]

1. Adopt my invention, Greenbrier's "stack n' half" intermodal car. This design would increase the load factor for moving containers by up to 30%. This translates into 30% more TEU equivalents per given train length, and would take care of much of the congestion at ports and intermodal terminals.

2. Return to the "Rail Whales", the mega cars from the 1960's that were effectively banned by the FRA. These railcars had six and eight axles, and allowed gross weights of over 400,000 lbs, another 30% increase in load factor. On the issue of track maintenance, these cars effectively spread the weight of the car over more axles, reducing wear and tear on trackage (except for the rigid three axle trucks. With the advent of radial steering a flex trucks, that potential problem has been eliminated). In conjuction with a return of six and eight axle freight cars, we can then.....

3. ....limit per axle loads to under 65,000 lbs per axle for these cars. This would obviously reduce wear and tear on track. This means less track being taken out of service for repair, and thus less delays. Current four axle cars would still be allowed at the 286k max (71,500 lbs per axle) to allow them to run out their life expectancy, and prevent any needless distruption in current car supply.

4. Allow container ships to carry a certain amout of U.S. spec domestic containers. Currently, much of the import cargo into the U.S. is being transloaded from 40' ISO containers into the 53' domestic containers and dry vans at U.S. ports before the cargo is transported into the interior. It has occured to more than one freight manager how much cheaper it would be if these domestic containers could be filled at the foreign port by lower cost labor and then shipped to the U.S. This would increase the load factor for container ships and reduce the number of lifts from ship to chassis to well cars. This would really help reduce congestion at ports such as LA and Long Beach.

5. Reroute Amtrak off high density corridors onto lower traffic lines. There are examples of routes where Amtrak runs over heavily used freight lines while parrellel lines with less traffic are available. Take Amtrak off BNSF's High Line and put it on the ex-NP (nee MRL) line through central Monana and North Dakota. Take Amrak off the ex-Santa Fe LA to Chicago line and reroute it to the ex-RI/SSW/SP line. This may increase the travel time for Amtrak passengers and deprive some towns of rail passenger service, but Harve and Minot's loss is Bozeman and Bismark's gain. It would certainly help clear up the heaviest used freight lines.

6. Last but not least, institute some form of open access. We are all aware of paper barriers, bottleneck price gouging, needlessly circuitous routing of freights to keep it all on the "home rails", e.g. examples of inefficient monopolistic practices that keep railroads from performing as they should in theory. Elimination of these practices and caveats would improve the fluidity of rail transit, and greater fluidity equals less congestion.

You are welcome to add or comment on this list, as it is a work in progress.....