Freight train vs truck

[Overmod]

Perry Babin

Are they saying that if you deliver the intermodals from a train with 150 double stack cars that you'd need only 4x the fuel if you were moving them the same distance with 300 truck

You need to do some careful research and homework before swallowing any lore about truck vs. train efficiency.  Otherwise you're stuck in the era of comparing Niagaras to 'diesels', or a couple of decades later 'diesels' to AMC Berkshires.  Even if the analysis is correctly and fairly conducted, everything has changed in sometimes considerable detail since then.

A fully modern Class 8 OTR truck is capable of getting upward of 12.5mpg average over a large percentage of many routes, loaded (to about 40T - those in the industry can flesh out with much better numbers than I have).  Meanwhile, rail fuel efficiency has increased with improvements in EFI, predictive operation, AC synthesis drive, proper rail and wheel grinding maintenance, etc.  Something leveraging costs for the truckers is additional fuel cost due to tax recovery attempts, but that is usually passed along as a surcharge rather than incorporated in an "economic analysis" as it should be.  There are also, as shadow's owner points out, what may be substantial net costs related to emissions control -- some of which apply, in other ways, to Tier 4 final (or better) locomotives.

One of the big savings is, as you note, the need to pay team drivers for each 'container' or equivalent, rather than one train crew for 15,000' of articulated stack cars.  For routes that make sense to operate on this scale by rail -- which involve intermodal-point to intermodal-point or cross-dock facility -- this difference is enormous even before we start looking into issues like driver availability.

You'll want to do this before you start factoring in things like truck and truck-route electrification, semi-autonomous operation or yarding, smart bogies for 'road trains', etc.

[Backshop]

First, you should post a link so that we can determine the veracity of the site. Second, remember that the truck goes door-to-door with the load while with a train you'll need to add in both first- and last-mile delivery costs.

[Perry Babin]

I don't know why but the numbers I found on the net about truck vs train transport and efficiency seems very far off. It seems that several sites say that train is 4x more fuel efficient. 

Are they saying that if you deliver the intermodals from a train with 150 double stack cars that you'd need only 4x the fuel if you were moving them the same distance with 300 trucks?