Mini Intermodal Yards?

[Paul Milenkovic]

Kneiling's idea was that an intermodal "integral train" would be just like a passenger train. A passenger train makes stops, and at some stops only a few people get on or off, but by an large passenger trains have fixed consists and are not switched. Oh, there are famous exceptions regarding sleepers, diners, or even entire sections being switched on and off from passenger trains, and there was Amtrak's experiment with switching head-end cars on passenger trains, but these exceptions prove the rule as it were because switching passengers trains was almost always an operational as well as a passenger-service quality headache.

Where the Stedman gear comes in is that you can stop a train in a siding with little more than a road running alongside, and you have random access to pull or add containers to the train, just like individual passengers can vacate or occupy seats at a station stop. Kneilings point was that stopping a train was not a big deal but switching or otherwise breaking up a consists was a very big deal -- coupling shocks on down the line. A fixed consist also allowed tightlock couplers, distributed motive power, two-pipe brakes, electrical activation of brakes, and all of the other features we now take for granted on passenger trains (yes, some passenger trains have distributed motive power in the form of MU cars or locomotives at both ends for performance reasons).

Kneiling argued that the side-transfer system was much lower labor cost than certain crane systems. Don't know the name of the front loader tractor gizmo that grasps a container or trailer and lifts it up, but in the day that was the "new thing" which Kneiling pointed out needed an operator along with two spotters because the operator had the container or trailer in his face when lifting it.

The disadvantages of side transfer I can think of are 1) the trucker carries around the active part of the gear, so there may be a cost/tare weight disadvantage at the trucking end, 2) the gear may require a lot of skill to operate, 3) the transfer rate may favor handling small numbers of containers rather than big volumes.

As to the skill level and capital costs, there is one area where sliding transfer gear dominates the market: garbage. A Dumpster is not just a bin you throw garbage into; it is part of a material handling system where a truck has the gear to tip and drag the Dumpster on to a platform. It is in widespread use and is the prefered "intermodal" system for garbage. No one comes around with one of these intermodal terminal style cranes to pick up the Dumpster and put it on the truck or to empty the Dumpster at the landfill site.

Kneiling was of the mind that the reason railroads were resisting the side-transfer system is that they were wedded to TOFC instead of COFC. Nowadays, so much stuff is COFC that this issue needs to be revisited. As to the double stacks, I believe Kneiling had an opinion on that, that it was better overall to single-stack and use the side-transfer gear as far as effectiveness of the overall system, but then John Kneiling had an opinion on just about everything as it was.

Am I the only "old timer" around here he read all his Professional Iconoclast columns in Trains and read Integral Train Systems? The railroading community thought him to be a crackpot back in the day, but I am surprised Kneiling and his ideas don't have that much of a following among us "crackpot railfans."

[Anonymous]

Maybe the RR's need to reinvent the wheel with wally world which seems to do a pretty good job at making $.....

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

I never bought "Integral Train Systems" when it was published by Kalmbach (the price was a bit steep for a high school student) but I did read his columns regularly. It usually took a couple of readings to understand him, but his main asset was a willingness to think outside the box. While railroading has yet to run an actual integral train, it has inched closer to that goal over the years.

I've observed over the years that my willingness to embrace many of the changes that have occurred in railroading (especially after de-reg) have put me in a minority.

[MP173]

As a college student in the 70's, I never bought Kneiling's book, but certainly did read his monthly columns. He was on the money with many of his ideas. It was very entertaining to read the reactions in the letters to editor a month or two later.

I may have to go back a read a few again.

ed

[Anonymous]

In Gloverstown NY the Walmart sits right next to the FJ&G right of way(Abondoned). There is about 300 trucks or more or less a day that come thru town. Now seeing that Walmart buys in such bulk could they get a boxcar of garden supplies or a Roadrailer train of DVD players? It would proably cost 12,000,000 to put the line back. If this were funded by bonds it certainly would improve the quility of life.

[daveklepper]

Israel Railways has huge mobile rubber-tired straddle cranes that are moved to particular sidings for specific agricultural seasons for loading containers on flat cars, generally one 40-48 foot container or two 28-foot containers on a conventional 40-50 foot 8-wheel flat car, no double stacking. These trains run directly to the Ashdot or Ashkalon Ports, with tracks on the docks, so the containers can be moved directly to the ships to cut down ship-in-port time. It is an under 200 mile haul, sometimes as little as 50 miles, but the railroad the port authority figure it is worth it by cutting down ship-in-port time. The huge straddle crane might be seen at a particular siding or yard just of one week or three days, and then it is off to somehwere else, moving on the highway at around 2AM. Some of these locations are adjacent to commuter stations on coastal Tel Aviv - Haifa line, but there are others. I think even the freight trains now use airbrakes instead of vacuum brakes that were the British Mandate legacy, but they still use screw and chain couplers and buffers, although the passenger equipment now uses modern transit style couplers.

[mudchicken]

QUOTE: Originally posted by ericsp

QUOTE: Originally posted by mudchicken

QUOTE: Originally posted by broncoman

Aren't there times when traffic becomes so prohibitive that dealing with the 3/5 car spine issues isn't that bad compared with the delays of truck traffic going from intermodal facility to D.C. Its probably going to be really interesting in many places in the next couple of years with regards to it being easier to move things via rail as opposed to truck. I would think the port of oakland is going to be one of these experiments.
Does anyone know how the Wal-mart D.C in the Central Valley CA (can't remember exactly what town) is fed by? UP, BNSF?

Thanks
Dave

Porterville, CA .......RailAmerica SanJoaquin Valley RR (former ATSF line, ex SP nearby)

Actually, it is next to the ex-SP. The ex-ATSF through Porterville has been removed (from s/o Lindsay to Ultra). There is no spur going into the center.

The old ATSF branchlines through the San Joaquin Valley have been decimated. The only remaining portions are from Exeter to Lindsay, Ducor to Ultra, Visalia to Loma, and a branch from the BNSF main in Fresno to eastern Fresno (SP used trackage rights on this for part of its Clovis Branch), all SJVR; there is also a section from the BNSF yard in Fresno to an A&K Railroad Materials yard in Fresno and the Oakdale Branch.

Just don't stay at the Best Western in Front of the Wal-Mart DC in Porterville. The air conditioning never wworks and you listen to trucks going in and out all night![:(!]

[daveklepper]

I did read just about all of Kneiling's comments. In fact when he ran the Joint Railfan Trip Committee in New York City, he ran some streetcar trips, and I was the designated teen-age pole-puller to speed up reverse movements. How he managed to talk the New York City transit authority into running an el train (open platform gate cars) with the gondola car with fans standing in it at the front pushed by the train I'll never know, but it did make the front page of the New York Times! He also ran a fantrip on the LIRR with one Gibbs car (the original electric cars built to the same design as the first steel IRT subway cars), one or two MP-54's (I think one arch roof and one cleristory) and one 1939-era double-decker, all in one train, no two cars alike.

[StillGrande]

In Alexandria, Va near Van Dorn Street there is a 2 track Norfolk Southern intermodal facility next to the UPS distribution center. They handle mostly trailers (from what I can tell from the road) but not just UPS stuff. There is usually 4-6 locomotives parked there during the day. The tracks are not terribly long and they have one or two mijacks to work the trains.

[Junctionfan]

That reminds me, where is the tra***ofcs loaded? Those Colt cars (spine cars) seem to pop up all over the CSX and NS system on manifests.

[Overmod]

Kneiling was a major formative influence on my thinking, in quite a few respects. I remember an extended correspondence regarding the implementation of MU gas turbines on intermodal trains (as he proposed in the late '60s) in the period before the first OPEC blowup in '73.

Regardless of what the CargoSprinter people, who seem to be the heirs of this kind of capital equipment, may say, you're going to put a significant kink into operations on most modern railroad main lines by stopping for any period of time required for side-loading operations. I think Mr. Kneiling was presuming a number of things in claiming the short transfer time, including 'perfect' equipment and training on the part of all the groundside personnel, as well as a well-aligned location where the truck (or unloading platform, would be in the required stable and relatively leveled alignment required for a relatively heavy ISO container. I think that, at the time, he was presuming the intermodal containers would be built with low tare weight (on the Flexi-Van model) whereas what actually got standardized at trailer length usually has marine-type, if not in fact full marine-strength, construction...

Of course, once crews got accustomed to working with Letroporters and similar transfer equipment, the presumed latch-on problems, lifting, etc. became comparatively insignificant, and the operating issues with maintaining something like top-spreader equipment (or, for that matter, big 'glorified-forklift' underlift equipment, will always be less than for ratcheting sideloaders capable of the same transfer speed. If you have the area for the rear of the Letroporter to swing, you can easily accommodate vehicles or situations not strictly parallel and close to the track; a disparity of train and vehicle/dock height; if your top spreader has lateral shift, you can neatly accommodate out-of-level situations as well as weight-imbalanced or shifted-load containers, SAFELY.

Oh, yes: you can work with stack-train consists, including those situations where you have to reach a container on the bottom. Don't even think about trying a side-loading transfer on something in a well car, or on two stacked containers at once, although there are technological methods for doing those things; it will be sooner, not later, that you have enough slack in your equipment or operating methods that you have an 'incident', which if you're lucky will only screw up train operations for a few hours or so and not hurt somebody badly. (Heck, the Canadians couldn't even keep the suspension or the hitches on the Iron Highway going for any length of time! ;-})

Much of the same applies with a bit different method when using a straddle-loader of appropriate design. While I don't expect to see these things cruising the highway in most of the United States, we've seen within the past few months how easily one can be packaged and sent via rail to a place where it could be reassembled. Shouldn't be terribly hard to design a loader optimized for transportation and remote use -- for precedent, see the forklifts designed for Home Depot and similar trucks, with enough capacity to handle construction supplies, but designed for extremely low tare and reasonable balance when being carried, and a simple but stable method for mounting and demounting from big straight trucks.

I feel somewhat qualified to discuss side-loading systems, as I've designed equipment for them. My preference is to use them primarily for fixed transfer points, with the specialized equipment (but not necessarily the prime mover supplying power for the equipment) located in a fixed scaffolded structure at trackside. Containers are quickly transferred to this structure, in parallel if appropriate to minimize dwell time, and trucks or other modes can reach even tightly-spaced containers simply by loading at slightly different times; the structures can also be adapted to adjust container height, attitude, etc. or to swivel them as needed for other forms of loading.

The primary problem with Dumpster-type loading is the significant tilt it puts on a container during loading. This could be at least partly overcome when using a 'dedicated' articulated chassis by using small bogie wheels on the trailer section and a relatively long angled apron behind that bogie with something like roller-table wheels, similar to what many sideloaders use. If you have the ability to pivot the container on the railcar, a la FlexiVan, you can do Dumpster-type loading on more or less the same level -- which is preferable imho. You're still faced with the need to rotate the container through an angle sufficient to get the chassis to bear on it -- not necessarily 90 degrees, but something not particularly advisable on a railcar that's part of a train with very low dwell time. (I won't speculate on how much 'fun' you could have skidding the containers sideways off the car using a cable-and-hydraulics rig, then repositioning the same chassis to load them Dumpster-style, except that you'd have lots of fun with corner castings.

[BurlingtonJohn]

IIRC, there was a facility near El Centro California that used to have containers loaded with hay and then dropped into well cars ... it has been a long time since I was there, so things may have changed ...

Regards,
Burlington John

[Anonymous]

PHOOEY ON REDMONDITES!!

[Overmod]

AntiGates, welcome to the right side of the Force...

...but OS 8.0 was about as full of bugs as a New York apartment with peanut butter smeared on the walls... 8.1 was the first stable build of that OS, and that was a pretty good one, but it wasn't really 'til 8.6 that the thing got set up to be modern (e.g. with USB) and by then it was artificially jiggered not to work with the Windows dual-mode compatibility boards. (THAT was, I feel certain, engineered in collusion with Redmond somehow).

Legacy conversion is to 9.2.2 under 'pure' Mac OS; I don't have any particular hesitation in recommending OS X 10.3; won't switch to run Tiger until I'm convinced the little 'foibles' are out of the delivered code. I like the sentiment, though!

[ericsp]

QUOTE: Originally posted by mudchicken

QUOTE: Originally posted by ericsp

QUOTE: Originally posted by mudchicken

QUOTE: Originally posted by broncoman

Aren't there times when traffic becomes so prohibitive that dealing with the 3/5 car spine issues isn't that bad compared with the delays of truck traffic going from intermodal facility to D.C. Its probably going to be really interesting in many places in the next couple of years with regards to it being easier to move things via rail as opposed to truck. I would think the port of oakland is going to be one of these experiments.
Does anyone know how the Wal-mart D.C in the Central Valley CA (can't remember exactly what town) is fed by? UP, BNSF?

Thanks
Dave

Porterville, CA .......RailAmerica SanJoaquin Valley RR (former ATSF line, ex SP nearby)

Actually, it is next to the ex-SP. The ex-ATSF through Porterville has been removed (from s/o Lindsay to Ultra). There is no spur going into the center.

The old ATSF branchlines through the San Joaquin Valley have been decimated. The only remaining portions are from Exeter to Lindsay, Ducor to Ultra, Visalia to Loma, and a branch from the BNSF main in Fresno to eastern Fresno (SP used trackage rights on this for part of its Clovis Branch), all SJVR; there is also a section from the BNSF yard in Fresno to an A&K Railroad Materials yard in Fresno and the Oakdale Branch.

Just don't stay at the Best Western in Front of the Wal-Mart DC in Porterville. The air conditioning never wworks and you listen to trucks going in and out all night![:(!]

It sounds like you speak from experience. I doubt I would stay at any of the motels in the cities and towns along Highway 65. I did notice a Best Western in Exeter that looked new. I have never seen the inside of it. Funny how topics get side tracked. It starts out about industries that load and unload containers themselves to motels on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley.

[ericsp]

It seems like I heard something about an intermodal terminal dedicated (or nearly so) to the Eastman Chemical plant in Kingsport, TN.

[Junctionfan]

QUOTE: Originally posted by ericsp

It seems like I heard something about an intermodal terminal dedicated (or nearly so) to the Eastman Chemical plant in Kingsport, TN.

Do they make plastic pellets or resins?