I have seen TC's with close to 150 trailers.
Do these trains require special handling by engineers?
ed
Safety Valve wrote: Murphy Siding wrote: A roadrailer car can't ride along in a train with other freight cars?One good slack run-in or run-out will wreck that floor and collaspe the trailer and scatter the load all over the ground.
Murphy Siding wrote: A roadrailer car can't ride along in a train with other freight cars?
One good slack run-in or run-out will wreck that floor and collaspe the trailer and scatter the load all over the ground.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
I just took a look at the Investor Days info Don referred us to. Pretty interesting stuff. It is outline form, PowerPoint stuff, but the info is interesting.
Looks like TC will be heading to Colorado, Nebraska and other points soon.
Are they currently running to Texas? They are planning to expand there.
Murphy Siding wrote: With autoparts traffic in declining mode, it doesn't sound like Triple Crown has a very bright future.
Some interesting stuff from NS's "Investor Day" http://www.nscorp.com/nscorphtml/speech07/investorday/mrm060607.pdf
Talks about outlook for autoparts, Triple Crown (which is only about 1/3 autoparts, at present) and all other forms of intermodal. Also has some info on "Crescent Corridor".
-Don (Random stuff, mostly about trains - what else? http://blerfblog.blogspot.com/)
...So those rules allow no "pushers" to be connected to any TOW if it were on the rear of a conventional train, and that train required help up a certain area.
Easy to understand....They couldn't stand that force.
Quentin
Equipment Handling Rules generally state that TOWs (Trailer on Wheels, the generic term for RoadRailer type equipement) must either move in dedicated trains, or on the rear conventional trains. You cannot place conventional equipement behind or shove against TOWs.
Nick
Take a Ride on the Reading with the: Reading Company Technical & Historical Society http://www.readingrailroad.org/
There is a loss of at least 10% if not 20% on paid miles versus actual mileage traveled. If my dispatcher says I have a 1500 mile haul from Nogales to point B I automatically add 25% for close to 2000 miles total haul. That is about 500 miles of unpaid driving because everything is based on the now obselete Household Guide.
Toss the guide and bill for the actual miles traveled tracked by GPS and watch the fallout.
But that will not happen as long there is ONE starving O/O, Company or maveric driver willing to take that load out of there for .70 a mile when he or she or the corperation knows well it costs 1.15 to run it.
Sometimes it's nice to take a crap load and get out of a low rate area and start feasting on 1.80-2.50 or more overnights on the other side of the USA.
Greyhounds: You make some very interesting comments and the history lesseon is really appreciated, thanks.
In the late 1990's I worked for a top ten truck line out of Memphis,Tn. we went into a partnership arrangment with the IC out of Memphis, out of the Johnson Yard Piggy-back yard to run daily loads both to Chicago and to New Orleans. At first the trailers were to be contract drayerd to delivery when a MSC company driver was not available, as you can imagine the fees were the deal killer, freight got missed on delivery and pick up appointments both in NOLA and 'the Windy.' Then were were operating trailers the were not 'strengthened' for the piggyback service and damages mounted, the forklifts used at Memphis to load the trailers destroyed a number of trailers and damaged more. As with your RoadRailer deal there was tremendous potential on both sides but the devil was in the details.
Your West Coast senario fails to mention that the lion's share of their produce [and other comodties] are pretty well tied up with brokers; who will wear down the truckers they contract to haul the outbound freight. I have seen, and hauled loads, just to get out of there for prices in the the +- $.70 per mile rate- and that was Rand-McNally miles [about 12% less than actual hub miles]. The broker controls the price; really perishable items, pulled by a team truck can get excelent rates, but the broker is usually in a bind with the shipper, the higher the rate the bigger the bind for the broker/shipper.
It is the shipper/broker arrangement that adds a layer of additional cost or fees to outbound West Coast, as well as East Coast origins, also. Read that as unless a driver works for a carrier that has its own originating or inbound freight, the pay will usually be right at the barely survival rates. If the railroads can hold down costs and get an origin consolidator, such as the one recently put in operation by BNSF up in Washington state, to a destination distribution center they will be able to recapture some of this produce/ other comodities business, but they will not make inrodes until they resolve the integration and compatibility issues with the ability to provide quality on-time transport of time sensitive produce comodities.
We have 4 TC's a day on the local NS line to and from Chicago/Ft Wayne. In fact a fourth train was just added recently, train 242 between Chicago and Bethlehem, Pa. I went down and watched it roll thru Friday night, 1 locomotive and 90 trailers. Pretty impresssive. Even the lovely and talented girlfriend was impressed "that sure is a lot of trucks that arent on the Hoosier highways tonight." Smart.
It would be very interesting to know the economics of TC, but it is doubtful if that info is available. I do know we got an order for 1500 sets for new TC trailers coming up, so I know the capital is there for investment. What NS has done is stick with their plan, where others have failed. Of course it had to have helped to had all of that Ford business on line, but they still had to execute. Was it a recent Trains issue that indicated that around 40% of TC's business is auto parts?
The new auto plants seem to have parts being built very, very close to the assembly plant. Even some of the older plants (Torrence Avenue in Chicago) has a nearby parts "campus".
Does anyone know what the door - door quoted rates are (how they compare) to the truck business? How much of a discount is there on normal lanes?
OK, this is an article I tried to sell to "Trains". It's dated now, but it does tell the story.
The Problem with RoadRailers
The BNSF just recently suspended operation of its "Ice Cold Express" RoadRailer trains. The elimination of these trains, which operated between Los Angeles and Chicago, is disturbing for two reasons.
First, they were targeted on the California produce transportation market. This
market is huge, long haul, and predominately moves via motor freight. California produces
about one half the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed in North America. This equates to
around 500,000 refrigerated tractor-trailers leaving California each year. Most of these
trucks are on long haul runs to eastern population centers. These truckers don't return to
California empty, they maximize their revenue by getting "backhaul loads" from those
eastern cities to California. That makes the total market, including backhauls, 1,000,000
long haul loads per year.
The railroads successfully handled this business for years, but were driven out in
large part by Federal rate regulation.[i] For the DECADES since, the railroads have
generally conceded this long haul business to the truckers.[ii]
The now defunct Ice Cold Express was a strong attempt by the BNSF to get more
of this business back on the rails where it belongs. It's sad to see such a false start in such a
worthy, important effort.
Secondly, this is yet another setback for RoadRailer. For a while, it looked as if the
Ice Cold Express might be RoadRailer's big break through. A major railroad had made a
major investment in refrigerated RoadRailer equipment for the first time. Two intermodal
marketing companies, Alliance Shippers and Clipper Exxpress, also joined the operation.
These companies also made substantial investments in the service by purchasing their own
equipment to operate in the trains. The CN established a connecting RoadRailer Service to
Toronto and Montreal. These cities are both major markets for California produce. CSX
established its own connecting service to the US east coast. It looked as if RoadRailer
might be finally on its way.
Then things began to fall apart. First, the CSX and CN connecting services at
Chicago were shut down. Now the Ice Cold Express no itself longer operates.
Just what the Hell went wrong? Why did the Ice Cold Express join the ranks of
other failed RoadRailer operations? I'm confident that I have a reasonable, logical,
explanation for why the trains failed. This explanation has nothing to do with the actual
viability of RoadRailer technology as a freight transportation vehicle; nor does this
explanation have anything to do with the railroads' ability to compete for service sensitive
business such as California produce.
No, this logical, reasonable explanation deals with humans, not technology. It deals
with humans and their inability to grasp how to use new technology in unfamiliar ways. That's really the problem with RoadRailers. Humans don't yet know how to use them.
Here's the story.
From 1977 to 1985 I worked in intermodal marketing for the Illinois Central Gulf.
In 1981 the ICG became the first railroad to establish regular commercial freight
RoadRailer operations. We established dedicated RoadRailer trains between Louisville,
KY and Memphis, TN. We extended the market served by these trains through over the
road operations. We ran trucks to Indianapolis and Bloomington, IN from the Louisville
terminal. We also ran trucks to Little Rock, AR from Memphis.
It was our job in intermodal marketing to: 1) determine the volume of freight
available in the target market, 2) identify who controlled the routing of this freight, 3)
devise service and pricing packages that would put the freight on our railroad, and 4)
actually get the freight on our railroad.
It was generally a job that I greatly enjoyed. I got up in the morning looking
forward to work. I left work reluctantly to go home. I loved taking freight away from a
trucker, and the ICG could do that, even with its relatively short hauls. The railroad offered
reasonably good intermodal service and had established a separate Intermodal Department,
which was operated as a separate "profit center". Strict cost controls were in place.
Equipment utilization was the rule of the day, every day. If one of us in intermodal
marketing became aware of a truckload movement on one of our "lanes", we could
generally get that freight on the railroad at a profit.
But we intermodal marketing people knew this wasn't going to happen with a
RoadRailer operation between Memphis and Louisville.
It wasn't the length of the lane that scared us, even though it was less than 400
miles; a very short distance for rail intermodal to compete with direct motor movement.[iii]
By necessity, the ICG intermodal department had developed expertise in competing with
trucks at short distances. The longest haul on the railroad was Chicago - New Orleans, 900
miles. On a good day, 10 intermodal loads in each direction would be handled that
distance. That obviously wasn't enough to justify a train, so we had to find more loads.
We found those loads at shorter distances.
We found those loads between Chicago and Memphis - 500 miles; we found those
loads between Memphis and New Orleans - 400 miles; and we were even finding loads,
and duking it out with the truckers between Chicago and St. Louis - 275 miles. The latter
was thanks to a special "Slingshot" service made possible by the then revolutionary use of
two person crews on the trains.
We filled out our scheduled trains and kept the terminals busy. A railroad is a network business and a key to profitability for a network business is to fill up the network
without giving the store away. We got pretty good at doing that.
No, the short length of the haul between Louisville and Memphis didn't bother us
....Triple Crown runs long trains thru here on a daily basis. If that would go by truck via Highway, umpteen drivers would also be needed....Train, 2 men. That must make up for some of that extra weight being discussed.
Murph -- here's a nice article on the Cerrejon coal mine in Colombia, which is the largest one. Note the nice photo of the GE locomotives on their rail line ...
http://www.mining-technology.com/projects/cerrejon/
Murphy Siding wrote: On the issue of roadrailers,somewhere I picture a mad-scientist type guy working on an ethanol haulling roadrailer!
On the issue of roadrailers,somewhere I picture a mad-scientist type guy working on an ethanol haulling roadrailer!
S. Hadid
Murphy Siding wrote: 1435mm wrote: It's not easy to parse auto traffic. Coal is vastly easier to understand.That one still gets me-the fact that we import coal! What's the phrase-sending coal to Newcastle?
1435mm wrote: It's not easy to parse auto traffic. Coal is vastly easier to understand.
It's not easy to parse auto traffic. Coal is vastly easier to understand.
Yes but only a dribble -- about 3% of our 2006 output of 1.16 billion tons.
By the numbers in 2006, 36.2 million tons import (25 of that from Colombia), vs. 49.6 million tons exports (19.4 to Europe, 18.4 to Canada). Basically all that is being imported is Colombian and Venezuelan coal to tidewater or near-tidewater power plants on the Gulf Coast and Atlantic seaboard, and some coking coal. The former is simply a reflection of the fact that water transportation is significantly cheaper than rail transportation (and the Colombian coalfields are near-tidewater), and the latter that we've exhausted most of our low-cost-of-extraction coking coal seams. By the way the Colombian coal mines are owned predominately by U.S. and Canadian coal mining companies (or companies whose stocks are largely held in the U.S.) and most of the mining equipment is sourced in the U.S.
1435mm wrote: I apologize that this wanders; auto traffic is very hard to parse. Coal is vastly easier to understand.
I apologize that this wanders; auto traffic is very hard to parse. Coal is vastly easier to understand.
It gets very complicated. Many builders such as Toyota, Honda, and BMW are clearly building a substantial manufacturing base in the U.S., but that may or may not be good for railroads. It might lose for the railroad the long-haul assembled vehicle business from a port -- or it might actually enhance the railroad's traffic as the plant seeks to distribute by rail throughout North America rather than a lot of import short-hauls by truck to dealer from seaports around the margin of the continent. It might build an autoparts traffic from U.S. parts manufacturers, or a nice container business from a seaport to the plant, and which is more profitable, anyway?
Often the "foreign" manufacturers have started out in North America only as assembly plants with very low U.S. content but later the North American content rises substantially. Many "foreign" autos such as Toyota actually have a higher domestic parts content, up in the 80% range (counting domestic as both U.S. and Canadian) than many "U.S." products such as Chrysler (the U.S. manufacturers have substantial content from Canada and Mexico). From an automaker's point-of-view empty backhauls of multilevels, steamship containers, and RoRo ships all come under the category "things to avoid," as does the risk of having all of the assembly and parts sourcing in one country and the market in another, due to currency volatility penalties and the risk of tariffs, labor unrest, political unrest, transportation cost volatility, etc. The automakers that intend to compete in the long term are really not "domestic" or "foreign" but multinational in outlook and dispersal of assembly and sourcing.
From a railroad's point of view it might make more money to long-haul foreign-made parts from Long Beach to Kentucky, than from northern Indiana to Atlanta. On the other hand railroads understand that manufacturers, especially big ones like automakers, are in the business of trimming their transportation costs to zero. Assembly plants in the Kentucky-Tennessee region are within one day's truck transportation to better than 50% (two thirds? I can't recall) of the U.S. population base, according to Ward's Automotive. So at first blush while it might appear that a new Toyota plant in Kentucky hurts rail traffic on the output side it might actually be better than a Detroit plant on the input side, or, if it sources its parts locally it might hurt rail traffic, but meanwhile rail traffic increases for the raw materials that make the parts -- plastic pellets, steel, iron ore, coal, etc.
Fundamentally I do not see how the financial woes of GM, Ford, and Chrysler are necessarily "bad" for North American railroads. No one is talking liquidation of them yet, only liquidation of the obligations. Regardless, even if the domestic manufacturers should dwindle much or most of the loss of U.S. auto production will be made up by the foreign makers building assembly plants and parts supply networks here. That is because U.S. heavy manufacturing is vastly more competitive than many think. The labor cost advantage that developing nations such as India and China have is not sufficient to overcome the cost disadvantages of transportation, engineering, support, and infrastructure for vast swaths of the manufacturing universe, and as their labor costs rise they become even less competitive. U.S. heavy manufacturing is highly competive with its industrial-nation competitors -- ask Komatsu why they failed to unseat Caterpillar's global dominance of earthmoving equipment, CNH-Global why they haven't overturned John Deere, Airbus why BearStearns predicts Boeing will get 64% of the revenue for heavy jetliners, or any number of companies why GE eats their lunch. I think the bottom was reached several years ago in the U.S. in terms of loss of output to low-labor cost nations, depending on which particular sector one happens to be in. In heavy capital goods we appear to be gaining ground rapidly.
1435mm wrote:You haven't convinced me that autoparts are a declining business. Who says they are?
Triple Crown says the weight penalty on a current-model 53' RoadRailer trailer is about 800 lbs.
It's difficult to make the economics work unless the lane has consistent load factors and loads both ways. Otherwise there's a lot of equipment sitting around as well as an investment in terminals that is being spread over not enough loads. Conventional domestic container or trailerload is much more flexible, the equipment is cheaper, and the terminals have more loads in more lanes to spread their costs over.
Specialized equipment is often squeezed between two rocks -- one rock is that it takes a lot of loads, consistently, to make the purchase of the equipment economically viable; the other rock is that when you have that many loads, boxcars become economically viable. So you work really hard to build up the traffic and then you lose it to carload!
Triple Crown has found much of its success in autoparts lanes, where the parts originate at a fairly dispersed grid which makes it hard to get the costs low for carload, the load factors are very steady, and backhauls are available.
It's really hard to take a network business (trailerload, domestic container) and carve out speciality lanes. All of the economies of the network are denied to you.
CShaveRR wrote:Possibly because the weight of RoadRailer trailers limit their payload for highway mode. Even moving the rail wheels to separate bogies hasn't helped enough.
Carl: The weight problem was a real issue with the earlier versions that had the railwheel set attached permanently to the trailer..the earliest version had the rail wheels behind a fixed tandem and one version had a spread axle arrangement with the rail wheels located in the center of the spead-axle road wheels.
Now with the railwheels detached for highway use, the issue is probably keeping this specialized equipment [ the trailer] in a captured position between the origins and destinations, specifically points where there is a certain volume of freight to keep the equipment moving between those two points...the automotive business with Triple Crown does this. for every so many loads there is a return of empty racks back to the origin, or anoter back haul that will get the unit back to the origin. Normal trailers can be made to be piggybacks with very rudimentary modifications, -pads for the pick up equipment- which can be either purpose build additions or simply a wooden board affixed to the trailer bottom to prevent damage to the trailer's lower rail.
All that crap hanging off the trailer cuts seriously into what you can put into a box. In fact, that weight cuts down on how much money you can load into that trailer literally.
A second problem is one of maintaince. Trailers get thrown around and abused until something breaks. When it does break, they try to get the load delivered first and then set it aside to be fixed, if ever. That road rail stuff just increases more stuff to break.
Training. Not too many companies are going to take the time to train drivers on how to rail them things or unrail it.
And finally...
The paperwork mushrooms into a frankenstien whenever you change modes of transport. Road, Rail, Water trainsport inside the USA. Any one of the three modes or any combination of those modes will affect who gets what money for the haul and how the paper work is done.
Triple Crown does it on the Horseshoe and they make it work. But a average trucking company? NAH. We can beat a train most of the time except the Tropicana Juice.
Carl
Railroader Emeritus (practiced railroading for 46 years--and in 2010 I finally got it right!)
CAACSCOCOM--I don't want to behave improperly, so I just won't behave at all. (SM)
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