Cargo Trams

[narig01]

Just kind of a comment. or my 2 cents worth.

As I've said elsewhere one of the problems in the US is a lack of a secondary rail network.  IE a network that can handle shipments either in very short hauls say 5-30 miles or multiple truck loads that do not make a unit train. 

        In my driving days I saw many manufacturing operations that had an off site storage or distribution warehouse 10-200 miles away and would have multiple truck shipments in a day. Or situations with multiple truck shipments on a pair of shipper/receiver.

    The best example I'll cite is the one from a major food producer that has a distribution center in the Atlanta area that ships 10 truck loads a day to a major grocery warehouse in SW Virginia. The shipper has a rail spur that in 16 years of going in and out of I never did see being used. And the receiver also has a rail spur that(the last time I was there) was being used to store TTX cars.

      One real problem with a lot of truck load freight is it boils down to, for railroads, to single shipments or LCL of "loose car" freight.

Rgds IGN

[carnej1]

The most ambitious plan I'm aware of using this type of technology was a proposed system in Amsterdam, the Netherlands which would have used a fleet of freight carrying light rail vahicles using the existing tram lines.  They were to carry freight from a warehouse location on the outskirts of the city,servicing a network of small freight depots within the city proper where cargo would be transloaded onto small battery electric delivery tucks.

 The whole system was designed and tests were run using converted LRV rolling stock but the private backers of the scheme could not secure sufficient capital. There was to be a municipal/national government subsidy but it was offered on the condition that the funds had to be matched by private investor money, and that never happened so it wasn't built.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDIQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Feltis.org%2FPDF%2Fgenerate_pdf.php%3Fstudy_id%3D1547%26lan%3Den&ei=w8luUZPMAqTx2QX56IHgAQ&usg=AFQjCNHsJZmXK8HxUP_N5gEcd-a_uunYWA&sig2=vqqtdakH6Mwzh5ysx9omcg

 

[Overmod]

Combine the Pacific Electric example with the rise (and fall) of rail LCL service generally.  Outside those special parameters, 'cargo' service may make little sense in typical American contexts.

Trams are useful in situations where the end users are adjacent to the tram route, there is no time pressure (other than expectation of scheduled arrival times), the handling difficulties and weight of the cargo is non-critical, and (especially!) there are external traffic and parking difficulties in areas along the tram route that would make use of a truck either functionally impractical or excessively expensive.

THEORETICALLY you could build something like a full-electric CargoSprinter that would handle larger boxes, like airplane containers.  But you'd have to side-load, with extreme care, because of the OHL that most trams use.  There's a place for this stuff, but most if not all of the specialized material and equipment isn't cost-effective (here in the USA, at least).

The Chicago subway isn't a very good example, because it was built explicitly for transfer and delivery services -- if some of the King's-Dream-of-New-York-style traffic separations had actually been built away from the waterfront, and there were insufficient ventilation down there for motor vehicles, there might be a use for lower-level electric tram service... but I'd still think that using BEV or hybrid trucks, capable of running powered over normal approach roads with normal fuel and labor cost, is still an eminently better solution than anything that runs on tracks and has to be loaded or unloaded out in the street, blocking a travel lane as it is.

The marginal 'fuel' saving of using steel-wheeled equipment fed from the grid instead of BEV/battery-hybrid trucks is vanishingly small unless you have hundreds of trams making thousands of deliveries every day.  And right at that point, the necessary synergy of running the cargo trams 'in between' the normal tram services makes business-hour deliveries a woeful prospect.

And so we are left with the nighttime use of the tram network -- which is comparatively sensible if you have the customer base and customer willingness to load/unload at night.   (Akin to those proposals to run low-profile multimodal stuff through the North River Tunnels in off hours, handing off to the NY&A or whatever, for next-morning delivery.)

If I were going to do this sort of thing, I'd build a hybrid vehicle, a bit like the old Evans Auto-Railer, that could run with a trolley or light pan under wire, on tracks, but easily go off the tracks and run like a normal truck when necessary or desirable.  More expensive and marginally less 'efficient' than, say, a cut-down older passenger tram with big side doors and fold-down ramps.  But infinitely more convenient, and infinitely more flexible, and perhaps (if subsidized) little more expensive in terms of capital, to private firms, than ordinary battery-electric trucks would be.

[Just in case anyone misses this point of the -auto-railer- approach vs. 'trolleytruck' vehicles: with the auto-railer approach we can eliminate the need (both for zero-local-emissions running AND spot rapid recharging as on flywheel buses) for trolleybus-style double overheads, which don't play very nice with pans without lots of finicky optimizations... ]

[daveklepper]

 Volkswagen has a regularly scheduled cargo tram in Wolffsburg, Germany.   Possibly one in Dresden, also.

[henry6]

Definetly the truck took over because of its superiority in flexibility.  But interurbans and trolley lines did provide RPO and express services, funeral cars and trips, as well as lcl and some carload freight.  One of the most notable electric freight lines was probably the Chicago underground which provided services in downtown Chicago to and from loading docks by the carload.

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

The idea has been tried but fell by the wayside with the advent of the truck.  Also, many interurbans and street railways had franchise restrictions limiting or preventing freight operations.

[ontheBNSF]

Transporting cargo by an urban rail system seems like an interesting to me be. You can deliver goods directly to their destination and save energy while doing it because of the lower rolling resistance and the usage of electricity. Even with transmission loss it is still more efficient to use fuel in a generating plant than directly.

CarGo Tram in Dresden

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CarGoTram

Melbourne

http://www.thecollectormm.com.au/private/Elizabeth1962.jpg

Pacific electric

http://www.pacificelectric.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/MP-00409.jpg

http://libraryarchives.metro.net/DPGTL/pacificelectric/AirLine_Expo/1953_AlanWeeks_SantaMonicaAirLine_WestOfPalms_PacificElectricFreight.jpg

http://www.midvalleynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/twebrain_1.jpg