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A month in the life of 4 freight cars
Ugly numbers
Pathetic. Hopefully the typical percentage of bad orders is magnitudes lower than in this sample. Still, it should not take this long to process them. Cars sitting in multiple yards for days at a time should be a thing of the past. What is going on in Danville, VA? Almost 6 days there and then 2.5 hours to go to the east side of town!
I hate to say it but if I were a business that relied on rail for my product I most likely would be out of business, in this day and age most manufacturers use Just In Time and if you are not there with the product the whole place will shut down. I will stick with truck freight much faster. Hope I said this right.
6 days in Danville - perhaps the consignee was not ready to receive the load since it was so late.
Heads would have rolled for this kind of performance on the NYC … 40 years ago! Have we really gotten worse?
For some types of merchandise (e.g., non-perishable, not damaged by environmental issues) you may not want the fastest possible service. You want the lowest possible cost of service. If you do a more-or-less constant volume of product you need it to arrive as a steady stream. Intrinsically it does not matter how long the product is in the pipeline, as long as you get it when you need it. There is the cost of the product in the pipeline - so you find the minimum of the combination of cost of shipping and cost of product in the pipeline. If it’s a one-off shipment and I need it tomorrow I’ll use a truck. If it’s a steady stream and it can stay on the rails a while I’ll ship by rail.
Sure speed of shipment is important. But it is not the most important factor here. Stability of supply could easily be the most important factor, and if so I might not care that the railroad takes two weeks instead of one to get it to me, as long as it is consistent and the cost of the extra week is cheaper than the differential cost of the extra product left in the hands of the shipper.
Remember, what goes in eventually comes out, so the cost of what is in the pipeline is not the direct cost of the product but the cost (e.g., interest, other associated factors) of having that money tied up thusly rather than free to be used for other purposes.
If the shipper and consignee are both on the tracks and you do not have a just in time delivery then by all means go the cheapest way possible but on the other hand if the consignee is not on the tracks you have an additional cost of delivery and with out REA there becomes a huge logistics problem. Truck is by far the best way as it will get there on time most of the time Rail is for the non sensitive freight in my opinion. I am a retired Owner Operator with 30+ years in the seat.
I would agree with Ms. Harding…As a recipient. I would not care how long the RR stores my shipment for free as long as I don’t yet need it. If it arrives before I need it, now I have to provide storage. The pressure comes from manufacturers and suppliers who don’t get paid until the car arrives at the customer’s location. They should finance their undelivered shipments and take full advantage of the system. A truck cant slow down delivery or hold your goods on board because the driver is needed for another job. The railroad doesn’t care.