I really do not think this will be the great success Amazon thinks it will. Who is the biggest rail carrier of Amazon trailers? Is it evenly distributed?
The competition will have something to say. But perhaps it is sort of like how AWS got started - they overbuilt their network capacity and then sold the excess capacity to others.
Does anyone here know Amazon’s delivery business model in terms of its drivers? Are they actual Amazon employees, or independent contractors? If the latter, do the contractors own their own vehicles, ala FedEx Home, or does Amazon?
As far as I know, they are independent contractors but drive company vehicles. That’s really skirting the contractor/employee line, but in this business climate, they can probably get away with it.
“Pay to Play” on a scale Blago never dreamed of.
A lot of Amazon containers go through Fort Madison on the old Santa Fe. You can see them on Virtual Railfan and Steel Highways. Steel Highways also has the railroad radio and towboat radio for the bridge.
And I’m seeing more and more heading into Chicago on UP West.
Charlotte N C gets Amazon containers also NS and CSX.
What I find interesting is the the Amazon containers/trailers do not have their vehicle id initials end in the customary ‘Z’ for trailers or ‘U’ for containers.
All the trailers that I have seen have AZNG.
Likewise!
Being 10 years retired I don’t know how the railroads are handling this outlier from the standard.
The NS train 28N runs from Chicago to Charlotte, typically with anywhere between 10 and 40 Amazon containers daily.
For comparison UPS is typically around 10 per day.
Ed
Union Pacific also has trackage rights on the old Santa Fe that had belonged to Southern Pacific and they use them. Their stack trains are really long through Fort Madison.