I’m a modern-era modeler who is a massing a fair amount of autorack cars.
I know that for the most part, there are four main types of autorack cars on the rails today:
89’ Tri-level - For compact cars
89’ Bi-level - For SUVs and trucks
Articulated autoracks - For larger cars
Gunderson Auto Max articulated autoracks - For maximum payload of SUVs with less wasted space
Is there a methodology for stringing the cars together? Or are they just thrown together (albeit with regard for their final destinations)? Or are the bi-levels grouped together apart from the tri-levels (possibly to facilitate loading/unloading in the appropriate facilities?
Also, does a single autorack unit train represent cargo from a single manufacturer? In other words, if an autorack train travels from Long Beach, CA to Chicago, IL, will it only contain, say, Toyotas/Lexuses or can it contain Toyotas as well as Hondas and/or Nissans? Similarly, would an autorack train traveling from Detroit to Seattle contain only Fords?
I’d appreciate any insight regarding autorack trains!
It depends on the railroad, the era, the specific movement, what the blocks are.
Modelers go by what the outside of the car looks like or the brand of the manufacturer of the railcar. Railroads really don’t care about that. What they care about is the loading pattern INSIDE the car. Up until the late 1990’s or so, each manufacturer had a different method of tying down the cars inside the railcar. So a car wasn’t a “trilevel”, it was a Ford Mustang trilevel because the tie down chains were only set for Ford Mustangs. After the 1990’s the restraints were standardized so virtually any make or model can be quickly accomodated.
To a person standing beside the tracks it can look like a total mishmash of cars, but to the railroad it might be highly organized.
It depends on the railroad, the era, the specific movement, the specific shippers.
The earlier the era the more uniform the movements, the more recent the era the more likely the movements will be mixed.
It also depends on where you are in the chain. Some manufacturers use “mixing” or distribution centers. They drive all their production into one spot, unload the cars of a solid model
a couple of things about auto rack loads. first off, my experience on the railroad dates from the time of open cars. back in the 60’s although i was around later when the enclosed cars started showing up.
i worked for the NYC/PC/CR at E St Louis. we received a lot of automobile loads from the 3 major assembly plants in St Louis. just about all of it came to us through the TRRA. Chrysler and Ford were on the Frisco and NW (Wabash) respectively and those two roads were the originating carriers for billing purposes while GM was located in the city of St Louis and was switched by the TRRA direct. the Terminal Railroad Association received switching and river transfer revenue but no line haul. after GM moved to the new Wentzville plant, their traffic came to us from the NW. (NS)
the east coast destinations went out mine run mostly in trains NY-6 (Selkirk NY) and SW-6 (Enola Pa). the auto loads would be together in those trains because that is the way they were switched out from the interchange deliveries we received but the loads from all 3 assembly plants did not necessarily come to us in the same cut so you would see a bunch of Fords somewhere in the train with the GM and/or Chrysler loads elsewhere in that same train.
we measured the loads by passing them through a set of lights mounted on a pole with photo cells on another pole across the lead from the light pole. there were 3 different heights and the alarm box was on the yardmaster’s desk. used to drive him nuts when birds would fly through and break the light beam.
these were high liability and high revenue loads. best i remember we got about 2000 dollars for a tri-level load St Louis to Little Ferry NJ. the railroad cops were all over these cars when they came in. not so much to protect them but to check for vandalism so we could lay any damage off to the delivering road instead of being resposible for it.
From my experience , autorack trains can be pretty diverse , I know that Toyota has a couple od dedicated trains , 1 to Jacksonville FL and one to Kansas City MO . but there are several other trains that are made up of many car makers . Generally Bi - levels are grouped together for easy unloading and the same goes for Tri-levels .
The Gunderson Auto Max cars are generally used by Honda as they lease the largest fleet . The Articulated Bi- levels will carry both , auto’s and trucks on a regular basis .
Fast automatic unloading! [(-D] I’ve seen a set of pics of a CN (IIRC) train that did the same thing with a low clearance overpass. Impressive. It also showed me that racks get mixed into a consist in a pretty random way and not just run as unit trains or blocks of cars.
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I have to confess that the few tri-level, enclosed racks I have are UP or one “commercial” ID (Don’t recall which merchant off hand)… BUT… I have often wondered whether cars tend to stay in RR or company blocks or just get mixed around and run anywhere like boxcars???
Would a UP rack tend to stay on UP routes and an NS rack tend to stay in NS territory or would a UP rack freely wander into the North East and an NS rack wander to maybe San Fransisco or Seatle?
Are some racks in captive service? …and if so are they clearly marked as such?
Racks are pooled. The Toyota plant in Cambridge, ON is served by the CP, but it most certainly does not load only CP cars. With the amount of CSX, UP, BNSF, NS, CN, etc. racks that arrive for loading, CP cars are in the minority.
Now of course, like Dave H. said, it really depends on route, era, road, shipper, etc. On CN and CP’s transcontinental routes in the 1970s, anything other than CN and CP cars would have been in the minority, since cars would travel the width of the continent on a single railroad’s track, so they used their own cars for that. CN and CP weren’t really major participants in Trailer Train at that point either. Which makes modelling that period interesting because you can’t really use TTX racks or intermodal cars.
I don’t believe the AUTO-MAX cars can be loaded in the same string as other autoracks, they’re not really compatible. They’re only used at certain plants. For this reason, they don’t really mix with other autoracks, unless they end up mixing in a general manifest freight, or if that plant also loads into different types of cars, but then the two types would probably be in separate blocks (er, same block as far as the railroad is concerned, but would probably end up in separate strings due to the way they’d be coming out of the plant(s)) since they can’t actually be loaded together. (Of course this is just at the point of loading, if the cars get sorted somewhere for other destinations, they might start mixing a little.)
The BTTX style articulated racks are fully compatible with standard bi-levels, and I see them mixed in together all the time.
They don’t stay on the home road, but they don’t “wander” either. First off, very few of the cars belong to a railroad. So you probably don’t own any “UP” cars. The reporting marks on the majority of the auto racks are some version of TTX. That’s because the RACK is provided by the railroad and the CAR is provided by TTX. Each railroad contributes racks to TTX. TTX assigns cars to each shipper. The shipper then sends cars assigned to it to the destinations they serve. So a “UP” car might go anywhere in the US and might not actually see UP rails for years, possibly ever.
The railroads track the cars, not the rack so unless somebody physically looks at a car, they couldn’t tell you who owned the rack or what railroad name was on the car. If there were 10 autoracks in a track, there is no way to identify what railroad’s name is on the rack. All the railroad sees or cares about is the car number.
As the market changes, the shippers change the mix of cars they need and so TTX shifts which cars are in which service to which customer. So the cars can be going to different places and over the course of years can serve different shippers, but they aren’t in general service.
Thanks for the answers to my daft questions… I’d forgotten the ?TTX reporting marks.
What I now don’t understand is why the cars get anyone else’s markings on them? Are the racks defined (fitted/billed/whatever) seperately from the ?TTX car they are bolted to?
Nope. The racks are part of the car. They are welded to the cars not bolted. Since the railroads own TTX and since the railroads paid to put the racks on the cars I guess they have the right to put their name on the racks.