Easily one of my favorite railcars, I have yet to find a railroad that existed in or or since the 1980s that did not have one of the enclosed autoracks.
Do all railroads really have this much automobile traffic? I know how they are loaded, but what are their routes like? Do they all run from seaports to inland dealers, or do some travel from dealer to dealer? Do all railroads that own autoracks serve a manfacturer/importer of automobiles?
I used to work for GM a while ago. The autorack trains for domestic consumption run from an auto assembly plant to various auto transloading points in the United States. Used to be one near Kenosha or Racine, WI not sure if it still exists. Anyways the autoracks are parked in strings of 6-10 cars at an off loading lot and the cars are driven off and parked waiting for the autorack trucks to upload them and take them to dealerships served by the rail offloading point.
On the Milwaukee Road one of it’s well known freight trains was the train that ran to the St. Paul Ford assembly plant taking those huge boxcars of parts as well as full autoracks to the St. Paul (yes they were full heading up there and full comming back) plant for unloading and loading and it would return to Chicago. I believe the plant has closed now and that train no longer runs but the follow-on CP still hauls significant auto traffic so my guess is there is a auto transload point somewhere near St. Paul. Plus the autoracks running back to St. Paul were usually full of Ford Vans and Trucks so my guess is again they ran the racks full in both directions and there was probably a transloading yard at or near St. Paul.
Typically the trains have nothing to do with a specific dealership rather a region of dealerships combined in a regional sales area or area(s) support a rail offloading point where the cars on autoracks are transferred to a lot first…where they are organized for truck loading for the final delivery to a dealership.
Similarly, imported autos are loated on autoracks at the port for transportation to the transloading points. As with the auto plants there are large parkindg lots to hold the cars awaiting autoracks.
From the transloading points the usually move by highway autotrailer to dealers. I
A number of years ago, Ford developed their ‘Mixing Center’ strategy for auto distribution. Product was shipped from multiple manufacturing plants by rail to the ‘Mixing Center’. There the product was off loaded and reloaded and moved by rail to the final distribution centers for furtherance by truck to dealers.
The philosophy for this being that the manufacturing facility did not have sufficient volumes to ship directly to the final distribution centers. I believe the strategy was administrated by UPS.
KBC, I’m in Flint, Mi. We have shippied a few auto out of here over the years, (formerly GM’s largest concentration of plants and employees in the world, as well where they got started). As I understand it the RR names are 1st the TTX owners but the number of cars they each pay for is based on the approx % they handle. Which should explain why there are so many UP, BN CN, CSX, NS, GTW (CN) cars. That’s how I recall the expaination many years ago from a TTX repair center person.
The ownership of auto racks is an interesting situation. The flat cars are generally owned by TTX and carry TTX reporting marks while the racks themselves are owned by the various railroads as marked. There are some autoracks in service in which the flat car and rack are owned by the same railroad and lettered as such but these are relatively uncommon.
In the western USA auto unloading yards (facilities) are located by RR’s near major cities and are secure from theft and vandalism. The RR trains (usually specificly carrying autoracks) pull into the facility and unload whatever makes and models are in the autoracks and then park them at locations designated for each manufacturer.
Authorized trucks then enter through the secure gating and load autos for delivery to dealers within a geograph area. Examples are near Sun City West in the Phoenix area and at Alliance Yard and Airport for the Fort worth-Dallas area.
These facilities handle nothing but automobiles and can reload autos which dealers or manufacuterers wish to have relocated.
What confuses me, is that certian railroads (D&RGW for instance) do not serve a place that imports of manufactures automobile sto my knowledge, yet they had their own autoracks. Why is this?
Automobiles have to be shipped to consumers. In the Denver area, for instance, there is a pretty good sized unloading operation in North Aurora, at least. That might have been an impetus for the Rio Grande to invest in autoracks. I’d bet that such investment made good business sense, in any event.
Generally railroads have to provide equipment to a autorack pool based on the percent of the revenue they would receive from shipments from an assembly plant. If the Rio Grande is going to handle the automobile freight and get paid for the service, they will have to provide equipment to the assembly plant pool where the freight originated.
UP does it unloading north of Denver (I-76 and 96th ave) and BNSF south of Denver (Santa Fe and Titan Rd).
In the majority of the fleet, the cars are owned by TTX and the racks are owned by railroads.
Up until the 1980’s auto racks were set up for a specific car make and used chain tie downs. Then the industry changed over to wheel chocks and a universal system so that any car could load any make or model of auto.
The fleet is managed by TTX and they direct where the autoracks will be allocated, based on demand.
Since the cars are all TTX the railroads manage the cars and they probably don’t know what herald is on the rack. So the UP doesn’t really know (or care) if the rack has a UP or BNSF or CN herald on the rack. the car hire and leasing costs are the same since they are all TTX cars.
In my area the Providence & Worcester, a regional railroad operating in RI,Massachusetts and Connecticut, handles autorack service to and from the Port at Quonset Point in Davisville, RI (about 20 miles south of the State Capital of Providence). The traffic originates at the Railroads Northern Terminus of Worcester , Ma. where it interchanges with CSX.
New autos from the various Japanese and Korean manufacturers come in on ships fom Asia.
What is somewhat surprising is that there is a fair amount of export business of used vehicles from around North America which gives the P&W a decent backhaul volume. These presumably go back to Asia.
The business is lucrative enough that the railroad has acquired it’s own fleet of autoracks (which ride on leased flats like most Autoracks in North America)…
On Google Earth, that is a pretty big set of operations. I was struck by the fact that almost all of the cars parked were white, until I remembered that many automakers wrap the cars in white (I assume plastic) material with only front and rear window openings uncovered. Audi, for one, apparently doesn’t remove the wrapping until dealer delivery, based on the auto carriers I have seen going north from San Diego.
Hermetically sealed and stored on the front porch of Funk and Wagnalls.
It’s interesting to watch the autoracks which come thru here. Almost all of them are headed east, very few going west; saw a westbound today with four autoracks in it, which is very unusual. I believe they are cars made in Mexico which came off the UP at New Orleans, but have absolutely no actual knowledge to back that up. I’d welcome comments or info from someone who actually knows.
The automobile production industry is very globalized, and they have found it cheaper to mass produce large amounts of certain cars at specific plants. America may export certain cars while importing others, and I have seen loaded autorack cars going both ways on Stevens Pass.
Autorack unloading facilitiers are not or in the past were not necesairly large. Somtime in the 1980’s (don’t remember the year I saw it) there was a facility on the Southern Pacific in Chico CA. It was only one or two spurs (I think one) with an autorack ramp. It fit within a city blick and only had room a couple cars.
This is all very interesting, and I am learnign a lot.
I am still confused though.
Do the railroads own the actual racks, and the heralds are placed on by whcih railroad owns which rack, or does TTX just have the railroads pay a fee and TTXjust slaps the heralds on to the racks as advertising?
I have noticed RR reporting marks on the racks different from the TTX reporting marks on the flat, so I have to vleeive that the railroads are keepign tabs on these in one way or another…
Yes.
No.
The railroad knows how many racks it owns and details on the racks, but all the movement and billing information the crews and customers see is on the car. If I handed you a train list for an auto rack train, unless the car is owned by a railroad, you wouldn’t be able to tell what herald is on a rack from the paperwork.
KBC Pres. As to your question about the railroads having"…That much automobile traffic…" The answer is easily a Positive.
Around the early 20th Century; the advent of the automobile, You may not be aware, but at one point in history the Automobile manufactured their cars with diamentions to be able to maximize the space available in standard railroad boxcars. At the automobile transportation by railroads grew, the railroads added specialized boixcars: There were boxcars buil;t with racks to double stack the autos within the boxcar, the railroads roduced boxcars with double side doors and also with end doors, not to menton lengthening the length of the boxcars from the ‘standard’ of 40’. All done to facilitate the loading of more autos within the boxcars.
Along in the late 40’s, and1950’s, flat cars began to appear on the rails, they were basicly a flat car with a sort of open steel bridge work; this allowed the double-decking of the autos and small trucks. These evolved into open triple decked units, to transport smaller autos. As you can imagine these specialized rail cars really cut into the long distance transport by road of the automobiles from the plants to the dealers.
As they(auto rack cars) became more and more prevalent on the rails; instances of vandalism began to take place. This lead to the additions of ovehead roof