I know that this is a relatively silly question but I’m going to ask anyway.
I’m relatively new to trains and model railroading. I’ve collected a small number of rollingstock for my layout and am working through building my layout. Of course, the number one, most common rail car I have is a boxcar. For the life of me I can’t think of what ‘goods’ will still be tranported by boxcar. Please help.
I’m trying to think of industries to put on my layout and need all the help I can get. Era is modern - what can I use boxcars for.
Just a few things transported in boxcars:
Auto parts
Building products (lumber, plywood, roofing materials, doors, windows, etc)
Household appliances
Paper (finished rolls, and scrap heading for recycling)
Food products
Beer & Wine
Bagged agricultural products (peat moss, fertilizer, ect)
And much more
Probably about 90% or more of the products that you see at your local WalMart store can go by rail.
Matter of fact, are the district warehouses for any of these large retail chains serviced by rail? Does anybody know?
Jedi,
On the south side of Indianapolis, IN., in the Beach Grove area, is a place called Americold Logistics. Go to http://www.americold.net/ and click on Facilities in the side of the page. Next, click on the map (anywhere) and then scroll down and you will see all the cities that Americold has a warehouse in. I don’t know how many of their warehouses are like this, you’d have to look, but I know that the one in Indianapolis gets deliveries of food by rail and then different trucking companies come and pick it up and take it wherever. In the meantime, it’s stored at their facility.
There’s one example of an industry that uses boxcars and you even get addresses and pics!
[#welcome]
Not a silly question at all. PLUS you’re asking it at the right time.
Sounds like you’re modelling contemporary roads.
In that case most of what will go by boxcar will be palletised. This means stacks of pallets at facilities, Fork lift trucks …and - the important bit - the boxcars either have wide dorrs fo the forklifts or double doors.
I would guess that the Americold facilities mentioned above will be receiving reefers (mechanical or cryogenic) by rail.
As a guide a boxcar will carry anything you can put in a box-bodied semitrailer BUT it’s only economical if it is a full load (by weight if not by volume) and can go from a rail loading facility to a rail unloading facility without handling… if it needs to be put into a semi trailer in bulk at either end it will probably go right through in the trailer… but that might go intermodal for part of its route.
(The Americold operation looks like it is bringing bulk into distribution centres, breaking it up and sending it out as mixed loads in trucks).
Hope this helps
BTW… a whole load of cars of all kinds will roll by with no indication of what’s in them and no need for people mid-route to know (usually).
If you model a public distribution warehouse (versus a private one) that leases space to a variety of manufacturers you then have the possibility of having a lot of different types of cars unloading and loading at the building, as well as loading trailers. The list of items being handled at the warehouse is endless.
Having worked at a distribution warehouse and having a neighbor in the next building who is the major bleach maker inthe U.S., it was interesting to see how they handled the bleach. Bleach is heavy and the most economical way to ship the product is in a tank car. The tank car arrives at the building and the product is pumped into the building to filling lines. The product is bottled, packaged and shipped out the door via trailers to deliver to stores for retail sales. Liquid drain cleaner is handled the same way.
So it kinda sounds like although there is a whack of stuff carried in boxcars, most are assembled/disaseembled at yards - not necessarily at a particular industry. This helps out a great deal. I thank you for your input, the brewery/distillary sounds especially inviting!!!
I work for a company that makes plastic plates and lids, restaurant to-go boxes, casserole dishes and caps, deli cups, &c. All this is plastic of various grades. We usually bring plastic pellets in by rail (covered hopper) and our other supplies by truck (machines, boxes, shrinkwrap, plastic sleeves to protect the product). We usually ship product out via truck but we have been known to use RoadRailers for shipments to West Coast destinations. I see no inherent reason that we could not load up a boxcar with stuff for a West Coast food product distributor or a big customer’s West Coast distribution warehouse. (Imagine the look on your friend’s face when he reads this car’s waybill and sees he is moving 1,000,000 to-go boxes [:D] ) We could bring in the boxes and bags and shrinkwrap via boxcar if you wanted to do it that way. All we have to do is lay some rails from our existing property-edge spur into the facility and run it next to (but I would prefer into) the plant.
The days of loading railcars and shipping them in volume to distribution centers is going away. Why??? Cost. Tying money into large inventories and sitting on the inventory is not good business practice. Borrowing money to create the inventory and paying interest on the borrowed money is not a good business practice.
The company I worked for was based near Milwaukee, Wi. They would ship railcars to us in Cleveland (400 miles) and it would take anywhere from 5 days to as many as 11 days. Part of the problem was the routing of cars through Chicago, from one railroad yard to another. That could take several days. Then if the car was blocked into the wrong section of the train. I had cars stay on a train until they got to the east coast. The car had to be rerouted back to our warehouse. This was back in the 60’s, 70’s and early 80’s.
Our parent company phased out railcar shipping and switched eclusively to truckload shipments. The product in a trailer usually can weigh up to 40,000lbs. But the trailer can deliver from MIlwaukee to Cleveland overnight. Today everything is time sensitive and that is why you see more trailers and containers on flatcar shipments.
Most of my working career was with warehousing (loading and unloading railcars & trailers) , truckload scheduling, air freight and and container shipping all over the world.
I have seen large public warehouses equipped with rail facilities start taking out some of the trackage and fill in the area within the warehouse to get more storage space. They do keep some track as their customer base does change from time to time. But for the most part trucking is providing the faster service.
The railroads make out with their volume type shipments. A covered hopper conatining plastic pellets for injection molding would be one example. A 53 trailer and a 50 foot boxcar have close to the same cubic sq. footage. But the boxcar can carry 2 and 1/2 times the weight.
All of our shipments to Walmart were by truckloads to their distributi
appliances
cars at one time
bagged products like cement
grain
lumber
bricks
cereal
hobos!
freight like packages
wire
castings
steel coils
steel sheet
alloying agents like manganese
anything needing protection from the weather
Some one forgot BEER!!! Wine, whiskey etc. Tons of stuff still goes by boxcar dont let people fool you. Boxcars are still used these days for all of the items listed above and then some. I have seen old BN boxes used to haul hides. Nasty nasty cars and I bet it would be hard to model the black cloud of flies around it!
Paper. the large rolls used in printing gets shipped by rail (sometimes), I believe beer, wine and canned goods would be in insulated cars. You’re modeling modern era so most boxcars would be the 60 foot kind, I’m not sure if thre are any fifty footers left.
Actually, that’s not true. There are far more 50’ boxes running around, then 60’ boxes. Outside of areas with heavy auto-parts traffic, (at least on the east coast) 60’ and 89’ boxes are rare, and 50’ boxes dominate.
I had not really noticed,but I see you’re right, would it be safe to say the 50 footer is the standard size of today? Most trains going by here are stacks,open and covered hoppers, gons, tankcars, and boxcars, and I never checked their size.
Beer and wine are presently being shipped from the south to Randolph, MA in 50’ boxcars of 1970’s vintage, many still lettered for Southern Railroad. They are delivered on a siding of what was the Old Colony Railroad (1849), now an MBTA commuter rail line. CSX also hauls trains of tank cars filled with waste from tbe Boston Harbor clean-up project on this line.
So are the beer and wine boxcared at the brewery/distillary or shipped to a warehouse off site to be transported? I ask because I live near London, Ont and the Labatt Brewery in London isn’t close to the tracks and from what I can tell teh Labatt and Molson Breweries in Toronto and Montreal aren’t either. Montreal Molson maybe, hard to tell from the picture’s I’ve seen but none the less doesn’t provide exclusive evidence.
Truitt Bros cannery - tank cars of corn syrup in; insulated boxcars of canned goods out;
Seneca canned goods warehouse - insulated boxcars of canned goods out;
Boise Paper mill- bocars of LARGE paper rolls in, truckloads of cut office supply paper out;
Boise cardboard box plant - boxcars of paper rolls in, trucks of cardboard out;
Cascade Warehouse Co - building supply broker reload center - boxcars of plywood, OSB out;
Norpac - Frozen food plant - empty refrigerator cars in, loads out;
Americold - frozen food distributer - loaded refrigerator cars in, empties out.
How about bailed plastic, cardboard or paper from a shredding co. going to a recycling plant. I’ve seen several box cars loaded with the stuff. One may ask how I knew what they were loaded with? Easy, they were packed so full the door couldn’t be shut all the way. A few times we have seen one set out away from anything with smoke rolling out the doors. The fire dpt. can’t put the smoldering “fire” all the way out so they just leave some hoses spraying on the outside of the car to try to keep the car usable again.
