Does anybody know if North American railroads – or anybody really – plans to buy more boxcars?
I am an assistant purchasing agent at a small trailer factory in Indiana, and we use a lot of plywood, OSB and treated plywood. These items are dependent on boxcar shipments from the Pacific Northwest.
Lumber can be easily shipped on center beam flatcars but plywood and gypsum board cannot be.
My supplier has informed me that it’s getting harder and harder to secure equipment to get the plywood with. The North American boxcar fleet appears to be shrinking according to articles I’ve read in the past in TRAINS Magazine.
I doubt the Class 1’s are looking to expand their boxcar fleets or replace cars when they are retired. The new business model seems to be leased boxcars from GATX or pool cars through TTX. Now; some shortlines, particularly those serving paper mills, may be adding boxcars. Just as an aside, I’m beginning to see a lot of new Crab Orchard & Egyptian boxcars (reporting marks COER).
TTX is still buying new boxcars, not sure about anyone else or if they are getting enough to keep up with attrition.
I’ve seen plywood and OSB shipped on centrebeams and gypsum/drywall bundles are a regular sight on them out here, but I agree that boxcars are a better way to ship those products.
Greenbrier Industries is still building them, so i’m assuming they still have buyers. Their website shows new CN and NS boxcars, maybe those two railroads purchased some recently. The total number of boxcars in circulation has declined over the years, from about 133,000 in 2009 to around 100,000 today.
Trying to narrow down the “small” trailer manufacturer in Indiana. I work with several trailer manufacturers and the Monroe is more of a specialty manufacturer. Just had a customer order with them last fall.
I agree about boxcars being better equipped as well. Though I as well have witnessed gypsum and other board being hauled on centerbeams for years. Example Home Depot DC’s that are rail served tend to get alot of their board on center beams. IIRC.
It’s both exposure and size. Drywall, OSB, plywood, particleboard etc are easily damaged by moisture, and the sheets are often wider than one side of a centrebeam. I’ve seen plywood bundles on bulkhead flats that were the full width of the car, those might not have fit in a boxcar.
The all-door box cars (Mechanical Designation LU) were pretty much all built in the early 1970s. All of those doors were just expenses waiting to happen. It was almost a misnomer to call them box cars, because what they really were were covered bulkhead flat cars with big, heavy doors hanging from the roof. Wrapping the product made more sense. And when Centerbeam flat cars came along, with higher load limits due to the lack of need for a heavy center sill, that just about did them in. As mentioned above, some loads couldn’t fit on a centerbeam car, but bulkhead flat cars, in spite of exposing poorly-protected loads to moisture, were far easier to load and unload (and to clean out) than something that involved passing through doors.
Receiver of lumber and OSB here. The mills have perfected wrapping the units so they ship dry. Drywall is shrink wrapped. We got a boxcar of plywood-once.
What is funny about that is that “All-Door” Boxcars are about all you see in Western Europe now a days, as older boxcars age out. Even Meter-gauge railway
Rhätische Bahn has a small fleet of them, mainly used for bottled beverages.
The issue here is that some products are too heavy to be shipped in a container. OSB, plywood and wall panels are HEAVY. Some boxcars can handle 100 tons while containers cannot handle anywhere near that amount of weight. How much weight can you load in a container? 20 tons? 30 tons? Maybe 40 tons? Does anybody know for sure?
Boxcars not only keep the product dry but boxcars can be used for a variety of products whereas the kinds of products that center beam flats can carry are more limited.
Containers are also relatively tiny, being 40’ by 8’ by 8-9’ feet, when boxcars are 50’ or 60’ long, 10’ wide and 12-13’ tall inside for “high cube” cars. Even if you did “cube out” the container before overloading it weight-wise it’s a bare fraction of what can be shipped by boxcar.
PLENTY of things are still shipped by boxcar, and as pointed out above, brand new boxcars are still being actively constructed in 2021.
It’s not so much shortlines that are acquiring new boxcars, it’s the leasing companies using the shortline reporting marks under some agreement. Most of those AOK, ATW, COER, NOKL, LRS, etc. “shortline” cars are owned by Greenbrier, CIT, Wells Fargo, GATX, or other leasing companies and leased to the railways. Most of those COER cars mentioned are in fact probably being leased directly to various Class I railways and may never at any point in their lives EVER hit “home” rails.