Friday’s Trains Newswire reported on the new CSX intermodal facility at North Baltimore, Ohio. The yard will use five straddle cranes each traversing 8 tracks. I assume these cranes will allow the rapid and direct transfer of containers and trailers from an inbound train to as many as 7 outbound trains or blocks. In some respects, this is the “hump yard” for intermodal. CSX could receive trains from western connecting carriers (BNSF or UP) randomly loaded for a number of CSX destination, run them to North Baltimore to be sorted for CSX destinations. If that is the primary task, it seems that the terminal would require less space for the pads that would be required for rubber tired mobile cranes to handle the transfer of the boxes and eliminate the need to run around the end of blocks of cars when moving the box to a train two tracks over.
I think I read that BNSF has similar straddle cranes at their terminal in Joliet. Perhaps the UP or others have or plan to have similar units. It seems to me that the use of straddle cranes on traffic going through Chicago could reduce the volume of highway interchanges. Given the congestion on the rails used for interchange in the Chicago area, I wouldn’t think it economical to move all intermodal interchange via rail. At a minimum, rail interchange would require good size blocks, if not “full” trains.
Anybody have more information on the through put of a straddle crane setup such as CSX is installing?
BNSF’s Memphis, TN facility has wide-span portal cranes, I don’t think that Logistics Park Chicago has them. Until all four of the US Class Is setup to perform this way I don’t think it will work. Rght now BNSF is originating trains out of West Coast terminals with the idea of unloading at a single Chicago area terminal, the UP is the same. The question becomes how many units on a
Interesting approach. First - as beaulieu noted - there would have to be enough volume to accumulate a ‘block’ or trainload for each point. Then - because those cranes can’t ‘pass’ each other - the ‘sort’ of a container for other destinations would mostly have to be to the adjacent parallel tracks under the same crane’s reach and within it’s travel range segment of the yard - or else it would have to be set down and picked up by 1 or more of the other cranes - or moved by a yard truck and chassis as is now done.
I saw a presentation on Friday afternoon on BNSF’s new Memphis Intermodal Terminal (and several other BNSF recent or current capital projects). If I remember right, there are 5 of those cranes, plus 3 more of a different type behind them to serve a temporary storage function. Those 2 groups of cranes can pass each other, because the ones to the rear are higher, and in the ‘common reach area’ between them they all have a projecting cantilever track out that way. This might be clearer or easier to understand if I can find the link to the slides from that presentation.
I suppose sooner or later one or more ‘simulation’ studies will be done by the terminal operators to figure out which of the traffic flows from/ to the various Origin-Destination pairs could be sorted this way, and then interchanged by rail instead of over-the-road. Another factor that may tip the balance is the gradual improvement in rail interchanges in the Chicago area by the CREATE program. A number are underway - such as the IHB’s CTC project - that will have major benefits in terms of speed-ups, but they will take 2 or 3 years to complete, and then those studies will have to be done and their findings inplemented. Perhaps by 2015 this will be straightened out and running much better.
I understood and agreed with all your points except for this one. I mean these cranes are spanning 8 different tracks, with 8 different trains right? Now I do not fully see how having the cranes work in their respected territories would greatly interfere with the sorting of the containers. I think holster trucks working with either the large cranes or smaller cranes would certainly solve the problem you stated above if such a conflict were to arise. I mean it does not seem the wide span cranes would ever have to play “hand off” with each other. You did state above about the yard trucks would have to aide in the sorting but if properly worked out it seems much of the sorting can be done by the cranes. [:)]
Adding a bit more to information on the operation at North Baltimore, the CSX web site says that they expect the terminal to handle 25 trains a day, I assume split about 50-50 eastbound and westbound and 630,000 containers/trailers per year. Of those, only 30,000 will originate or terminate at North Baltimore. It is quite clear that the facility is being built to mainly function as a hub to sort traffic moving in and out by rail.
It is just a guess, but I suspect that the BNSF Memphis terminal will have a much larger percentage of business for destination/origin at Memphis. Still, it is possible that interchange traffic could be swung off an inbound train and set on a cut of cars for rail delivery to a connecting carrier.
As I play with this, I am keeping in mind that an intermodal train set up to haul traffic to along a route with several terminals doesn’t always have to be set up with “blocks”, i.e., all traffic for a given terminal on a contiguous string of cars. Such a train can stop at an intermediate terminal and have the traffic for that point picked off from any car in the train. I don’t know how that necessarily works out in terms of cost efficiency at the intermediate terminal, but it does reduce or eliminate the need to move a unit from the operating range of one straddle crane to another.
No doubt, as Paul noted above, CSX has probably done a considerable amount of study to figure out the best design and operation of the new facility.
As far as Chicago goes, I agree that rail capacity and the impact of the CREATE rail projects on the same is a big factor on the method to interchange intermodal traffic.
Intermodal train cars are humped in Germany and there was a artical about this in Trains about 3 years ago. If trains were pre-blocked (as they should be) before they get to chicago then this would not be needed.
I was just going to point out - in response to BT CPSO 266’s post above - that since the boxes on an inbound train from the West Coast are often loaded at random (“mine-run” coming off the ship as Railway Man and others have described it here previously), then that means that for any such inbound train under 5 straddle cranes, 80% of the boxes under any 1 crane could be going to an outbound block that’s under one of the other cranes . . . unless, the ‘sort’ is set-up so that all the cars on an outbound track are going to the same or similar destinations, in which case the location of the off-loaded contnainer in the outbound train might not matter so much. If the CSX terminal is set-up for 7 outbound tracks, then there could be 1 each for say 1) Montreal, 2) Boston, 3) New York City/North Jersey, 4) Phila./ Wilmington, 5) Baltimore/ Washington D.C., 6) Norfolk, and maybe 7) Pittsburgh, etc., and points along the way or in the near vicinity of each of those. But there couldn’t be any further refinement without getting into ‘blocks’ wihtin each outbound train/ track.
However . . . a little further thought on the crane’s transfer rates and how to beat this problem led to the following scenario: Figure 5 cranes over 7,500 ft. long tracks, as for BNSF at Memphis - that’s 1,500 ft. under each crane. At about 60’ per platform or well for 53’ containers, that would be 25 platforms under each crane, or 50 containers if double-stacked at 40’ or longer - maybe a few more is some 20-footers are mixed in. At 1 container per minute, each crane could unload its portion of the train in a little under an hour.
More to the point, if each crane unloaded and transferrred only the boxes for the ‘blocks’ on the other 7 tracks directly served by that crane - and leaves the containers for other destinations and bloc
That was an interesting article about the European freight rail network’s system of humpyards but I noted that the rolling stock involved was all single flat cars with one or two containers (single stacked). With 3 or 5 well stack cars I can’t see how that system could work…
You are correct that the best those of us on the outside could do is speculate on the operation. After starting the thread, it occured to me that the subject could make an article in Trains and suggested same to Jim Wrinn.
The CSX website list their 30+ intermodal (and port) terminals and also has a map of their core intermodal operations. Looking at both, it is fairly clear that the new terminal wouldn’t necessarily be handling traffic between all terminal. To illustrate, CSX ramps in Chicago might receive traffic destined for everyone of the terminals, but it seems that a good part of that traffic would be routed southward and run on trains heading to Evansville and beyond. Perhaps, if North Baltimore is only handling trains that serve say 15 terminal destinations, the job becomes a little less complex.
For a lot of construction-type info on BNSF’s Memphis Intermodal Terminal, do the following (I wish there was a shorter or better way, but I don’t know how or what to do instead):
Go to the University of Illinois’ at Urbana-Champaign Railroad Engineering Program’s page for the William W. Hay Railroad Engineering Seminar series for Fall Semester - 2010 at:
Scroll down a little bit to the 11/19 presentation by Robert Boileau of BNSF on the “Capital Expansion Program for the BNSF Railway”. Click on that to either Open or Save the file named “University of Illinois 11-19-10.ppt”, at the following URL:
(Be forewarned - this file contains 136 slides/ pages which cover many different topics - it really deserves a thread of its own on “Railroad Engineering”, but that’s for a little later - so it is about 108 MB in size, and a a result may take as long as 10 minutes to download even with a reasonably fast connection.)
The Memphis Intermodal Terminal is shown on slides 52 - 87, which are chiefly about the cranes, and are from the Sept. 20 - 23, 2009 AREMA Annual Conference & Exposition. The cross-section diagram that I have in mind as the best illustration is slide 72, and although it is captioned as “Pavement Designs”, it clearly shows the almost symmetrical “Overhead Production Cranes” which span 6 “Strip Tracks” - 1 outboard to the east, and 5 underneath, together with 2 “Drive Lanes” for container trucks; the asymmetrical “Ground Stacking Cranes” to the west, which have a “Ground Stacking Area” shown as 5 containe
Reducing rubber transfers in Chicago is a painful subject for me as I have still have bruises from working on it over the years at two different railroads. I won’t write a book here but my summary take on it is that the solution to rubber-tire interchange is not technology but rather a commercial need/opportunity that is strongly perceived by both the originating and terminating carriers. Steel-wheel interchange requires more planning, coordination, and assumption of risk, and in my experience, it usually happened when the financial reward to both interchange partners was adequate, and went nowhere when it wasn’t.
I used to think it would ultimately be solved by sheer volume growth; for example. that eventually CN would receive enough business at Toronto bound for the former Santa Fe destinations to at least build a block for interchange to Corwith. But before that happened, BNSF’s volume growth forced them to split up their southwest business over multiple ramps: Corwith, Joliet, Willow Springs… We were chasing our tails.
Today, I wonder if the opposite isn’t true. Now that passenger traffic is a fraction of its former self, there are no more rubber transfers of passengers in Chicago. It all fits nicely into Union Station. But back in the day, the only way to go from a Pennsy or New York Central train to a Santa Fe or CNW train was by sidewalk or taxi - except for a handful of cases where it made sense for both partners to run a through block; er, sleeper.
Good points. Another factor is that the number of railroads is also a fraction of its former self, so that the benefits and costs are more concentrated and internalized to a single corporate entity, and there are less ‘others’ to deal with to achieve some rationalization - it’s less like “herding cats”.
Also, the management tools are better - the RFID tags, scanners, computers to track and predict traffic volumes and work out operating plans, etc. - and there seems to be more of a pro-cooperation attitude.
It’s a little less like herding cats with fewer railroads, but what I found was it was often still more a function of the many different terminals and blocks you had to deal with. When I was at CN (and after the IC merger) my counterpart at BNSF had a good idea; rather than try to steel-wheel at Chicago where everything was divided up between Corwith, Willow Springs, and Cicero, he suggested we run down to the TP&W at Remington, IN, where BNSF operated one daily train with service to all their major western destinations. But there were still too many logistical problems to ever get that working. For one thing, BNSF’s Remington train didn’t run all the way to California; it was reworked to/from other trains along the line somewhere, at Clovis I believe. So it had higher cost and slower service built in to start with; and by the time CN figured out a plan to get a new intermodal block from Gateway to Remington, we were looking at a schedule that was a day or two slower and at least as costly, if not moreso, than rubber interchange at Chicago.
Another story to illustrate the difficulties: Santa Fe’s run-through New York-LA mail service with Conrail. This worked just fine until, for cost and ride quality reasons, it became a priority on Santa Fe to run articulated cars on its ‘premium’ trailer trains. This was in the early 90’s, when artics were still relatively new and the national fleet still contained vast numbers of conventional pig flats. Conrail didn’t share this priority, and in fact may have preferred conventional cars on the mail train because it was still mostly all 48-foot trailers. And, of course, neither ATSF nor CR kept the trainset intact. At LA and New York, the inbound cars were unloaded and immediately reloaded for the next train out, which was never the mail train. So ATSF’s coveted articulateds kept bleeding off into the CR system on the QLANY train, while CR kept
Thanks again for those ‘tales from the inside’. To paraphrase what US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once wrote: “Upon this point a page of history is worth a volume of [il]logic.”
I will be the first to agree that there are many obstacles to converting interchange from truck to rail, especially in Chicago. Clearly, the first threshold is the volume of the business moving between any two terminals. I suspect that number would to have to be very high, maybe in the range of 30-50 loads per day, or more, before a rail transfer would even be considered.
After that, both the origin and destination terminals would probably have to be set up in a manner that allows efficient transfer of loads from one train to another. That efficiency may not be available at a terminal with a principal design to get business in and out by truck.
Chicago has a special problem in that rail capacity is known to be especially tight. Obviously, carload business has to be interchanged by rail. The option of transfering intermodal by truck does allow the railroads to avoid further capacity problems.
As noted above by CNSF, before it happens both the railroad companies involved are going to have to see an economic benefit to rail interchange. Even if that goal is met, the change has to be accomplished without a serious drop in the level of service.
CNSF nailed the issues perfectly. It’s a complicated system and a dynamic system. The problems continually move out from under you.
The take-home lesson – the one I try (with limited success) to impart at every talk I give to public agencies – is that all railroading is local. It’s unwise to think that an operating-and-infrastructure solution that works at one place at one time can without further thought be transferred successfully to any other location at any other time. The one-size-fits-all solution might work – or it might not. You don’t know until you look at each situation in detail.
While the straddle cranes seem to be a very efficient means to transfer containers between cars on adjacent tracks, as my thinking evolved on the topic, I realized that their use would be a fairly small factor in the question of the best way to handle intermodal interline transfers. Certainly not a magic bullet.
All railroading is local. Thanks for that reminder, Railway Man, it’s priceless.
As to Jeaton’s thoughts about the capabilities of straddle cranes, it will be interesting to see if they ever wind up being deployed in unexpected places in the “middle” of a railroad. I referred earlier to Santa Fe’s operation in Clovis during the '90’s. The problem we had was a whole string of then-secondary intermodal facilities in California in addition to the ‘main’ ones at LA and Richmond: specifically San Bernardino, Barstow, Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto, Stockton, North Bay. Each of these served specific market niches and/or key customers and was capable of generating substantial volume as long as service was provided to enough different eastern points.
The problem was that in order to improve both profitability and on-time performance, we needed to simplify the train blocking schemes. We just couldn’t afford to have every train stop and work at each ramp all the way up the Valley. The answer was a “mixing centre” in Clovis, which had excess yard capacity. Trains would come out of Kansas City, Remington, Houston, Dallas, and East St. Louis with cars loaded for each California ramp, and would leave Clovis nice and clean, with one handling just Fresno and Richmond, another just Bakersfield and Modesto, or whatever. This slowed the schedules down by several hours, so we didn’t put the mail or UPS through Clovis, but for most other customers it was acceptable because the improved transit consistency offset the delay. Also, the cost at Clovis was more than offset by operational savings on the west end.
I believe Clovis was purely a switching operation; loads weren’t routinely transferred from one car to another, but if we’d had straddle cranes back then, we might have made good use of them there to improve car utilization by minimizing empty slots.
A better example may be the UPS transfer facility at Willow Springs. To the extent that trailers from anywhere are resorted & reloaded to go anywhere. More work needs to be done in the CREATE plan to change transfers from yard to yard & company . Given the restrictions of low clearance & small streets, it’s surprising the rubber tore transfer has worked this long.
In the big picture, it may not matter if most of the freight is on I-40, I-80 via regular truck.