Suggested uses for extra capacity in the very unlikely event of such occuring:
Re-enter the Less-than-Carload Freight business.
I contact by email or phone, arrive at the “station”, run my credit card through the computer, get a number and sticker, put the sticker on the package with the number, personally place the package in a box car or reefer used as a box car or gondola to be covered with tarp, and phone the repient as to the number and where to pick up and what car number etc.
Personal auto tranportation like Auto Train but provided by freight railroads for anyone who wi***o travel long distance by Amtrak or air and still have his personal car at both ends, and is willing to put up with a short delay.
Photo frieght trains with vintage diesels and revived steam. Auction off the few passenger places in the caboose. Other photographers board a mystery bus with stops and runby’s kept secret.
Yes Mr. Railroad President, good Pastors and Priests do design churches for Easter Sunday, and then work like the ___ to fill them the rest of the year.
LCL is the soul mate of the dry van. It just works best if it has rubber tires under the box. Now, that certainly doesn’t preclude rail expanding it’s share of this business, but the RR’s gotta beat the dock to dock times of the team drivers with their TOFC service. Increasing intermodal velocity and increasing (not consolidating) terminal locations would accompli***hat end.
Something the railroads should have started up back when Henry Ford churned out his first mass production Model T’s. Drivers do want to save money when they take their autos medium to long distances, as long as the transit times are close. If we use the IRS standard of 42.5 cents per mile as the current cost of driving across the asphalt for, say 500 miles (42.5 x 500 = $212.50), then all the railroad transporters have to do is price it below that mark to get the business. If they can average 5 autos per autorack (well below max capacity of the autohaulers) and charge 30 cents a mile for a 500 mile haul, they’d still pull in $750 per autorack per trip. Should be enough to pay all the costs and still make a profit, and by establising the service during low us
“Something the railroads should have started up back when Henry Ford churned out his first mass production Model T’s. Drivers do want to save money when they take their autos medium to long distances, as long as the transit times are close. If we use the IRS standard of 42.5 cents per mile as the current cost of driving across the asphalt for, say 500 miles (42.5 x 500 = $212.50), then all the railroad transporters have to do is price it below that mark to get the business. If they can average 5 autos per autorack (well below max capacity of the autohaulers) and charge 30 cents a mile for a 500 mile haul, they’d still pull in $750 per autorack per trip. Should be enough to pay all the costs and still make a profit, and by establising the service during low usage, they’ll be ready and primed during peak usage. All they gotta do is keep the speeds up (none of this 25 mph average velocity crap)”.
But it doesn’t cost me anywhere near $212 to drive 500 miles. Once I own the car the only out of pocket expense is for fuel. Maybe $60 depending on price and fuel economy of your vehicle. Mark
When I use my auto I’m free of the for-hire carriers schdule and I can go from my front door to my destination. It is ironic but when your destination is Sand Patch, PA you can only use a car to get there.
Hey, Southwest Airlines (and for all I know other airlines as well) offer point to point VIP package service at a premium price…WHY NOT THE RAILROADS AND POSSIBLY AMTRAK?
These are ideas just for starters. And don’t forget to ask your Pastor, Priest, Imam, or Rabbi, if I am right about designing worship spaces for “peak load.”
There should be some other ideas out there. And not all will work in the same place at the same time, obviously.
I figure a real railroader would know what the rest of us already know. New third party ideas have no shot at being tested on the US rail system, given the extreme limitations of even accessing the property. That means the idea (BTW, not my idea, but it does have certain merits) would have needed Amtrak to test it out, and that window of opportunity passed when most cabooses ended up in the scrap heap.
But most car owners do recognize that wear and tear on an auto eventually results in out of pocket expenses for repairs. Mileage also reduces the blue book value of an auto.
That’s a pile of BS… most cars owners look at one thing and one thing only…the sticker price in front of their eyes, in this case gas prices, cheap is king. If they were worried about wear n tear they would take the bus to work not their car, and if they were worried about the book value of their car then they would be buying Honda, Toyota and other cars that hold their market resell value longer versus these other ‘brands’ that depreciate so fast that you either have give it away or be stuck with it.
You’d be suprised then what real car owners do to guesstimate current value of their autos. Many will trade in for a new car every three or five years, and the trade in value is a big part of the deduction from the sticker price of the new car. The lower the mileage, the higher the trade in value. Other car owners prefer to run 'em into the ground before they buy a new one, so the less wear and tear they put on the current one means a longer service life, pushing back that next major financial decision.
Yes, CD, most people do make long term financial decisions, 'cept maybe new college grads.
No FM, MOST people do NOT make long term financial decisions when it comes to their automobiles, a small percentage do, but the large majority do not. That is why leasing is becoming so very very popular…they like the cheap sticker price despite the fact it costs them more in the long run. If they were making long term financial decisions with their cars, they would be saving ca***o buy (own) their next car and avoid paying leasing / loan costs, as their current car wears out…but nope…not here in North America…credit and low sticker prices is king.
I’ve never known one person to do what you talk about…including those who demostrate sound long term fiancial planning with their money and retirement plans.
Not everyone enjoys driving long distances as most railfans seem to enjoy, and especially the railfans on this forum. A safe driver concentrates on driving and does not let his/her attention wonder. This can minimize the joy of beautiful scenery and make part of a vacation more like work.
About 44 years ago I had gone to Tallahasee on the job. Used the East Coast Champion (with my friend Jim Masters the dining car steward) to Jacksonville and the Golf Wind to Tallahasee. When I felt I had put in enough time at the job site, I found that the Gulf Wind was the only rail connection returning and this would involve a wait of about 18 hours and another overnight at the hotel. So I went to the bus station. While I was on line to buy a bus ticket to Jacksonville, a man approached and offered me $25 to drive his car to Jacksonville! A lot of money in those days! He inspected my NY State driver’s liscense, and he showed me his company identification, possibly Babcock and Wilcox, if my memory serves. It was a big car, not a compact, Cadillac or Buick. At the Jacksonville RR Station I was met, handed the person meeting me the car keys, and he gave me the $25 and offered to buy dinner. There wasn’t time for that, since I wanted to return via the Silver Meteor which was about to leave around a half hour later.
Even if I had wanted to fly, and I still had the time and freedom to use trains, I would have had difficulty getting on the equipment I used without excessive baggage charges, to say nothing about worries about missed connections.
I guess that is what prompted me to think about freight railroads moving personal automobiles.
Auto leasing has GOT to be the biggest ripoff in the industry. Like CD said, if they actually looked at the contract, nobody would sign them. But I guess PT Barnum was right.
I’m trying to ignor this garbage, but sometimes the stink gets so bad I just can’t hold my nose.
When facts conflict with his ideology, Dave does what any true idealouge does, he ignors the facts.
The rest of you may want to look at what just happened, Lord Knows, FM won’t. Schneider, a 3rd party operator, just opened its own intermodal terminal in Ohio and is operating its own trains between that inovative terminal and Kansas City.
So while FM Dave falsely states that “3rd party ideas have ‘NO SHOT’ at being tested”, he’s wrong.
Other 3rd parties are on the rail all the time. I don’t know what FM Dave thinks Alliance Shippers, Hub Group, Pacer, Clipper, etc. do for a living - but they are 3rd parties working in conjunction with the railroads to provide solutions to shippers’ logistic needs.
My belief is that FM Dave has taken (or takes) his half baked concepts to the railroads and, unlike Schneider, been rebuffed. He can’t accept the fact that he’s wrong, so he blames the railroads. And those railroads are perfectly willing to work with 3rd parties on feasible inovative ideas - Schneider and others prov
Dave, when people move (relocate) long distances in Canada, they often use rail to transport their automobiles.
I wi***here were more passenger routes available in Canada, and the routes were more affordable. I love and really enjoy traveling by train either for personal recreation or for business travel. Being able to sit back in a seat much wider than any place seat I’ve been in, being able to walk about is wonderful, being able to go to the snack car and drink beer and watch a little TV is awesome!! Plane travel is a nusiance today, and long distance driving by car is so tiring. [V]
Back to your topic of discussion, I wi***he RRs had more services competiting against other forms of transport, for the ordinary Joe Blow to use., but around here their business plans focus on the long haul of serious tonnage.
Actually, the US railroads never got out of the Less-than-Carload business. They haul it today. ABF (LTL giant) just bought some pig spec 53’ trailers with ABFZ marks.
The railroads tried t remain LCL/LTLretailers by forming subsidiaries called “freight fowarders”. These forwarders combined rail/truck transport as appropriate and established through service over several railroads. This gave a shipper door to door one carrier service that used the rail route(s)/truck route(s) that best suited the needs of the market.
Of course this was too much for the Federal Government to allow, and their regulators put a stop to it. They allocated the retail part of the business, with its high revenues, to the trucking companies like ABF. The railroads were left with “The Leavin’s” be Federal decree. So what the rails have is some of the line haul, but they have always carried LTL/LCL and done a good job with it.
The government restrictions on rail lasted for 50 years and the railroads lost their expertiese in retailing just about anything short of a unit train. It would be difficult for any one railroad to build a nationwide LTL/LCL system from scratch and they’ve got better uses for thier money.
Anyway, you’re talking about package delivery, not traditional LTL/LCL, which would put your system in direct competition with UPS/FedEx/USPS, etc. I can’t see someone g
It’d help if you power washed the kennels once in a while.[xx(]
[quote]
QUOTE:
When facts conflict with his ideology, Dave does what any true idealouge does, he ignors the facts.
The rest of you may want to look at what just happened, Lord Knows, FM won’t. Schneider, a 3rd party operator, just opened its own intermodal terminal in Ohio and is operating its own trains between that inovative terminal and Kansas City.
So while FM Dave falsely states that “3rd party ideas have ‘NO SHOT’ at being tested”, he’s wrong.
Other 3rd parties are on the rail all the time. I don’t know what FM Dave thinks Alliance Shippers, Hub Group, Pacer, Clipper, etc. do for a living - but they are 3rd parties working in conjunction with the railroads to provide solutions to shippers’ logistic needs.
My belief is that FM Dave has taken (or takes) his half baked concepts to the railroads and, unlike Schneider, been rebuffed. He can’t accept the fac