Transporting cargo by an urban rail system seems like an interesting to me be. You can deliver goods directly to their destination and save energy while doing it because of the lower rolling resistance and the usage of electricity. Even with transmission loss it is still more efficient to use fuel in a generating plant than directly.
The idea has been tried but fell by the wayside with the advent of the truck. Also, many interurbans and street railways had franchise restrictions limiting or preventing freight operations.
Definetly the truck took over because of its superiority in flexibility. But interurbans and trolley lines did provide RPO and express services, funeral cars and trips, as well as lcl and some carload freight. One of the most notable electric freight lines was probably the Chicago underground which provided services in downtown Chicago to and from loading docks by the carload.
Combine the Pacific Electric example with the rise (and fall) of rail LCL service generally. Outside those special parameters, ‘cargo’ service may make little sense in typical American contexts.
Trams are useful in situations where the end users are adjacent to the tram route, there is no time pressure (other than expectation of scheduled arrival times), the handling difficulties and weight of the cargo is non-critical, and (especially!) there are external traffic and parking difficulties in areas along the tram route that would make use of a truck either functionally impractical or excessively expensive.
THEORETICALLY you could build something like a full-electric CargoSprinter that would handle larger boxes, like airplane containers. But you’d have to side-load, with extreme care, because of the OHL that most trams use. There’s a place for this stuff, but most if not all of the specialized material and equipment isn’t cost-effective (here in the USA, at least).
The Chicago subway isn’t a very good example, because it was built explicitly for transfer and delivery services – if some of the King’s-Dream-of-New-York-style traffic separations had actually been built away from the waterfront, and there were insufficient ventilation down there for motor vehicles, there might be a use for lower-level electric tram service… but I’d still think that using BEV or hybrid trucks, capable of running powered over normal approach roads with normal fuel and labor cost, is still an eminently better solution than anything that runs on tracks and has to be loaded or unloaded out in the street, blocking a travel lane as it is.
The marginal ‘fuel’ saving of using steel-wheeled equipment fed from the grid instead of BEV/battery-hybrid trucks is vanishingly small unless you have hundreds of trams making thousands of deliveries every day. And right at that point, the necessary synergy of running the cargo trams ‘in between’ the no
The most ambitious plan I’m aware of using this type of technology was a proposed system in Amsterdam, the Netherlands which would have used a fleet of freight carrying light rail vahicles using the existing tram lines. They were to carry freight from a warehouse location on the outskirts of the city,servicing a network of small freight depots within the city proper where cargo would be transloaded onto small battery electric delivery tucks.
The whole system was designed and tests were run using converted LRV rolling stock but the private backers of the scheme could not secure sufficient capital. There was to be a municipal/national government subsidy but it was offered on the condition that the funds had to be matched by private investor money, and that never happened so it wasn’t built.
As I’ve said elsewhere one of the problems in the US is a lack of a secondary rail network. IE a network that can handle shipments either in very short hauls say 5-30 miles or multiple truck loads that do not make a unit train.
In my driving days I saw many manufacturing operations that had an off site storage or distribution warehouse 10-200 miles away and would have multiple truck shipments in a day. Or situations with multiple truck shipments on a pair of shipper/receiver.
The best example I’ll cite is the one from a major food producer that has a distribution center in the Atlanta area that ships 10 truck loads a day to a major grocery warehouse in SW Virginia. The shipper has a rail spur that in 16 years of going in and out of I never did see being used. And the receiver also has a rail spur that(the last time I was there) was being used to store TTX cars.
One real problem with a lot of truck load freight is it boils down to, for railroads, to single shipments or LCL of “loose car” freight.
Theres like 30 Price Choppers here in Albany. Oddly many of the Wal Marts are near railroad tracks. I know that for years that my local lumber comany got direct shipments of retail lumber. If there was a way to get freight from the distribution center by rail directly into the store and locate big box stores near railroads/
That’s not the way chain stores operate…they get stuff into their warehouses, sometimes even by train. Then each store gets a truckload or ten per day from that warehouse .
Each retail outlet carries thousands of line items of product, ranging from aardvark tongues to zymological ointment. Consumption varies wildly - tons of toilet paper, ounces of oat bran supplement. The distribution center gets each kind of product as a shipment - truckload, carload or container load. Then each bulk arrival is split out to the various retail outlets in accordance with data developed by the POS computers. Out of 1000 boxes of jellied grasshoppers delivered by a single truck, individual stores will need one or two. Any surplus will be held, to be shipped to stores with higher demand as necessary to keep the shelves stocked. OTOH, the single truck (or pup trailer) sent to Store X will be carrying various quantities of several hundred different products, The total may be barely enough to stuff a single 24 footer.
Very little product is actually warehoused, either in the distribution center or in the back room(s) of the retail outlets. Management wants it on the shelves, where customers can get their hands on it. Management also wants the regular staff to be able to unload and distribute incoming product during normal business hours, to avoid having an off-hours crew or paying overtime.
If a company truck leaves the distribution center at hour X of day Y, its arrival at Store Z can be predicted to within a half-hour, even after several hundred miles of travel. If a rail car was made available to the local switching district at the same time, not even God could make an accurate-to-the-half-hour estimate of its arrival time - except to say that it would almost certainly take longer.
In today’s world, anything that uses manpower costs money, and
As Henry said there is a difference between lumber yards and chain stores.
I will point out that both Home Depot and Lowes use distribution centres(DC), and truck from DC’s to store (some of the DCs are rail served).
What i point out with regard to the lack of a secondary rail network is this, Most big box stores at this point get 3-6 truckloads a day. Multiply that by the number of chains and by the number of stores in a given area and you see why the huge numbers of trucks in major metropolitan areas.
In my humble opinion we should get this traffic off road network and onto a secondary rail network. The incentives for usage should be one driver could handle an entire nites deliveries to one or more stores.The advantages for the public are reduced heavy truck traffic. The disadvantage cost.
What you say is true enough. It reflect the fact that in the United States government has chosen to invest in road transportation rather than rail transportation. Since almost all investment is in roads and almost none is in rails it limits the US to road transportation and prevents considering other options.
Not just the government but also business, John, have invested in highway…if business wanted rail they would have gotten the government to go rail. The so called Highway Lobby pushed concrete, gasoline, and private carriage.
As for lumber movements by rail, yes, Home Depot and Lowes rely on distribution centers as do several co-ops and chains. One chain here in the east frequently uses rail, however, 84 Lumber has sidings where available.
There are, Henry, different businesses with different needs. As you no doubt know there was a time when department stores were down town and everything they sold was brought in by rail and then delivered on small trucks to the store or people’s homes. That system worked so well that it was part of making the United States the biggest and most powerful country in the world.
Once the highway lobby got going and large trucks got into the act a store had to be just off a large highway for delivery to happen. City streets are too narrow and congested of big over the road trucks. This is not the only thing that pushed department stores out of the city and into the suburbs but it is one of them.
Today, however, there is another change that is really challenging suburban shopping centers. Consumer goods are delivered to hugh warehouses as has been described above, often by rail. Those goods are not shipped to department stores; they are sold on the internet. As I write internet retailers do not pay sales tax which gives them a big competitive advantage over suburban mall stores. (In New Jersey sales tax is 7 per cent). Congress seems about to change that but even when it does small internet companies, who sell less than $1 million per year, will be exempt.
Where this will lead I don’t know. My skills do not include clairvoyance.
So are you going to to build branch lines to every big box store or mandate that they all relocate onto an existing rail line?
If you’d rather build in-road streetcar tracks for fleets of cargo trams on a huge scale are you really solving the traffic congestion problem?
The short haul business was the first thing to move to motor trucks way back early in the last century and for good reason. As far as the 5 mile trips you speak off, i suspect they went by horse and wagon in the pre motor vehicle era…
Up through WWII and a few years after, there was a partially complete secondary rail network composed of branch lines and lots of street trackage, often combined with streetcar service. Examples included the South Brooklyn Railroad using streetcar and subway tracks in Brooklyn, Manufacturers Railroad, sharing tracks and outliving the Connecticut Company streetcar tracks in and around New Haven, Altantic Avenue, Boston’s, Union Freight Railroad, and just about all the standard gauge surviving interurban lines. At one time there was a lot more, of course. Just as buses and private autos took the streetcar business, so did trucks take this freight business. I think we should be glad that the freight business for the surviving railroads is good, and the future seems more and more to involve intermodel operations that combine efficient long haul railroading with flexible local delivery trucking. But in a way, the surviving short line railroads are a partial secondary network and manage to compete with trucks quite well.
There are different kinds of big box stores. Over time home centers that sell lumber and large objects like plumbing supplies could well be located at the rail siding to have the benefits of rail delivery.
It certainly was the case prior to the rise of modern home improvement/do-it-yourself megastores that many lumberyards and building materials distributors were located on RR lines and got much of their stock by rail.
It’s difficult for me to imagine the industry reverting to the old patterns.
Do Home Depot,Lowe’, etc… have many distribution centers with direct rail service?
I really don’t know the answer to your question. However, none of the Home Depots (a total of 4) I have ever visited had direct rail service the the one Lowes I have been do didn’t either.
But what I am saying is that situation could change over time. Never say never.
The Home Depot and Lowes distribution centers are mostly rail served, they get lumber and other wood products by rail, many other independent building supply companies get dry wall by rail and bricks are still shipped by rail a lot. I think the dry wall/ gypsum board by rail business has increased due to the use of centerbeam lumber cars being adapted for this service. You can put 3 to 5 truck loads on these cars. Also of note 84 lumber has increased use of rail the last few years.