I watch the Berea, Oh railcam…benefits of both NS and CSX mainlines with a tower in the view.
Around 1pm the UPS eastbound parade begins…Q8,Q10, 20E, and 24M and often 21Z heading west. Most of the UPS units are still trailers. Containers have made inroads, but still quite a few 28 ft. pups. In fact 24M just passed (Chicago - Baltimore) with 15 trailers and 28 containers, more containers than normal, but perhaps that has to do with weekend scheduling.
What has really increased of late are the number of FedX Ground trailers. The westbound 21G will often contain up to 40 FedX trailers.
Cats…interesting regarding Hyundai trailer weight reduction. The problem is getting in line for their production. A customer of mine inquired about a 1000 trailer order for 2022…they were allocated 80. Another customer is seeking 1500 trailers for next year, has yet to place an order due to unavailability. Yet another customer wants 600 Hyundai trailers next year for his trucking fleet and cannot even get a committment…and he owns a Hyundai dealership! The industry is probably stuck with the heavier older trailers for a couple of buying cycles until demand and supply reach equilibrium.
Take a look around the rail container storage yards on 47th Street in Chicago. No inventory on the grounds. All hands are on deck. Indications are that any innovations will be shoved down the road until resources are available for R&D, prototypes, and distribution channels.
Yep everyone wants those trailers for the weight savings. It’s a freaking game changer for this industry allowing us to get back to preemission cargo weights and a huge boost in cargo movement capability. Dart transit with their newest generation of trucks and trailers can move in 9 trailers what 5 years ago took 10 units to move. That give you an idea of how much weight we as an industry have found to remove.
You can do that with current lift equipment. They need specialized “shoes” to be equipped on the spreaders arms. To lift trailers that lack lifting pads and reinforced side rails for IM service.
Well, that’s good to hear. Making things more efficient is good for our people and our economy.
I know some Luddites will go nuts because you’re using fewer drivers. But then, they’re Luddites.
The railroads are going to have to respond. But keep in mind that most freight fills up the cubic capacity of the trailer before it hits the weight limit. So, most freight won’t be affected.
I don’t like the “One Size Fits All” approach. I’ve got a friend who is a retired railroad intermodal guy. He’s absolutely convinced that the way for railroads to move perishables i
There’s no question about it. On the rail double stack is much more efficient. The weight per load is less than TOFC. This results in less fuel used, more revenue loads in a given train length, less wear and tear on track, etc.
In a terminal I see a trade off. They can get more doubled stacked containers on a given track than they can trailers. But things get more complex with containers as they must match up a chassis with a container instead of just setting a trailer on the ground. There are more moves in the terminals to handle containers than trailers. More moves = more costs.
On the highway, again, there’s no question about it. But it’s the other way around. The trailer is much more efficient. A tractor-trailer combination will weigh less than a tractor-container-chassis combination. Any increase in tare weight must be made up for in a loss of payload weight. Not good.
We’re talking intermodal here, so rail costs, terminal costs, and highway costs all come in to play.
I’d opine that there needs to be more consideration of the total door to door costs. Each component will factor in differently depending on the distance moved, the density of the commodity, and the capacity of the rail line. I judge that’s there’s too much emphasis on the rail cost component to the detriment of the total cost component.
For fruit like cherries, apples, etc., that are somewhat prone to “bruising”…what is the ride quality of a railcar versus a highway trailer with air ride suspension?
But you don’t want to drag empty equipment, with no revenue, thousands of miles westbound. A trucker running with a revenue load both ways will beat you.
Your’re going to have some empty miles. As will the trucker. But the need is to minimize them. The westbound loads will go in to Seattle/Tacoma/Portland. They’re part of the system that is required.
The biggest problem with trying to have two way service from any carrier involving a reefer trailer or container or a railcar is the FSMA or Food Safety Modernization Act of 2005. That has a whole host of requirements and regulations that are expensive if you break them. Imagine what the financial pain for a railroad could be if a railroad provided reefer car wasn’t cleaned properly before a load of potatoes that are made into French fries for McDonald’s. Those fries ended up with say listeria or ecoli in them and they trace it back via the FSMA regulation to the railroad. A lawyer would have a freaking field day in court with that case. The standards that are required to be met well most trailers used by the mega fleets are traded in after 3 years. Why to not have the headaches of dealing with older equipment and those regulations.
RailEx started the “unit train” perishable movement. First from Washington state and then from California. UP later bought the company. UP stopped running the “unit trains” and moved the buisiness onto intermodal trains. And then quit it (the former RailEx perishable model) entirely.
Does TOFC equipment that’s capable of circus loading/unloading still exist? I haven’t seen any in years.
Yes, they had a good business plan. And it was working.
But a “Polar Vortex” just destroyed BNSF service on their Great Northern route. To the extent that they abolished all Z trains. The railroad couldn’t meet the schedules so they abolished the schedules. The BNSF did what they could.
Cold Train had its expenses continuing, but its revenue declined significantly. It was a good try, but you can’t beat Mother Nature.
CP’s small fleet of Expressway/Iron Highway flatcars might be the only such equipment left, unless they were scrapped after the Toronto-Montreal service was abolished a few years ago.
Really!? Wow, learn something every day. Shows how much I know about intermodal terminal ops.
So why isn’t this done more? To me it’s almost seemed like a big obstacle to convincing truckers to try TOFC was the need for stronger trailers that could be picked up, and of course the associated weight penalty that is the subject of this thread. And now I find out that’s a non-issue. And it also eliminates any need for circus loading and specialized equipment like Iron Highway.
Anyway, here’s the sort of train we’d like to see, a mixed freight with reefers, containers, and some other carload traffic behind them. No reason this couldn’t be replicated again today.
There’s considerably more to it than this, especially with more modern trailer construction. Even back in the days of heavier construction the use of straddle lifting could tear up van trailers; both the size and contact surface of the shoes has to be substantial, and the application of the shoes made to balance the load distribution, to do outside lifting properly.
A more correct method of lifting is to provide it where the trailer is designed to take vertical stress: at the bogie or its attachment points and at the landing gear or kingpin area, with balance arrangements longitudinally and laterally. There are some interesting proposed designs to do this with straddle loading, the fun now being that you need specialized ‘shoe’ alternatives and the straddle arms have to traverse laterally to achieve correct balance – this was too expensive and fiddly, and the consequences of ‘wrong’ operation rather immediate and sometimes unforgiving, to implement on ‘production’ equipment in the heyday of PiggyPackers and the like.
It is at least theoretically possible to incorporate a center sill construction and shielding under a van trailer that is of adequate strength to accept a pivoting underlift of the kind used for the original and improved CargoSpeed systems (not the Adtranz CargoSpeed btw) – the idea there is to have the underlifts running in a continuous pit below the running rails, detect the correct balance moments, and lift and turn the trailer from below. This is much more difficult if not impossible to do with any arrangement that engages the side rails if the repositioned trailer is to be driven off the equipment cleanly.
If there were an easy answer to trailer lift it would have been developed in the era that TOFC, especially in pockets or on spine equipment when air resistance at higher speeds was more of a design consideration. That it effectively
A few reason why it’s not done more often. The time it takes to equip the lifting arms with the shoes to handle non-IM trailers. Non-IM trailers are still suspetible to lifting damage especially when loaded. Another consideration is th
I would be highly interested to see construction details and tare weights for IM trailers being built now, as we’re getting to an era where engineering and design analysis is comparatively cheap and the use of materials previously considered exotic for trailer construction may be considered – particularly if both low tare and long service life are recognized by owners to be financially important.
Apart from trailer spec and operational considerations, TOFC was a great tool that allowed railroads to provide door to door service to their customers. Economics killed off TOFC entirely in Canada and have greatly diminished its use in the United States. With the exodus of manufacturing to Asia, there was less of a need for TOFC, replaced by a growing demand to move containers in huge volumes from ports inland to the big box stores. Also, TOFC in the earlier days was hampered by the regulatory framework of the day that encouraged competition between the modes instead of encouraging alliances between truck and rail. The truckers were loathe to work with their arch rivals, the railroads, and vice versa.