Rail verses truck fuel efficiency is a meaningless comparison. We may as well ask which is more efficient… a power drill or a rice cooker. Not being a power engineer, I would go with the rice cooker if its a rice dinner I’m after. And I would go with the power drill if I needed a hole in a wall (I guess throwing the rice cooker against the wall would work too if you’re not fussy about the size of the hole). But the point is that any tool’s efficiency is always closely correlated to the job at hand.
Nope. Wheel replacement is an AAR-billable repair. Unless that car is owned by the railroad that you saw it on, there is zero economic incentive for the RR to leave a condemnable wheel defect in place instead of replacing it and sending a bill to the owner. But conversely if the defect is not condemnable, they are not going to spend their money to fix someone else’s car. This is how it has been since AAR interchange rules were established a Long Time Ago.
When the Wheel Impact Load Detectors (WILD) network got built out 15-20 years ago, car owners gained the ability to repair trending wheels prior to condemnable flat spots if they wish to. The advantage to that is they can get the work done in home or contract repair shops at less-than-AAR rates. But the WILDs mostly only catch flat spots, not hollow wheels, thin flanges, or other defects.
Dan
Might be hard to make the comparison, but it’s not meaningless, of course. How much fuel used by a truck pulling a container LA to Chicago, versus how much by a train carrying 300 of the same containers? 300 times as much, or 200, or 100, or what? (Not more than 300, we hope.)
In my opinion, it’s ridiculous to think that you can’t compare efficiency of two modes of freight transportation in the same lane with a simple-in-principle comparison of cost per ton-mile.
The complexity starts to come in if you average the cost per mile to account for things like grade, wind, congestion etc, that affect one mode differently from another, but those are reasonably readily determined or approximated. The trouble comes when you have advocates for a particular mode who start fudging the assumptions or data to get what they want to see, or want others to believe or agree to.
The two modes, truck and rail, really only intersect on about 10% of all freight. Thus a fuel efficiency comparison between the two is for the most part meaningless. For example, if you need a fridge delivered to your home is it meaningful to know that the flanged wheel is more efficient than rubber on asphalt? Of course not. Now extrapolate that to most freight, and bingo, that’s why nobody really cares about fuel efficiency comparisons. Rail isn’t an option for most freight…thus rail efficiency, however wonderful it may be, is irrelevant i.e. meaningless.
If I remember correctly, the claim was ‘CSX: moving a ton of freight 520 miles on a gallon of fuel.’ I always took it as a carefully worded way of saying: ‘Once we figure out how many gallons it takes to move an empty train 520 miles, we can add a ton of freight and get it there for only a gallon more’.
Based on the reply from Balt, it seems I’m wrong, but it would definitely make it a different comparison.
Apparently your definition of “meaningless” is different from the usual.
Sounds like you’re saying 90% of all freight always goes by truck, or always goes by rail. Or something like that. Who cares what’s in each container? The very meaningful question is: given 300 containers, each weighing 25 tons, to be moved from LA to Chicago, how much fuel would 300 trucks burn, and how much fuel would a train carrying the same containers burn?
I’m saying that truck and rail freight really only overlaps on about 10% of the overall freight market. Alot of freight cannot go by truck… coal… iron ore… crude oil etc… and conversely, alot of freight cannot go by rail… you order a new couch from Leons for delivery to your home for example… that’s not going rail. The overlap… where freight is equally amenable to truck or rail is about 10% of the total freight market. That’s why truck to rail fuel efficiency comparisons are for the most part a nice theoretical exercise with almost no practical value… fun stuff for engineers to contemplate.
Sure – no point in comparing the fuel efficiencies of a coal train and a FedEx delivery van. So we won’t try to do that. But the carriage of identical containers between the same two points, by rail and by truck, would be a useful comparison. (Anyway, it’s the one the original questioner asked about.)
But a good many items of that sort do get carried at some point by rail. Your new TV likely travelled in a container to a warehouse, where the TVs were broken down into regional destinations, etc, to which they travelled by truck.
But, yes, the markets are different for probably most cargoes. The problem is identifying what those cargoes are. TVs are a case in point. There may only be a couple of containers on a 200 can train that are loaded with TVs. They’re still travelling by rail, but as a commodity, they would be hard to track.
Tracking may be well nigh impossible if the container is being shipped under a “Freight All Kinds” classification.
Exactly.