Take a look around 19 seconds into the video. Look at the backup of semi’s. Can’t some creative mind come up with a way for railroads to profitably handle more shorter distance freight moves. Remember Kneiling’s Trains articles?
In Dallas we have a solution, it’s called a toll road. Remarkably, not a whole lot of trucks transit those but move on over to a parallel freeway just 5-6 miles away and you can see trucks everywhere. Noticed the same is starting to become true with the likes of Super Shuttle as well. A lot of Uber and Lyft drivers avoid the toll roads as well if they reasonably can.
Honestly, I think we should sell more of our freeways to private entities to make them tollways. In Dallas I used the tollway system as much as I can along with airport parking (same tag). I never exceed $100 a month and a large chunk of that is 4-5 days of airport parking at Dallas Love Field (B Parking lot). I would be willing to spend more if it meant more traffic would shift to rails and we also got better mass transit / rail passenger service.
Railroads work best at aggregating what they transport, whether large numbers of people who want to go between particular pairs of points A and B at the same time or large quantities of freight.
The John Kneiling solution to aggregate freight other than bulk commodities was containerization. It reduces the costs associated with switching moves to make the last few miles – he called its replacement by truck movement of the containers “switching on rubber tires.” It reduces both the time delays as well as impact damage from switching and from hump yards.
Like all inter-modal systems, the key is the interface between modes. Kneiling advocated for a system based on side transfer between the spine car and the truck chassis. The mechanism to effect the transfer was in the truck chassis, where hydraulically powered arms would drag the container between the rail and the truck platforms – there was no lifting involved. The Stedman (Steadman?) company in Canada was said to have developed this system.
Kneiling claimed that an intermodal terminal in his system was no more complicated than a strip of tarmac parallel to a rail siding. By going with single-level instead of stacked containers and with the random-access transfer system, sole-proprieter owner-operaters could be their own intermodal companies. This simple, low capital expenditure intermodal “interface” would allow such terminals much closer to their destinations, greatly reducing the drayage, meaning the truck portion of the intermodal trip and getting more semis off the urban highways.
The success or failure is always in the details. What was the “cycle time” of the side-transfer system? How much skill did it require from the truck driver/operator to park the truck in the exact spot to effect this sliding side transfer? On account of loss/damage/insurance/liability considerations, would a railroad allow truck operators into even this bare-
Something you have to remember is that Kneiling couldn’t spell very well; he got me into discussing “Letraporters” for far too many years, and Steadman Containers Ltd. (of Brampton, Canada) will likely remain invisible to a detail search if you use his version of the name.
The TL;DR of this is the (usually unmentioned) requirement that the full sideloading equipment reside on each and every trailer underframe, which rapidly ran the cost of any particular size of ‘intermodal company’ out of the range of likely competition. Many of the other contemporary ‘horizontal transfer’ systems, such as Railiner in the '50s or CarConTrain in the '70s, have this same reliance on specialized terminal equipment that must be present and fully functional to move a container. In my opinion this makes the tare-weight reduction in an ori
Steadman, it is, then.
Thank you very much for those links and references.
So I guess the Steadman story is that the transportation regulatory environment, which included concerns of unions representing groups of workers with different interests, held off its adoption until interest in it or money supporting it ran out? But even if it hadn’t been impeded, there would have been problems with the tare weight and cost of the specialized trailer? Along with the scheduling problem of choreographing the train and the truck arrivals also mentioned in the linked dissertation?
But the notion is that this technology worked, that it didn’t need unusual skill from the driver to line up the trailer for the transfer or the 5-6 minute “cycle time” was reasonable? I kind of wonder about that more recent side transfer systems lift the container rather than dragging it?
The best solution, I believe, is the GM-Canada (EMD) Voyagier (Sp?) system. Worked fine, could run in regular freight trains, one chasses per container, could not meet the economics of double-stacks. But might meet the economics for trucking per-se? 4-wheel chassis but advanced suspension technology gave decent ride and steerring characteristics. Trains had a good article about five or six years ago. (Or was it Classic Trains?) Yes, side loading.
How refreshing, to read a series of posts about technical issues and come away feeling informed. Thanks Paul and Overmod.
Unless I’m mistaken, what you’re describing is the Portager system. The two important things to realize about this – promptly – is that the tare weight was definitely too low, and the suspension decidedly too wretched, for any kind of high-speed service in general interchange. Bear in mind this is more than half a decade before Wickens even figured out theoretically how to build a proper two-axle freight car – and the approaches that work are very, very different from the low-unsprung-mass “solutions” GMD designed.
We should look more intensively at why, theoretically, there are really, really good reason double-stacking on a Portager wouldn’t work. First, there isn’t the room. The center units of a good modern articulated stack car rely on larger-diameter wheels to get the appropriate ‘two-axle’ equivalent carrying capacity, and these are accommodated between the dropped wells to allow both lower center of gravity and better restoring force on ‘perturbation’ than on a lightweight underframe that has the container or swap-body perched up artificially high in the first place for automated sideloading. You can imagine the fun providing 40" or larger wheels, plus a suspension capable of proper riding whether light or double-stacked, on anything better than perfectly lined and surfaced mai