No Dave. In the 27 years since the first “Modern” RoadRailers began commercial operation no one has come up with an effective way to use “bi-modal” technology to move containers.
It can be done, but it’s very limited. Containers come in various lengths and no one has been able to build a bi-modal chassis that can accomodate these various lenghts. If you have 40’ chassis and a 20’ comes of the ship, you’re screwed. As you would be with 48’s and 53’s for domestic moves.
Remember that outfit up in Minnesota that had plans to use containers on RailRunner chassis? They can provide their customer with just one length of container - because that’s all those chassis could ever take. That may work in the Minnesota application, but it would never work with a ship discharging differnt length containers.
Obviously your intermodal guy isn’t as up on the subject as Dave is, because Dave says it takes a lot longer…[:D]
And of course, the time spotting the extra train at the dock, and the added congestion running a container train in a first and second sections doesn’t count…
Then again, you would think Dave would have grasped the fact that the railroad part of all of this is already fluid, and that what we do is move the boxes from an start point, (port of entrance) to an end point, (distribution terminal) and that the “customer” is not the local Walmart or Sears, but the container distribution center, then by truck to the local distribution center.
Or that because most European countries are , for the most part, small enough to fit inside Texas, that it makes sense to run short, frequent trains…with their dense population centers, short distance between end points, and the fact that their railroads are subsidized by their governments, the need for their railroads to earn their keep is less.
Another big consumer of time may come up in a few years with mandatory screening of all containers arriving from abroad. The amount of pain may vary with the amount of pre-screening done before the container is loaded on the ship, what levels of screening are necessary and the perceived threat level.
Guess who is leading the fight against the screening of those containers also. The big box retaliers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot are the biggest fighters of it. If Wal-Mart was its own country it would have be the 8th largest in the world yet it does not want to secure its own country from someone slipping something into this country that could result in its destruction.
You evidently didn’t ask the questions I would have asked, settling for the facile rather than the pertinent. Of course you can load 100 containers onto a double stack as fast as a single stack, if the containers are on the ready! That’s the facile summation.
The pertinent summation is contained in your next paragraph…
Well there we go! That’s the pertinent take on the subject, aka the need for multiple pre-sorts so that the right container will go into the right platform on the right train, aka heavies on the bottom, lighter ones on the top, etc. Thus, you have to go through multiple minutiations in the container marshalling yard just to make double stack appear more efficient.
Nick, why didn’t you ask about the ship to rail time comparisons? Because single stack would allow for unfettered direct ship to rail loading/unloading which allows a complete bypass of the container marshalling yard morass, something you can’t effectively do with double stacks. That’s why any OA operator that shows up at the dock with only single stack platforms would easily take business from the big boys, John B’s obscure Dutch example notwithstanding - having a dockside container crane moving an extra 15 feet on average is small potatoes compared to the cost of dockside space crammed 10 high with containers needing all sorts of sorting.
I guess I dare not bring up the fact that railroads
Singles stacks need to be sorted too. You can’t just load them off the ship onto the railcars and expect them to be in the right order, unless the boxes are sorted prior to be loaded on the ship. The boxes need to be sorted somewhere.
What about domestic boxes? We mix domestic boxes and international boxes on the same train and same car. Where would you suggest we do the mixing? Although, I image you would say we should run them on seperate trains.
Where do RoadRailers fit in this discussion? It seems that they move quick and have good turnaround time. May not entirely replace some stack trains but could that application be utilized more?
Personally, I’d like to know how FM plans on taking containers directly from a ship and in one swell foop deposit them onto the well decks…moer effeciently than is done now. Going from an 800 ft long ship stacked 8 abreast and 10 deep, onto a 7500 ft long train just setting alongside the pier… either single or double stack. One reason they can get those things off so fast is the crane has a predictable and consistant destination…right underneith itself. Are you planning on spotting the flats under the crane, and slowly pull forward as they are filled? How ya gonna tell the guy driving the train when you are ready for him to go ahead? And co-ordinate the four (or more) cranes working together…How much real estate do you suppose it would take to build a circular track around the pier like they do at the grain elevators? And where, pray tell, will that real estate come from?
Also, I recall reading that some containers must be held awaiting customs clearance once unloaded. THis would be especially a problem if it is not consistent, the held containers intermixed with the cleared containers.
THe shipping companies pay big bucks for every hour they are alongside the pier. To be competative, if there was a faster way to do things, it has probably been or is being tried.
There is no bi-modal technology that can effectively handle containers except in very limited, specialized situations.
I worked for RoadRailer and I ran the the numbers vis a vis double stack several times. Where the volume exists to support a full stack train, stacks are by far and away the cheapest way to move containers (except for the ship.)
So that’s more a niche market kind of thing. After digging some more that does make sense. I’ve learned a couple of things from this thread. Hopefully it stays on topic…
If a crane can take a container off an 800 ft ship and load it onto a chassis or a set of shuttle wagons as is done now, it’s just as easy to load onto a dockside railcar. You can fit at least two sets of tracks between the struts of the crane, and have several more outside the struts. Keep in mind also that not all containers would be directly loaded ship to rail, some are staying local, some will be marshalled for double stack (I never said double stacks should be eliminated). Communication between crane operator and train driver is elementary, I don’t know why you’d think that’d be a problem. It would be harder to facilitate on dock rail lines for those that jut out into the harbor, but rather easy for those that are parallel to the seaside. And where is all this land to come from? From the reduced need to marshall all offloaded containers - think of all the space that would become available if container storage was reduced.
Keep in mind also that the reason direct ship-to-r
When you have access to multiple sets of tracks dockside and the ability to move the trains back and forth as needed, you’ll have enough “play” to allow the right containers on the right trains in the right spot.
Actually, I have a low opinion of the domestic container, prefering TOFC. And TOFC spine cars can carry either containers or trailers.
RailRunner is specifically designed to effectively handle containers in very unlimited, unspecialized situations, aka anyhow everywhere!
As I pointed out above, double stack takes a lot of pre-emptive sorting and marshalling just to make it appear efficient - those costs usually don’t show up on the railroad’s books, but always show up on the shipper’s books. And the RailRunner load factor beats the double stack load factor for moving primarily 40’ containers, so there’s a savings in fuel costs as well. Add to that the elimination of the need for the consolidated super-sized intermodal terminal in favor of regular sidings at multiple locations, and bi-modal single stack beats double stack hands down. RailRunner bogies are designed to handle 100+ mph speeds, something that can’t be said for most well cars, thus the potential for increasing the number of cycles using RailRunner vs double stacks is also paramount.
The reason bi-modal single stack isn’t used yet is the always present resistence closed access railroaders have for change, especially when that forward-thinking change repre
Back to the double saw-by. A few months ago I watched BNSF bring two trains to the Hebron siding in Plano, TX, on the Madill Sub, neither of which would fit into the siding. No saw-by. They ended up sending a light engine from Irving to pull the NB train back to Irving. Considering how much time and trouble that cost, I concluded that there must be a huge resistance to doing a saw-by.
So instead of sorting the just boxes at the gate, you’re sorting both the railcars on the dock and the boxes as they come off the ship. Sorting is sorting.
A box is box…You didn’t answer the question. I am aware of the fact that spine cars can carry both types of boxes (I do this for a living you know), but that’s not the issue. I asked…where you would mix them?
Dave has also failed to answer the need to sort the boxes when they come off the ship. It would not surprise me if the first five containers off of the ship were going to 5 different cities, including a large percentage going to somewhere in the LA Basin. And then there are the reloads.
I see no further reason to continue to participate in this discussion, the problems with where, when, how and what to do with the boxes will always be part of the business. Ship, Train, Port, Inland Railhead… wherever.
When a box is loaded it needs to go somewhere. Whoever is at that somewhere is going to be waiting on that box. What is in that box is everyone’s problem. It could be glowing nuclear warhead being smuggled into our USA or it could be bags of Birdseed that needs to be Customs approved or rejected. Where is that box is going and How it’s going to get there is determined by the lowest transport bill. If it is cheapest to load it all onto a airplane and air-freight it… so be it. It shall be done.
Actually what you’re suggesting is to use the inherent structural quality of the container as a functioning part of the rolling stock itself. You’re not that far off from an idea that came close a while back - there was an outfit in California(?) that proposed using old logging railroad technology as the basis for a single stack container train. Remember how some logging railroads used only the rail bogies as their “railcar”, stacked the logs with one end of the stack resting on one rail bogie and the other half on the next rail bogie? Others implemented a long drawbar between bogies to absorb draft and buff. Well, these guys thought they could do the same with containers - have a set of bogies interconnected with a long drawbar, and rest one end of the container on one bogie and the back end on the trailing bogie.
The advantage is extremely low tare, but the disadvantage is the possibility of “twisting” a container when one bogie yaws one way and the next bogie yaws the other way.