Was watching the Rochelle, IL TRAINS cam and noticed a train on UP that was entirely empty intermodal well cars. Who pays for their return shipment (they were going west). In fact who pays for a privately owned railcar being returned? How about returning a car to the home railroad?
Empty intermodal cars are not on ‘return trips’. Intermodal terminals know the expected ‘footage’ of the equipment they will need to handle their loadings of both loaded and empty boxes in intermodal service. If a terminal knows it will be loading 20K feet of intermodal cars and it has 40K feet in it’s staging area and it also knows that other terminals of needing additional footage of cars to handle the needs of their boxes - empty intermodal cars will get moved to the terminal that needs them.
Loading patterns are known commodities at each intermodal terminal.
Trailer Train, the leading supplier of intermodal cars is a entity that is owned jointly by the carriers. Individual railroads have also built their own intermodal cars. Cars are moved around the intermodal network to support the timely loading of boxes. Car Hire rules apply to the cars.
Thanks for the reply. Just saw another dedicated empty well car train heading west. This was about 5 minutes ago. Must be a lot of merchandise coming into western ports. I somehow see piles of empty containers stacking up in Chicago and the East!
Railroad can rent TTX cars from the pool and then control them like they are company-owned for the rental duration. So, baretable moves generally don’t have any incremental cost for the equipment.
It’s called an equipment reposition move, or ‘repo’ for short. And if you’re moving nothing, it costs you. My boss used to say “We aren’t in the habit of moving sailboat fuel around here” but you do have to keep equipment moving to ensure fluidity in the network – loaded or empty. The trade imbalance right now basically means you’re repo’ing equipment around, you just want to either do it a.) mixed in on a revenue run or b.) on a basis when you accumulate enough equipment. Some lanes are priced to take into account the repo costs… also keep in mind just because you see containers too those aren’t always full. Luckily for the RRs, an empty container they don’t own can be a ‘revenue’ move but priced advantageously to keep the IMC partnership alive. So an entire empty well car train is a repo move, and if someone else (another RR for example, say NS) needs it they pay for the equipment (car hire) move & reservation(use of equipment). But keep in mind, equipment is typically a net-revenue generator, so in the grand scheme the cost of moving empty over the lifetime in theory should be less than the revenue earned by the asset.
Not everyone gets to use TTX equipment, just the Class Is, Pan Am (a stakeholder) and their partner lines that they send the equipment to.
Working at an intermodal ramp, it’s always a major ‘juggling act’ to have the right amount of equipment (empty containers, chassis, train) available at all times.
Depending on the season (Sep-Dec is typically the busiest), there may be a shortage of chassis to ground all the loads from an incoming train. There’s a number of private owner chassis (Schneider, for example), that can only be used under one of their containers unless, by prior arrangement under unusual situations, a Schneider container may be put on a ‘pool’ chassis (TSXZ, etc). JB Hunt has similar restrictions on their chassis, and some of their older containers will not fit ‘standard’ chassis due to their tunnel design.
Even having enough parking space at the ramp to hold all the containers & trailers both inbound and outbound can become problematic as well. Double-parking invariably causes truckers to wander around looking for a container that we know is there (should be, but doesn’t mean another trucker took it by mistake…a driver may see the container they want, but back under the one next to it, etc), but not visible as it’s been double-parked in. I’ve even observed a ‘triple parked’ container that was in between another at each end…but that was in an area where containers & trailers are normally parked back to back. Sometimes, when there’s an excess of empty containers with chassis on hand, the containers are removed, stacked 3 high, and chassis stacked as well, either ‘on their bumper’ at a 70 degree angle, or simply stacked on top of one another 3-4 high.
Having enough train available for containers and trailers is also another ball to be juggled. Invariably, there’s times there’s too much train, or not enough. Loading priority at the CSX ramp I worked at was UPS loads first, Schneider loads, all other loads (private owner & pool), UPS repos, Schneider repos, other
I had an experience with an intermodal train this past April as I was on my way to Bristol, Virginia, from Charlottesville. In Marion, we had to wait while a westbound train (for Memphis or Meridian?) crossed the highway. I did not count the cars, but there were far more empty tables than loads.
This would make a good TRAINS mag short article!
I think I found what is going on. There was a recent article that said that Los Angelas harbor was crowded with ships. One reason was speculated as goods flooding in to beat the new Trump Tarriffs. It also indicated that it was more likely a backup due to longshoremen not working July 4th resulting in a backup.
I had read an article recounting a China bound ship rushing to deliver soybeans to beat their tariff.
I watch the daily parade of NS intermodal on the Chesterton, In. web cam and it is always interesting to see the bare table movements (usually Monday or Tuesday) going into Chicago. Then you will see the intermodals which will carry a large number of BTs in the consist.
With all of this west to east movements of both domestics and international containers/trailers, where do these end up? It seems as if there are far more moving eastbound than returning west.
The discussion on the West Springfield intermodal operations by bratkinson was quite interesting. How are intermodal loads “booked”? Typically, how much notice does the railroad have of the incoming loads? How are the last minute or rush trailers/containers handled, particularly those of UPS, FedX, the LTLs or JBH, Schneider? I am sure those are handled with priority.
The domestic intermodal market is fascinating and worth of an article, or perhaps even an entire special issue. The coordination with the trucking companies, drayage truckers, 3PL, and others is quite a story to be told. Further, the movement of LTL off the highway and onto the rails is no doubt a complex story to be told. The number of YRC and ABF 28 ft pups moving is quite large on NS. There is definately a movement of UPS from trailers to containers, but still a large number of 28 ft and 53 ft trailers.
Ed
Once upon a time, a shipper could “crash the gate” and come in for loading without billing. The RR would just put it on the “right” train and hope to get billing later. Kinda like mailing a letter and telling mailman, “take it west. I’ll get you the address tomorrow.”
No more, though. You have to have billing to get in the gate. Is there a maximum lead time? I don’t think so. I s
Unless things have changed, a empty intermodal car move is a cost without offsetting revenue to the railroad.
We paid per diem and mileage to TTX. And it did not matter if the car was loaded or not. So that was a prime marketing focus. If we were moving empty cars, or trailers, to a terminal we worked to find loads for them. You could discount the rate because you were putting revenue to a cost that would be incurred anyway. That was the most profitable freight you could find.
I am not obsessed with the cam. It is on when I am reading. I doubt I cover 10 pct of the daylight hours. Just passed was a BNSF empty move west.
Clearly there is a notable flood of goods inbound!
Rochelle is clearly the pulse of commerce in the Northern Tier of the US!
Unlike unit trains that always have the same shipper starting point and customer (consignee) end point, intermodal equipment, like box cars, are pretty much ‘free to roam’ wherever the next load takes them.
To start off, there are certain container owning companies like UMAX (UMXU containers) that are partnerships between class 1 railroads, and 99% of the time, those containers will only travel between shippers and consignees on those railroads.
But private container owning companies are the ‘masters’ of where each box goes and when. Schnieder, for example, may have a load from Los Angeles to West Springfield, but when empty, Schnieder has already scheduled that container to be loaded somewhere nearby (maybe even the first consignee!) and it may go to Louisville,
Glad to hear the ‘war stories’ from the Springfield ramp, I never toured that one but managed a piece of business out of there for a while… one that you referenced. For chassis management at the pumpkin there was a custom built Oracle based system that used ‘events’ reporting in conjunction with driver assignments and the TT210 tracking devices on the end of the containers. The TT210s are all but gone replaced with with a new unit, much smaller and different service vendor, but my counterparts at CSX used to find the big white boxes on the end of the container (which would mostly be covering part of the Schneider logo) would fall off… and they would collect them in their trucks. That of course put off the tracking to show a bunch of containers just hanging around the ramp… good times. Also customers liked to take containers, often the brand new ones, and move them to other off site locations and use them as storage units… that was good to have the live tracking as you could send a driving to within 20ft of the box and then charge the customer a bunch of demmurage for their ‘misuse’ of company equipment.
A few times we diverted traffic from one ramp to the next, but given the train routings that wasn’t common. I had been working on ‘regional capacity’ models where we could shift drivers from one ramp to the next if a bubble of freight was coming. During the port strikes on the West coast, we were losing 100 loads a day (cross docked from 40’FCL to 53’FCL) and then once it was resolved, they started unloading the ships that were just hanging around which created a huge surge. We had to hire ‘partner’ carriers to come in and handle the freight, creating a real headache for CSXT with all these novice intermodal guys around (they have strict rules at the ramp but for good reason). I’m sure you’ve seen some of the questionable behaviors on ramps but some drivers… too bad because a few rotten eggs spoil the whole bunch (had a lot of excel
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Glad to hear the ‘war stories’ from the Springfield ramp, I never toured that one but managed a piece of business out of there for a while… one that you referenced. For chassis management at the pumpkin there was a custom built Oracle based system that used ‘events’ reporting in conjunction with driver assignments and the TT210 tracking devices on the end of the containers. The TT210s are all but gone replaced with with a new unit, much smaller and different service vendor, but my counterparts at CSX used to find the big white boxes on the end of the container (which would mostly be covering part of the Schneider logo) would fall off… and they would collect them in their trucks. That of course put off the tracking to show a bunch of containers just hanging around the ramp… good times. Also customers liked to take containers, often the brand new ones, and move them to other off site locations and use them as storage units… that was good to have the live tracking as you could send a driving to within 20ft of the box and then charge the customer a bunch of demmurage for their ‘misuse’ of company equipment.
A few times we diverted traffic from one ramp to the next, but given the train routings that wasn’t common. I had been working on ‘regional capacity’ models where we could shift drivers from one ramp to the next if a bubble of freight was coming. During the port strikes on the West coast, we were losing 100 loads a day (cross docked from 40’FCL to 53’FCL) and then once it was resolved, they started unloading the ships that were just hanging around which created a huge surge. We had to hire ‘partner’ carriers to come in and handle the freight, creating a real headache for CSXT with all these novice intermodal guys around (they have strict rules at the ramp but for good reason). I’m sure you’ve seen some of the questionable behaviors on ramps but some drivers… too bad because a few rotten eggs
The mention of hazmat placards on transportation when there is no hazmat aboard reminded me of an incident when I was receiving chemicals.
On one occasion, a load that was not hazmat came in–and the shipper had failed to mark “hazmat” out on the bill of lading, and the load was delayed at the POE so an instpector could go throguh the load. The driver, from his account of the incident was a smart aleck who had not read the bill carefully and noted the error, and showed the inspector no respect.