Can’t imagine doing much better than this even today.
http://dcmny.org/islandora/object/bronxbusiness%3A75/datastream/OBJ/view
Boston Globe, June 11, 1931
A new freight train, The Maine Bullet, beginning next Monday, will make an overnight run each way every business day between Portland and New York, at a speed unapproached in the history of New England railroading. With an elaborate system of feeder connections by train and truck at various points en route, it will extend its speeded schedule to most of the principal centers of industry and business in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The new train is a cooperative effort by the New Haven and the Boston & Maine to put freight service in New England on new standards of speed. Thus freight service, with a schedule of 12½ hours between Portland, Me, and New York City in each direction, giving shippers and receivers in more than 500 N
Where is the wreck coverage that led to that verse in that very peculiar song? Two steam locomotives in front and one behind does seem like something of a prescription for disaster on a fast freight train…
of course the first thing that poked me with a stick is that this train went nowhere near the Boston area, depending on precisely-scheduled aggregated LCL and carload from that and one other region; it would NOT have directly benefited much from the intermodal ‘containerization’ and swap-body LCL of that era in actual running. Second, you already know why this amazing result isn’t justly famous when you read that it’s largely predicated on railroad-owned truck lines. Imagine the “anticompetitive” screaming from truck interests, and a Depression-era ICC bringing down the boom… note that part about ‘no increase in freight rates’ for the precision scheduled efficient service?
i would perhaps not be as impressed with this had we not been looking at the logistics of the Rotterdam Cold Connect service recently. This train served an enormous cross-section of then-burgeoning New England industry … all of it, as noted, getting the freight there faster than a cover letter could be mailed… in the days of twice-daily mail deliveries.
One also wonders where this would have gone if there had been no protracted depression ending the New Era… think of the fun in a similar train on the route of the pre-1917 Federal making precision block meets with the various New Jersey and Pennsylvania railroads well clear of the New York City bottlenecks and congestion, and thence as appropriate with a wide range of coordinated delivery trucking…
It’s pretty impressive really… get your shipment in a boxcar by 4:00 pm and, if it goes the whole route, it is there early morning. Not too shabby!
Back in the days when manual labour was cheap.
I wonder if you could do something similar with Iron Highway or Lohr equipment? Of course, the train would have to keep time like the Swiss.
Yes, but no. This train is a somewhat unusual case.
It pays to recall the kinds of traffic being generated for these four trains, much of which was LCL in ‘special cars’ that would have to be broken-bulk if delivered in LTL form. Note the container crane in the ad NOT being used with containers.
In operation, the Bullet essentially gets much of its speed from only requiring two parallel, extremely highly-timed loadings – they are in the switching-in of precise blocks at the two defined ‘feeder points’ (and presumably switching-out of other equally defined blocks serving the other express points, although this is less essential, for a number of reasons). Think of this as little more than a crew stop, probably set around 100-mile points, where you have a switch crew on call and ready to shove the Lowell or wherever cut on the rear and make the air. You wouldn’t get one intermodal car on there in the time it takes to do the whole job, a hidden advantage of loose-car railroading; likewise there is no competitive advantage in expensive and incompatible specialized intermodal equipment to speed up the train movement.
Meanwhile we take a look at those ‘special’ LCL cars. Note all the ways in which accelerated stripping and stuffing of purpose-built cars can be optimized. While things like Evans loaders hadn’t quite been invented yet, some standardization on packaging and dunning certainly could be – as could, in the time before “B-minute”, careful loading so that packages off could be easily tracked and routed to the waiting last-mile trucks. (To do this with a trailer would involve taking it off your Iron Highway or out of its Lohr pocket and parking it ‘somewhere’ at a dock with its end
Lots to read here: keep you fascinated for some time.
https://movingthefreight.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/nynhh-freight-train-and-package-car-schedule-070-9-29-1940.pdf
Looks like New Haven and Pennsy share the same icon… it’s kind of weird though, not too crazy about it. Different times.
All those connections really show how many trains operated each day on regular schedules and that just for this service. Pretty darn good.
I think they did a great job, just as good as today. Too much has been lost.
Not just for these services. Look at some of the implied dwell times. These are ‘connecting’ trains operating hours, in a couple of cases multiple hours, before the scheduled connections. What I don’t see, and perhaps this was partly intentional, is precisely where and how the connecting cars were switched into the train (cf. Pawtucket).
This is eight hours down the Shore Line from Boston origin to Bay Ridge, then two hours for the lightering and reassembly in Greenville, then apparently either the train went down (as PRR freight N-51, “Speed Witch” more by courtesy) to Camden first or they split it east of Philadelphia (perhaps at Morrisville) and sections went to various points in Camden and then Philadelphia in around the 6am range … right about where truck transfer would give pre-opening business service ‘timely’… and Baltimore (Edgemoor?) by around 9:00. One might strongly argue this train is operating ‘only as fast as it needs to’ provided there is good quick transfer to last-mile delivery.
Perhaps better. I’d bet the “modern” service has that ‘I shot an arrow in the air…’ PSR response as soon as the intermodal transfer gets accomplished, and I doubt any “local” setouts from a similar service would (or could!) be made enroute with switcher and loose-car service, let alone cross-dock performance.
Pretty straightforward. Pawtucket is on the Shore Line, so switcher. Brockton at Providence, Worcester and Woonsocket (Along with Central Vermont connections) at New London, Holyoke/New Britain (New Haven & Northampton) at New Haven, Waterbury at Bridgeport.
