When TOFC was re-invented in the 1950’s, there was a tendency to put ramps in a lot of places that didn’t really have the traffic to justify it. I seriously doubt that the circus-loading ramp on ATSF at Fort Madison IA loaded that many trailers. The phasing out of circus loading and the hardware related to it (bridge plates, full-length flatcar decks, etc) contributed to the shutdown of many of these ramps. At any rate, those small ramps were the TOFC equivalent of the small-town freight house.
Since most loading requires straddle cranes or other large devices, it takes a high-volume terminal such as Willow Springs to justify the capital expense. I don’t see any individual warehouse and distribution operations that would have that kind of volume.
Sorry. Thier current model is a L shaped warehouse one side to take Frozen and Reefer trailers, the other side dry goods and grocery.
The distribution centers usually will need new rail and infrastructure to reach them.
And Kalamah Box lifters will need to be purchased and people trained to operate them. For some reason I cannot stomach a mental image of one of these moving a cargo of breakable stuff. Maybe it is from what I have seen at the piers years ago.
What we CAN do is build a intermodal yard, establish a local Chassis operation and transload the boxes from train to truck and take it to the walmart.
I see no improvement in walmart’s ability to absorb 100 new loads a day that is going to slug em.
I see a potential for Walmart to shift everything onto thier own boxes and away from third party motor carriers anyway.
Nah. Walmart will not spend that kind of money, they need to finance the low wages on the already very low prices they have in the stores.
Yes, that’s just what the Florida East Coast did at Ft. Pierce, FL to serve a Wal-Mart DC.
They build a new intermodal terminal focused on the DC. It will serve other business, but its focus was Wal-Mart. It’s huge step in the right direction. I’d like to see similar at Tomah, WI, etc.
You’re not going to put a siding into a Wal-Mart DC, but you can deliver off an intermodal terminal and that DC will provide the volume to support such a terminal.
“Fragile” things can move intermodal. It just isn’t a problem. We hauled TV’s, bottled and canned beer (can’t sell a dented can), fresh fruit that bruised easily (bananas), bottled bourbon, appliances, everything moving UPS, etc. Didn’t have much of a problem. We cooked some bananas once, and froze some beer - but that was about it. Just please don’t hump it.
The real problem was cigarettes. You know the deal. If you want to make a trailer leak, just load it with cigarettes. They’ll claim water damage every time. Even in a drought. Everybody on the dock gets free smokes on the carrier.
Aren’t there times when traffic becomes so prohibitive that dealing with the 3/5 car spine issues isn’t that bad compared with the delays of truck traffic going from intermodal facility to D.C. Its probably going to be really interesting in many places in the next couple of years with regards to it being easier to move things via rail as opposed to truck. I would think the port of oakland is going to be one of these experiments.
Does anyone know how the Wal-mart D.C in the Central Valley CA (can’t remember exactly what town) is fed by? UP, BNSF?
Actually, it is next to the ex-SP. The ex-ATSF through Porterville has been removed (from s/o Lindsay to Ultra). There is no spur going into the center.
The old ATSF branchlines through the San Joaquin Valley have been decimated. The only remaining portions are from Exeter to Lindsay, Ducor to Ultra, Visalia to Loma, and a branch from the BNSF main in Fresno to eastern Fresno (SP used trackage rights on this for part of its Clovis Branch), all SJVR; there is also a section from the BNSF yard in Fresno to an A&K Railroad Materials yard in Fresno and the Oakdale Branch.
Here in Erie we have a siding that feeds a local industry. Erie Foods Intl. We ship to Japan, Aust, Russia and India. We also receive from same. In late seventys up to 85 we used to load/unload containers and boxcars. They would load containers on flatcar with doors to the center, with a 12 foot space between them. We would run a ten foot aluminum ramp out to car then drive forktruck with pallets out to center. Usually a 20 footer would have 800 55lb. bags of dry milk product onthem. A crew of 5 guys could unload in about 2 hours. Then we would reload with soy product for Japan or wherever. Would have 4-5 cars on thesiding. We spotted the cars with a Ford tractor. We used to hate to unload boxcars. They were usually loaded with 100 lb burlap bags from Russia. Made for a hot, itchy day. Then they switched to running the containers out by truck from Chicago yards. Now with Rochelle inter yard, they are talking to enclosing the siding and going back to the old way. BNSF is probable not going to like it cause they park their MOW equipment there, and that will require some switching on the main line.
What ever happened to the side-transfer gear that John Kneiling was touting? That would seem to be well-suited to serving an industrial siding with a string of COFC cars.
I was waiting to see if anyone else remembered Stedman side-loaders.
Basically, the Letroporters and Mi-Jacks took away most of the business model. Chief advantage of intermodal containers is precisely that they go from railcar to truck underframe, and are then intended to be ‘yarded’ in the same manner, and via the same infrastructure, as any other truck. The thought of expensive intermodal trains being stopped, or worse yet, switched in cuts into sidings, simply to transfer containers chills my blood! When you have a ‘central’ facility to accompli***he intermodal transfer, economies of scale permit the use of capable, fast, flexible container handling solutions.
Oh yes: it might be amusing to see how Stedmans could be adapted to handle stack trains…
A better technology in this respect might be the CargoSpeed (NOT that CargoSprinter stuff) that was developed in Europe. This could be adapted to containers fairly easily, in conjunction with some form of ‘sideloading’ transfer table at trackside (similar to the kind of infrastructure I developed for gang sideloading, but adapted to handle the extended container as swiveled). Of course, it might be still better to use simple drop-pocket spine cars and van trailers for such a service, with a cheap drop-center ramp at the point where the trailer will be lifted and swiveled…
Something to remember about gang-sideloading is something I never saw Mr. Kneiling discuss: the access to the doors. As mentioned above, if you leave the container on the railcar for loading or unloading, you have to have clear access to the door end of the container (and provide clear swing and positive latchback for those doors, too.) The CargoSpeed approach would at least swing the containers through an angle which gets all the doors lined up to open past each other with the container ends staggered, in not much more ‘footprint’ than containers all in a line. I would not wait up nights for the introduction of ISO-compliant 48’ and 5
Kneiling’s idea was that an intermodal “integral train” would be just like a passenger train. A passenger train makes stops, and at some stops only a few people get on or off, but by an large passenger trains have fixed consists and are not switched. Oh, there are famous exceptions regarding sleepers, diners, or even entire sections being switched on and off from passenger trains, and there was Amtrak’s experiment with switching head-end cars on passenger trains, but these exceptions prove the rule as it were because switching passengers trains was almost always an operational as well as a passenger-service quality headache.
Where the Stedman gear comes in is that you can stop a train in a siding with little more than a road running alongside, and you have random access to pull or add containers to the train, just like individual passengers can vacate or occupy seats at a station stop. Kneilings point was that stopping a train was not a big deal but switching or otherwise breaking up a consists was a very big deal – coupling shocks on down the line. A fixed consist also allowed tightlock couplers, distributed motive power, two-pipe brakes, electrical activation of brakes, and all of the other features we now take for granted on passenger trains (yes, some passenger trains have distributed motive power in the form of MU cars or locomotives at both ends for performance reasons).
Kneiling argued that the side-transfer system was much lower labor cost than certain crane systems. Don’t know the name of the front loader tractor gizmo that grasps a container or trailer and lifts it up, but in the day that was the “new thing” which Kneiling pointed out needed an operator along with two spotters because the operator had the container or trailer in his face when lifting it.
The disadvantages of side transfer I can think of are 1) the trucker carries around the active part of the gear, so there may be a cost/tare weight disadvantage at the trucking end, 2) the gear may require a
I never bought “Integral Train Systems” when it was published by Kalmbach (the price was a bit steep for a high school student) but I did read his columns regularly. It usually took a couple of readings to understand him, but his main asset was a willingness to think outside the box. While railroading has yet to run an actual integral train, it has inched closer to that goal over the years.
I’ve observed over the years that my willingness to embrace many of the changes that have occurred in railroading (especially after de-reg) have put me in a minority.
As a college student in the 70’s, I never bought Kneiling’s book, but certainly did read his monthly columns. He was on the money with many of his ideas. It was very entertaining to read the reactions in the letters to editor a month or two later.
In Gloverstown NY the Walmart sits right next to the FJ&G right of way(Abondoned). There is about 300 trucks or more or less a day that come thru town. Now seeing that Walmart buys in such bulk could they get a boxcar of garden supplies or a Roadrailer train of DVD players? It would proably cost 12,000,000 to put the line back. If this were funded by bonds it certainly would improve the quility of life.
Israel Railways has huge mobile rubber-tired straddle cranes that are moved to particular sidings for specific agricultural seasons for loading containers on flat cars, generally one 40-48 foot container or two 28-foot containers on a conventional 40-50 foot 8-wheel flat car, no double stacking. These trains run directly to the Ashdot or Ashkalon Ports, with tracks on the docks, so the containers can be moved directly to the ships to cut down ship-in-port time. It is an under 200 mile haul, sometimes as little as 50 miles, but the railroad the port authority figure it is worth it by cutting down ship-in-port time. The huge straddle crane might be seen at a particular siding or yard just of one week or three days, and then it is off to somehwere else, moving on the highway at around 2AM. Some of these locations are adjacent to commuter stations on coastal Tel Aviv - Haifa line, but there are others. I think even the freight trains now use airbrakes instead of vacuum brakes that were the British Mandate legacy, but they still use screw and chain couplers and buffers, although the passenger equipment now uses modern transit style couplers.
Just don’t stay at the Best Western in Front of the Wal-Mart DC in Porterville. The air conditioning never wworks and you listen to trucks going in and out all night![:(!]
I did read just about all of Kneiling’s comments. In fact when he ran the Joint Railfan Trip Committee in New York City, he ran some streetcar trips, and I was the designated teen-age pole-puller to speed up reverse movements. How he managed to talk the New York City transit authority into running an el train (open platform gate cars) with the gondola car with fans standing in it at the front pushed by the train I’ll never know, but it did make the front page of the New York Times! He also ran a fantrip on the LIRR with one Gibbs car (the original electric cars built to the same design as the first steel IRT subway cars), one or two MP-54’s (I think one arch roof and one cleristory) and one 1939-era double-decker, all in one train, no two cars alike.
In Alexandria, Va near Van Dorn Street there is a 2 track Norfolk Southern intermodal facility next to the UPS distribution center. They handle mostly trailers (from what I can tell from the road) but not just UPS stuff. There is usually 4-6 locomotives parked there during the day. The tracks are not terribly long and they have one or two mijacks to work the trains.