Most places that would order these are going to be places like Kraft Foods Oscar Mayer or other Food Makers. BTW the only plants that will Cube out before Maxing out are the ones that make the Lunchables or Coolwhip If your pulling Lunchmeat or anything else you need every pound of cargo you can haul since that stuffs pays per Hundred weight.
Also the places that recive it are not going to want to recive more trucks every day to save a few pennys on the rate. For them the Shiopping cost is not that high and also on container every 5 days you run the chance of needing one on Sundays and Being out of Product to ship that night. I asked around from a couple buddies on a Bulliton Board trucking related and CR England is Still having trouble having trouble getting customers to accept them.
I am having trouble reconciling these two statements. I realize the first part refers to the trucking company and driver while the second refers to the shipper or consignee but if a few pennies more shipping cost wasn’t important to them then why not add a little to the rate per cwt. and not sweat needing a slightly lighter, and possibly less well constructed trailer. If your service delivery rate is top notch they won’t drop you for a slightly higher rate; or will they? I think that the reason England is having trouble selling Intermodal is that the customers are skittish about delivery reliability.
They’re not hauling the container/chassis combo around with OTR sleeper tractors that weigh 16K. They use Freightliner day cabs with single wheel tandems that weigh less. That is what England buys for its intermodal loads.
And they don’t need to load up 150 gallons of diesel fuel. Half that will get 'em at least 375 miles and that’s all they need. A chassis/container combination will weigh more than an OTR reefer trailer. But they get weight back from being able to use a lighter tractor.
(For those of you new to this, the standard maxium gross weight for a tractor trailer (including rail containers) on a US highway is 80,000 pounds. This includes everthing: lading, fuel, driver, driver’s lunch, you know, everthing.)
I’ll go over my view of this one more time.
Food production in the US is remarkably concentra
Greyhounds CR England is going to be one of the Carriers that the FMCSA is going to Mandate an EOBR b lack box on. With no Sleeper there is no way for that driver to go OFF DUTY and get the rest needed. Why are they going to end up with a set of Elogs when you have a CVSA 2010 scale score for drivers of 300 and 400 gets you shut down there is a HUGE Problem. Drviers tghere are forced to run Over Hours and if they refuse they get dinged in Miles. Also the Differance in Weight between a Daycab and a regular truck is no more than 800 Lbs were you get the weight at is in the Driveline. Remove a Drive axle replace it with a Tagger axle instead of a big Bore Diesel go with a smaller one. Trust me I speced out plenty of trucks that had the massive 70-72 inch sleepers but weighed LESS than a freaking day cab. It is all in how you spec them out.
Henderson Trucking here in IL still runs alot of my specs 11 years later boss had a contest to see who could spec out the lightest weight truck I won by almost 1000 lbs. Heard from the owner not to long ago with the New Cascadiadas they can now offer their Customers with my specs 48K in a reefer. I have shaved off enough weight from trucks to build cars.
I don’t doubt that you’re very good at “specking out” a tractor. But don’t you think CR England has similar expertise?
They’ve got substantial experience in both over the road reefer operations and intermodal reefer operations. I think it’s safe to say that they didn’t throw $15-$20 million dollars at the wall to see if it stuck. Based on their expeience and knowledge, and afer consulting with customers, they made a substantial investment in refrigerated double stack containers.
They’re not guaranteed success. Business has inherent risks. But CR England is a successful company that has evaluated this particular risk and decided to make the investment. My money is on England.
There is no economic sense involved in having a truck driver move a load of onions over the road from Washington state to Boston. The reason that such a fool thing happens in that the Federal government tried to centrally plan the US transportation system. The predictably disasterous results have been very harmful to the American people.
We’re slowly digging our way out of that hole. The CR England investment is a step in the right direction.
Greyhounds bossman had a contest to spec out the LIGHTEST tractor we could that would sustain the weights and speeds we wanted to pull. I used alot of Alloys and other lightweight stuff in the trucks. BTW some of this fleets 2001 the firsts ones with my specs my FIRST OTR boss bought to run OTR in 2007 when they were 6 years old. Just because I never Owned one doesn’t mean I never speced them out Greyhounds. I had to play the fuel games more times than I care to think of with the Heavier Trcuks. Bossman went with my Specs and not one of his drivers ever had to play a Fuel weight game ever again.
Saw an article which I hope to recover stating China is in process of buying 10,000 of them.