When you say “modified MK 3 roadrailers” I take it to mean a roadrailer configured as a container chassis. As someone else pointed out these exist and are called by a different name that I do not recall at the moment.
You seem to be advocating a lower than stack train volume rail feeder/distribution service between existing high volume container terminals and places were regular but reasonably consistent traffic is available.
I would suggest that the type of equipment is far down the list of things one needs to consider. Lets use your distribution center as the other end of the system.
First think of terminal issues. This comes in two flavors; the existing big hub and your dedicated terminal near the customer. The big hub is designed to do two things, unload inbound trains and get the containers on the road, and the reverse move containers from the road to train. As now operated to perform those tasks the container is driven to or from the loading machine which moves from slot to slot as it works the train. Containers come and go to a temporary storage area, then to and from the road.
While I do not know what a lift costs in such places, I suspect something in the range of $100 is in the ball
Hmm - that variation on the larger gross weight is new to me - as opposed to the just generally slightly higher tare weight of a container and chassis, as opposed to a simple van trailer - but also plausible.
What I didn’t note above - but perhaps should have - is that I strongly suspect (though I have not researched it to confirm) that this statute was enacted at the instigation of the representatives of the Port of Philadelphia to the Pennsylvania General Assembly (legislature), so as to not possibly disadvantage - and maybe even provide a slight commercial advantage - for the highway transport of container shipments coming up the Delaware River estuary that far anyway. At the time there were a couple of fairly active container terminals on the Philadelphia side - Tioga Marine Terminal and Packer Avenue come to mind, but don’t bet anything on my recollection of that - as well as competition across the river in Camden, NJ and just downriver at Wilmington, Delaware, as well as the usual other East Coast ports.
The costs shown are per container based on 20 containers per train, and your 50 mile one way move. The key to the conclusion is that railroad would charge the same for your slot as the railroad would gross on a 200 container stack train. I think that is a reasonable assumption as that is a reasonable approximation of the value of of a train slot in a congested territory, which the outskirts of any big city would be, congested. I can tell you that would be my minimum if I was running the railroad.
I think you mean rail mate technology which is basically a chassis with demountable rail trucks. I agree that you do not need a fancy terminal with this technology, but your hypothesis was that you were working from a standard rail IM terminal to a dedicated small volume terminal. Introducing “nonstandard” rail mate technology to a standard rail terminal negates the terminal advantage of rail mate at best and would complicate operations at the hub terminal since now they have to tie up track space for trucks, or move then off track and back, plus they may have to store extra rail mate chassis to protect surges in demand.
I would agree that at the small volume terminal costs would likely be less for rail mate than for conventional rail equipment since you do not need to lift containers. The savings however would be overwhelmed by the cost of rail line haul rendering the concept a non starter. It is simply cheaper to truck it.
I have no idea what NS figures as their terminal cost for roadrailers.
Usually someone was just not aware of limits. From what I’ve heard second hand it is not uncommon from Africa or Asia for stuff to go over without anyone thinking about the weight. Weights are approximated and someone will say let just throw a few more boxes in here to fill the container. And then no one weighs it til it gets to the US and there the local DOT is with portable scales to weight the now overweight “US” truck.
" I think you mean rail mate technology which is basically a chassis with demountable rail trucks. I agree that you do not need a fancy terminal with this technology, but your hypothesis was that you were working from a standard rail IM terminal to a dedicated small volume terminal."
No the Chassis I am thinking of has both rubber tyres on an 8’ spread with a single rail axle in between. The big O’s are the rubber tyres the little o is the rail wheel on a single axle
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O o O
This is the kind of chassis Burlington Northern was running Chicago to St Louis. It turned out these were not well suited to 70 mph operations. I think for short haul at 30 mph they would do better
IGN - That’s how the Mark IV RoadRailer was set up. But it’s since been superseded by the Mark V’s, which don’t have a permanent rail axle attached to them. Instead, the rear bumpers are set up on a 2-axle bogie = rail truck, and the trailing unit is hitched to it elephant-style.
It would be useful to post some links to both variants, and photos of both the RailMate and RailRunner versions, to facilitate comparing and contrasting them. Let me see if I can do that quickly - if not, then maybe tomorrow, or someone else can.
Paul North.
EDIT - RailMate photo from April 30, 2008 - incorrectly listed as a RoadRailer - which appears to have a single-axle ‘bogie’ under the 5th wheel of a trailer, with the preceding trailer somehow also being connected, at:
I WAS IN ERROR ABOUT THE CHASSIS TYPES . I SHOULD HAVE BEEN REFERING TO MK4 'S NOT MK 3’S .
The thing is that when you use this type of chassis in a train set all you have to store at the far end is the coupler mate. At the intermodal hub(say global 4 in Chicago) chassis and the coupler mate. If you are smart you use a coupler mate that can stashed off the rails.
The biggest disadvantage is having to drag around the rail wheels. But a single axle design is much lighter. And at the far end you only want to go a maximum of 5 miles or so.
It is much easier to get permits for overweight locally or in county/state if you can show a benefit. ie that you are only going a few miles with it and not clogging up regional Interstates.
IGN - I did a little digging in my library last night and this morning - David DeBoer’s book on Piggyback and Containers, and 2 articles from Trains in 1986 and 1989 if I recall correctly on piggyback and NS / TC’s RoadRailer operations, by Daniel Overbey and Kevin P. Keefe, respectively.
What I found pretty consistently was that the Mark IV RoadRailer existed in 2 versions - the early version had the permanent rail axle behind the dual axle highway bogie. But that was found to handle poorly, so the later Mark IV version moved it to between the 2 highway axles.
I was not able to find anything that described the Mark III version in any detail - though it seems to have been obsolete by the 1986 article. I do have a complete collection of Trains back to 1965 - including F.H. Howard’s 2-part series on the Portager and variations - so by combing through them with the aid of the index I could probably reconstruct the evolution of the RoadRailer’s over that time frame. But if anyone knows of any other decent pictorial history of same, please advise.
I know that one of the undesirable traits of the earlier RoadRailer models which featured a railwheel axle permanently attached to the trailer was higher Tare Weight, which is why the various current versions of the concept all use detachable rail bogies…
Yes - I meant to mention that, too. The sources that I cited above say that the tare weight of the Mark IV’s was about 17,800 or 17,900 lbs., but that the tare weight of the Mark V’s is only about 16,200 lbs., as I remember them - or 1,600 to 1,700 lbs. less.
Also - answering my own questions above - from another forum I found a reference to this book on RoadRailers, at:
IGN it kind of sounds like you are describing what North Star Rail Intermodal LLC tried to do in reverse. They operated a service over the shortline Twin Cities & Western into CP’s Hub at Shoreham Yard in Minneapolis. The remote terminal was at Glencoe, MN where they assembled trains of containers off the highway using the RailMate system. The TC&W operated the train of RailMate container chassis into Shoreham Yard where CP’s cranes exchanged the loads for empties. The loads were added to a Vancouver bound doublestack train #199. The program ended due to North Star Intermodal’s inability to obtain an adequate supply of suitable empty containers. As the loads were bound for Asia with food products, they needed the cooperation of one of the big shipping lines to be willing to divert suitable empty containers to Minneapolis for them to load.
Yes the weight was a factor in Norfolk Southern going to a demountable rail wheels. In addition I think that NS found that for longer hauls and higher speeds that a 4 wheel truck helped tracking. FRA was being picky when Amtrak was trying to get started with road railers.
§ 4974. Permit for movement of containerized cargo